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General Discussion

What text editor do you use?

What text editor do you use? I am using Notepad++

From what I can tell they all seem the same. Any recommendations?

9 Answers

Sublime Text 2 is very popular. Notepadd++ was my go to for years until I switched to Mac. Sublime is on all platforms and with the right plugins it can almost be as powerful as an IDE.

Sublime

im using brackets because of this:

http://blog.brackets.io/2014/04/17/css-shapes-editor/

That's pretty slick.

Woah

Didn't know Brackets did that.

There's a great article on AListApart that talks about CSS Shapes and using the Brackets editor.

http://alistapart.com/article/css-shapes-101

It's a nice feature, but even with it installed I've rarely discovered a practical use.

Brackets:

  • Strong features
  • Looks good
  • Free

Tim Knight -

It's a nice feature, but even with it installed I've rarely discovered a practical use.

Only thing I've used a CSS shape for is a speech bubble.

Textmate and Vim (command line editor)

Sublime and Textmate

Hi Jessica,

I definitely have to add support to the other comments about using Sublime Text. I've used a lot of various text editors in the past (starting with HTML Notepad, but that was a very long time ago). Sublime Text is very much like Textmate on the Mac, but as Caleb mentions it's available on all platforms. It's demo mode never expires, but it will show you a "You should register" window after a few saves. Some of the key reasons I find it so great:

  • Extensive language support contributed to by a community of developers
  • The ability to create templates and snippets to speed up your development (like Textmate, and it support Textmate bundles)
  • The simplicity of installing packages using Package Manager (https://sublime.wbond.net/)

thanks for the extra info on why you like sublime, super helpful =)

Sublime Text

Brackets

I'd recommend staying with the free open source text editors, such as the one you're already using. Sublime will end up costing you $60 when your trial expires. It is pretty, but not worth the money in my opinion. The provided Workspaces through Treehouse are an alternative too (since you're paying your subscription). If you aren't familiar with Workspaces yet, it has a few nice features like, a code completer and a drag and drop up-loader/organizer for all of your web documents and images.