Should I buy a license for Sublime 2 text editor or would the Brackets or another free open source program work as well?

ST is a great editor. But so is Notepad++ and Emacs and Vim and Brackets and Atom and Geany and pretty much any other tool out there that edits plain text. Find one that has features you like (installable plugins, code highlighting, folding, etc). If you're like most developers I know, myself included, you'll have 2 or 3 that you float between.

ST can be used for free, you just have to ignore its prompts for buying a license :) Sublime Text is pretty amazing, but unless you like to fiddle with your editor to make it a super custom build, I'd probably go with PHPStorm. Even though it says its for php, it has all of the features of Webstorm but also supports php development! Much like Kenneth, I float between several editors as well, primarily ST and Php Storm though.

http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/

I love Vim, yet I had to learn to hate it before I could love it. In other words, the learning curve is more like a cliff, but it pays off on the long run.

Have a look at Github's new editor, Atom:

https://atom.io/

Still in alpha, but it's free. Similar layout style to Sublime, command completion and lots of other fun stuff.

I personally like brackets the most but I do also have sublime as well. If you really like sublime then I would buy it, if I had to buy brackets I would.

I'm also going to try out that atom editor it looks interesting enough, thanks for the link James.

I am a huge advocate for Sublime Text. I tried it out for free, I liked it so much and figured because the developers did such a dang good job on it, it deserved a purchase. Never looked back since :)

I personally prefer Coda 2 it has a lot of great features like ssh, ftp, sftp, color picker, plugins and themes I'm sure I missed a few. Here is the link Coda 2.

Sublime Text is amazing. I can give it to you for free if you have a Mac.