Nerd question: What HTML editor do you use?

After building websites for the past 6 years using Dreamweaver as my primary editor, I’ve had it with the bloated and resource-hogging Adobe software. I still use Notepad and Text Edit for basic fixes, and I don’t use design mode, so what would you recommend as a lean, fast-coding HTML editing machine? What do you use, fellow web geeks?

—July 12, 2006

15 Comments

Nicholas Roussos

Jul 12, 2006 at 9:12 pm

I’m stuck on Dreamweaver. Honestly, I’m hooked on the code autocomplete, tag closing, and some other features.

But for an enhanced text editor, I use Notepad ++.

Kory Hoopes

Jul 12, 2006 at 10:42 pm

Even though I still use Dreamweaver for most of my editing, I do like UltraEdit-32. Paul Elsworth introduced me to it as an streamlined alternative to Dreamweaver.

burf

Jul 12, 2006 at 11:10 pm

EditPlus 2

Richard K Miller

Jul 13, 2006 at 12:33 am

I use SubEthaEdit on Mac and Crimson Editor on PC.

By Tor

Jul 13, 2006 at 12:51 am

If you’re on a Mac, then TextMate is the only way to go. Especially with Ruby on Rails.

I’m a nerd.

Anonymous

Jul 13, 2006 at 2:40 am

or if you really want to rock

vim

Anonymous

Jul 13, 2006 at 10:06 am

For the hardcore projects I’m on Eclipse – nothing like having PHP, ColdFusion, Ruby, and Java side-by-side in their own windows. Doesn’t solve your bloat problem though.

For a quick and dirty text editor with supported code highlighting for many languages (PHP, Java, C++) I use SciTE, or the Scintilla Text Editor. It’s lightweight, it has more features than notepad (by far), its cross platform (mac, linux, and that other OS) – just an all around great ‘alternative’. Oh, and its free.
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

Matthew Reinbold
SLCFUG manager
http://mutednoise.com
http://bloomburst.com

Robert Merrill

Jul 13, 2006 at 10:42 am

I’ve heard good things about vi, vim, and eclipse.

I am old-skool, but I still crank away on Homesite 5 (before Macromedia morphed it’s features into Dreamweaver).

I love the snippets and the file-management. For me, it’s easy, easy, not as light on the OS as notepad or some others, I am sure, but it feels a thousand times faster than DW, and it’s powerful enough for me to be impressed with myself.

Gary

Jul 13, 2006 at 11:06 am

I use vim for pretty much everything — HTML, code, shopping lists, emails, the works.

My second choice varies from one platform to another. On Linux or FreeBSD, I don’t have a second choice. On the Mac, I only use vim, but I’ve heard some good things about textmate, mostly from people working on Rails projects. On Windows, I used UltraEdit-32 for a very long time, and I’d recommend it if you’re working in Windows. Come to that, I’d still be using it if it were on the Mac.

Joshua J. Steimle

Jul 13, 2006 at 11:54 am

Homesite

Brooks

Jul 13, 2006 at 4:59 pm

TextPad is a good one for WIN users

Jason Alba

Jul 13, 2006 at 5:17 pm

MAXs HTML Beauty++

Eight Hour Lunch

Jul 18, 2006 at 2:24 pm

Dreamweaver for plain HTML and largely for its CSS support. But then I traveled/lectured with Macromedia for a summer so I may be biased.

UltraEdit for its Regex.

MS Visual Studio for most things .NET

Eight Hour Lunch

Jul 18, 2006 at 2:25 pm

Left one out: Crimson Editor. Free and pretty slick for Windows.

Thomas Bowcut

Oct 3, 2006 at 1:35 am

I’m glad to see that no one has posted FrontPage, even if that is the tool I firsted started using when begining to do web development. It didn’t take long to realize what messed up code it kicked out. Dreamweaver has become my tool of choice although until recently getting a new Dual Core with 2 GB of RAM I suffered through its resource-hogging.
Micrsoft is trying to make a come back in the sector with some new tools such as Visual Web Developer, but so far I haven’t been impressed.

Blake Snow

writer-for-hire, content guy, bestselling author

Nerd question: What HTML editor do you use?

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