Every year, many new Code Editors are launched, and the developer finds it challenging to choose one. Following is a curated list of Top 15 source code and text editor software for Windows and Mac platforms. All the editors in the list are Free to use. The code editor could be standalone or integrated into an IDE.
Download and install the best free apps for Web Development Software on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android from CNET Download.com, your trusted source for the top software picks.
- Best Free Code Editors for Windows & Mac
1) Notepad++
Notepad++ is a popular free to use code editor written in C++. It uses pure win32 API which offers greater execution speed and small program size. It runs only in the window's environment, and it uses GPL License.
Platform: Windows
Price: Free
Features:
- Support syntax highlighting for languages like PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
- Auto-completion: Word completion, Function completion
- Macro recording and playback
- User-defined Syntax highlighting and folding
- Entirely customizable GUI
- Multi-view and Multi-Language support
Download link: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
2) Atom
Atom is useful code editor tool preferred by programmers due to its simple interface compared to the other editors. Atom users can submit packages and them for the software.
Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux
Price: Free
Features:
- Package Manager Integrated for Plugins support
- The feature of smart autocompletion
- Supports Command Palette
- Multiple panes
- Allow cross-platform editing
Download link:https://atom.io/
3) Visual Studio Code [VS Code]
Visual Studio Code is an open source code editor software developed by Microsoft. It offers built-in support for TypeScript, JavaScript, and Node.js. It's autocompleted with IntelliSense features provides smart completions based on variable types, essential modules, and function definitions.
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Price: Free
Features:
- Easy working with Git and other SCM (Software Configuration management) providers
- Code refactoring & debugging
- Easily extensible and customizable
Download link:https://code.visualstudio.com/
4) Brackets
Brackets is a lightweight tool developed by Adobe. It is best text editor that is open source. It allows you to a toggle between your source code and the browser view.
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Price: Free
Features:
- Quick Edit UIfeature puts context-specific code and tools inline
- Offers live preview, preprocessor support, and inline editors
- Pleasant looking UI
- Especially developed tool for macOS
- It comes with the inbuilt extension manager for fast & effective extension management.
Download link:http://brackets.io/
5) NetBeans
NetBeans is an open-source code editor tool for developing with Java, PHP, C++, and other programming languages. With this editor, code analyzers, and converters. It allows you to upgrade your applications to use new Java 8 language constructs.
Platforms: Mac Windows Linux
Price: Free
Features:
- Easy & Efficient Project Management
- Offers fast & Smart Code Editing
- Rapid User Interface Development
- Helps you to write bug-free code
Download link:https://netbeans.org
6) Bluefish
Bluefish a is a cross-platform editor is a speedy tool which can handle dozens of files simultaneously. The tool allows developers to conduct remote editing. This code editor tool offers many options to s programmers and web developers, to write websites, scripts, and programming code.
Price: Free
Platforms: Mac Windows Linux
Features:
- Loads hundreds of files within seconds
- Auto-recovery of changes in modified documents after a crash, kill or shutdown.
- Project support feature helps you to work efficiently on multiple projects.
- Unlimited undo/redo functionality.
Download link: http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html
7) VIM
Vim is an advanced text editor open source tool which is also considered to be an IDE in its way. This tool allows managing your text editing activities with vim editors and UNIX System which can be used on-premise or online.
Price: Free
Platform: Linux
Features:
- Extensive plugin support
- Powerful search and replace
- Integrates with many tools
- Macro recording and playback
- Support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
Download link: https://www.vim.org/
8) Geany
Geany is a text editor which uses GTK+ toolkit. It also has certain basic features of an integrated development environment. The tool supports many filetypes and has some nice features.
Price: Free
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
- Allows you to add a note for applying the indent settings in the project preferences
- Navigating through the source code
- Allows popup menu on message window notebooks and sidebar
- Show status message on attempt to execute empty context action
Download link: https://www.geany.org
9) Komodo Edit
Komodo edit is an easy to use and powerful code editing tool. It allows you to do debugging, unit testing, code refactoring. It also provides code profile, plus integrations with other technologies like Grunt, PhoneGap, Docker, Vagrant and many more.
Price: Free Trial
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
- Multi-Language Editor
- A lot of contemporary color schemes
- Native Unicode support and Unicode compatibility checking
- Easily integrates into the desktop environment.
Download link: https://www.activestate.com/products/komodo-edit/
10) Emacs
Emacs is a Unix based text editor tool which is used by programmers, engineers, students, and system administrators. It allows you to add, modify, delete, insert, words, letters, lines, and other units of text.
Price: Free
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
- Complete built-in documentation
- Full Unicode support for many human scripts
- Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code.
- A packaging system for installing and downloading extensions
Download link: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
11) jEdit
jEdit, a code editor program which is written in Java. This open source tool supports hundreds of plugins and macros. It offers a large collection of plugins maintained by a worldwide developer team.
Features:
- Built-in macro language & extensible plugin architecture
- Allows copy and paste with an unlimited number of clipboards
- You can download plugins with the help of the plugin manager.
- Register contents are saved across editing sessions.
- Allows auto indent, and syntax highlighting over 200 languages
Price: Free
Platform: Mac, Windows & Linux
Download link: http://www.jedit.org/
12) TextMate
TextMate is a versatile plain text editor for mac with unique and innovative features. The tool offers support for many programming languages, writing prose in structured formats such as blogging, running SQL queries, writing screenplays, etc.
Price: Free
Platform: MAC
Features:
- Auto-Indent for Common Actions
- CSS-like Selectors to find the Scope of Actions and Settings
- Dynamic Outline for Working With Multiple Files
- Function Pop-up for Quick Overview and Navigation
- Run Shell Commands from Within a Document
- Visual Bookmarks to Jump Between Places in a File
Download link: http://macromates.com/
13) gedit
Gedit tool is designed as a general-purpose text editor. It offers simple and eases to use GUI. It includes features for editing source code and structured text like markup languages.
Price: Free
Platforms: Mac & Windows
Features:
- Support for syntax highlighting for languages like C, C++, Java, HTML, XML, Python, etc.
- Editing files from remote locations
- Support for text wrapping and auto indentation
- Search and replace with the support of regular expressions
- A flexible plugin system which allows you to add new features
Download link: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit
14) Light Table
Light Table is an IDE and text editor tool for coding software. The tool offers fast feedback and allowing instant execution, debugging and access to documentation.
Price: Free
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
- Inline Evaluation
- Light Table is a lightweight, clean, and sleek interface.
- Powerful editing and plugin manager
- The feature of println to keep track of critical values in your code
Download link: http://lighttable.com/
15) Blue Griffon
BlueGriffon is an open source HTML editor powered by Gecko, which is Firefox's rendering engine. It has a simple interface and most usual features needed to create web pages that are compliant with W3C web standards.
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
- Easy to change the color of font or to adjust the border style
- Opens Tabs from Last Session
- Shortcuts for CSS Editing
- Multiple Themes for Source View
Download link: http://bluegriffon.org
Apple computers are well known for their simplicity and performance. These are the two main reasons that every web designers and developers to use Macs as their work computer.
Finding Useful mac apps for web designers was one challenging task and here’s what we managed to collect best web development tools for Mac.
Best Web Development Tools for Mac
1TextMate for Mac
Textmate is a versatile plain text editor with a unique and innovative feature set which caused it to win an Apple Design Award for Best Web development tools for Mac in August 2006.
it supports all major programming languages, writing prose in structured formats such as LaTeX, Markdown, Textile, etc., blogging, running SQL queries, writing screenplays, doing your budget, and much much more.
features of TextMate
- collapsible text blocks — fold away the code you don’t want to see
- Ability to Search and Replace in a Project
- recordable macros — you don’t have to write a script to automate tedious work
- a CSS-inspired selector system which allows preferences and more to be applied to subsets of your
- Clipboard History
- Column Selections and Column Typing
- Auto-Pairing of Brackets and Other Characters
- Auto-Indent for Common Actions Like Pasting Text
- Dynamic Outline for Working With Multiple Files
- Expand Trigger Words to Code Blocks With Tab-able Placeholders
- Themable Syntax Highlight Colors
- Works As External Editor for (s)FTP Programs
2BBEdit for Mac
BBEdit is another one fully-featured professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh.
it’s specially designed to give you high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text.
Features of BBEdit :
- Edit in Results Windows and Disk Browsers
- Integration with MobileMe
- grep pattern matching
- Modeless Find/Replace Windows
- Project definition tools
- FTP and SFTP open and save
- AppleScript
- Mac OS X Unix scripting support
- function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages
- Search and replace across multiple files (even unopened files on remote servers)
- Character-level Find Differences
- Scratchpad
- Save/Copy as Styled Text
- text and code completion
- Search Xcode Projects
- Fix/ToDo Tracking
- Improved Autosave
- Code Folding
- Preview in MS Windows browsers
3Espresso for Mac
Espresso has a unique Navigator that’s best compared to CSSEdit‘s styles list. It shows the hierarchical structure in your documents, no matter how complex. You can even drag around elements to reorganize your code!
Espresso features an immensely powerful rule-based syntax engine, Core Syntax, that transforms your text documents into the semantic structure.
Espresso 1.0 supports HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript and PHP and easily Publish using FTP, SFTP, FTP/SSL or Amazon S3.
Features:-
- Elegant syntax highlighting
- superior navigation
- code folding
- smart CodeSense
- contextual text snippets
- spell check
- rich extensibility
- raw speed: presenting a state-of-the-art text engine for code artists.
4EditRocket for Mac
EditRocket is a source code editor, text editor, and software development tool with custom tools and support for over 20 languages including HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, XML, C, C++, Shell Script, and many more.
Features:-
Best Office Software For Mac
- syntax highlighting
- code builders and sidekicks
- function and method navigators
- function lookup
- code and tag auto-completion
- regular expression search and replace
- bracket and tag matching
- HTML, CSS, and XML validators
- File Compare
- Macros
5Cyberduck for Mac
Cyberduck is an open-source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac.
The program allows you to browse large folder structures efficiently and give you quickly preview files with Quick Look. To edit files, seamless integration with any external editor application makes it easy to change content quickly.
Both Amazon CloudFront and Cloud Files from Rackspace can be easily configured to distribute your content in the cloud.
6transmit 3 for Mac
Transmit 3 is a next-generation FTP (file transfer protocol), SFTP, S3 (Amazon.com file hosting) and iDisk/WebDAV client for Mac OS X which offer clean drag and drop interface, and powerful features set, Transmit makes maintaining files and folders through the Internet as easy as, well, the Mac!
Features of Transmit 3:
- Smart folder support
- Spotlight integration
- Automator actions
- Dashboard widget
- .Mac Sync
- Droplets
- Amazon S3 Support
- Edit any remote file, in any app — even graphics!
- Synchronization
- Column View
- Batch Downloading
- 100% Mac OS X-like
- Supercharged Favorites
- Previews with Zooming
- Set permissions on upload, automatically
- Server-to-Server Transfers
7Yummy FTP for Mac
Yummy FTP is an FTP and SFTP client application for the Apple Macintosh, built as native Mac OS X software from the ground up, with the goal of providing a reliable, powerful, yet easy to use file transfer utility.
Features of Yummy FTP:
- Remote editing
- Apple Scriptable
- easy to customize
- View all manner of files, both on the server and on your Mac – text files, graphic files, movies, pdf, mp3s… Yummy FTP handles them with ease, using its own built-in viewers or with Apple’s Quick Look
- Whether you’re updating your website with the latest changes, making an FTP backup of your important data, or just about anything that involves keeping a local and remote copy in sync
- Drag & Drop FTP on your Desktop
- AutoRoute checkbox function
- Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) and Secure Socket Layer (FTPS), the universal standards for secure file transfer, are both built right into the core of Yummy FTP’s file transfer engine
- Automatically update your web site overnight, every day, make a weekly backup of your data files, or simply delay the download of that huge file you need until nobody is on the network: it’s completely flexible.
- Automate your workflow with FTP Watcher
- multi-threaded, BSD socket powered connection manager purrs at minimal CPU usage
- Double Your Efficiency with Dual Browse.
- Multilanguage supported FTP client
- support for Growl notification system built for Mac
8Fetch for Mac
Fetch is a reliable, full-featured file transfer client for the Apple Macintosh whose user interface emphasizes simplicity and ease of use.
Best Mac Video Software
it Supports FTP, SFTP, and FTP with TLS/SSL (FTPS), the most popular file transfer protocols on the Internet for compatibility with thousands of Internet service providers, web hosting companies, publishers, pre-press companies, and more.
Features of Fetch:
Free Office Software For Mac
- Support for FTP, SFTP, and FTP with TLS/SSL (FTPS)
- A file list modeled on the familiar Mac OS X Finder
- Droplet shortcuts and a Dashboard widget for easy uploading and tracking the progress of your upload
- Editing any kind of file directly on a server
- Previewing files on the server with Quick Look
- Synchronizing folders using the Mirror command
- WebView – a convenient way to view files in a web browser and copy web addresses
- Automatic resuming of stalled or failed uploads
- Automatic support for ZIP, StuffIt, Gzip, and other common file formats.
- Bonjour (Rendezvous) support
- Unicode file names
- Automating repetitive tasks with Automator actions and AppleScript recording
- Full compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger