Fellow Campers:
I’m still very new to coding, however, I know the best way to learn is by doing. I’m itching to get my hands dirty so to speak, but I’m not sure what text editor is best, or what I need to do to “sandbox” my website experiments.
Suggestions on your favorite text editor and how to sandbox my website experiments are very appreciated!
Happy coding y’all!
This subject keeps popping up.
All your answers can be found in this forum’s search bar.
I’ve created an easy link for you here
For a text editor I like Atom myself.
For sandboxing, Plunkr is pretty popular but I like repl.it
If you’re on linux, I would seriously recommend at least getting the hang of Vim. It is a powerful editor, very extensible and available on almost any linux distro, even in the absence of a DE. The keybindings can really speed you up once you get the hang of them. Being able to quickly replace, delete, reformat etc is great. Some IDEs also offer Vim keybindings out of the box - I’m using intellij IDEA at the moment and loving it 
I appreciate the responses! I’ve downloaded Atom and will pay around with it once I get back home from traveling. Excited to get started with this!
Atom is good. I prefer Visual Studio Code over pretty much anything for its features and speed (its free as well). A lot of people like sublime or webstorm (neither are free). Just pick a free one if you are starting out and use it. You will waste more time in a bike-shedding argument like this than you would save using one editor over another.
P.S., Notepad++ is super simple and great for editing plain text like JSON and config files very quickly (it doesn’t work that great for programming). You will also most likely want to learn Vim sometime in the future so you can do command-line editing. Vim works on windows too.
Most are FREE, download and try them all out.
I think over time, you’ll start to gravitate towards one or two or three.
My current choices are:
Other editors I’ve used in the past:
I’m pretty sure a few years from now, my choice of editors will change again.
I’ve mostly used Atom, Sublime Text and VS Code. Out of those three, my current favorite is VS Code.
Like mentioned by others here, VSC is free for real, fast to use, Git equipped from start… Overall, it might the the one you need to tweak the less. It really has won me over in the last few months.
I use Notepad++ fow windows, It have helped in the markdown chalenge
I would recommend Brackets or Visual Studio Code. They are excellent for beginners, quite fast and very extensible. You can try out Atom also but I don’t find it fast despite being very customizable.
I’m using atom on mac and it feels kind of sluggish and their remote ftp package’s connection is iffy at best. Going to give VS code a try
Personally, I started out with Notepad++.
But now I’m using Sublime and Brackets - they more than do the job and I’m very satisfied with them.
Sublime is great once you have a decent set up of package addons, I use that mostly for HTML and Emails. Currently also trying out VSCode for JS stuff as the Intellisense system seems pretty cool
Problem with VS code is that the ftp extensions doesn’t have a file explorer of the server 
Guess I will have to find another that does this better. Really wanted to like it though, it was really fast
I use VIM(on Linux and mac) as my main text editor, I program mainly PHP, Mysql, c++, python, and java, it doesn’t has a high learning curve, but one you overcome it. I don’t believe there is a text editor as versatile as VIM. As a programmer you can set it up to your needs, and to work with petty much any language.
Text editor -> Notepad++
IDE -> VS Code 2015
My suggestion is Visual Studio Code with Terminal.
Edit: If you aren’t microsoft product fan, then use Atom
Personally I used Dreamweaver. I find the rich feature set and the ability to easily get a preview of site on several platforms to be a huge plus. Also it’s ability to help compile an entire is site is a super helpful as well.
Unfortunately it’s rather expensive, and the only reason I have access to it is through a great deal my brother got when he went to uni.
(…Well I know it’s on old topic but… I’ve been here before checking what people said and now I’m back to give my own personal story.…)
I’ve used Sublime Text for a while, then Atom most of the time, and tried VS Code for some weeks (after seeing all the hype everywhere about it).
- My thoughts on Sublime/Atom/VSCode -
All code editors mentioned before are very good, and almost the same where it comes to features and usability…but…
They’re pretty much the same too when you talk about performance!
And sometimes their performances can irritates you!
Try to work on a large codebase, or multiple files opened, linters enabled… Sometimes it can takes like 15 seconds only to open a file (on a pretty decent and new machine/hardware).
- That’s why I decided to Learn VIM! -
Well… there’s nothing to say about VIM performance!! It’s waaaay faster than those editors mentioned before! And you can bet on it… turn on a bunch of plugins and open a bunch of large codebases simultaneously, and you’ll see no lazyness at all!
The reason that intimidates people to learn VIM is just the best part that I’m enjoying on the way.
We’re all here learning, we’re all affictionated in optimizing stuff, create stuff to improve other people’s lifes.
So why not investing a little bit of time to master a tool that will optimize your workflow A LOT and increase your productivity?
Well it’d be so boring if there was nothing to learn, if there was no statusline for you to give the personal touch, no .vimrc to set up every month after you discovering another cool feature, if there was no scripts to learn and build your own features or plugins…
If you feel like giving it a shot, there are many free online resources helping you to learn VIM but the first step to try it out, is to open your console and type the command vimtutor.
Take 30/60 minutes to follow along the exercices and I’m pretty sure you’ll finish it very excited to learn more!
There is a very nice book too that promise you’ll master vim “…from WTF to OMG in no time…” , it’s called Mastering Vim Quickly , and they offer some chapters and a newsletter for free. Even the free stuff will be fairly enough for you to learn many nice features.
After these months using VIM I’ve got so excited more and more, and then I decided to start writing VIM quick tips and tutorials to help VIM newbies, on a medium publication called vim-drops.
️ I Hope I’ve helped! Happy coding folks! ️
I use Sublime (its free) for fast editing, but for two and half years i’m using Intellij idea. I tried a couple of programs, but Intellij is the best so far.
Notepad++ is the most downloaded text editor, It isn’t only easy to use for beginners, but also comes with really powerful features for advanced users. It support for syntax highlighting for multiple languages including PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Moreover, it supports to extend the already-powerful feature set by numerous plugins. Best of all, it is free. Besides, Notepad++, there are many good free text editors available out there, such as Atom, Brackets, and Vim.