I have been developing websites for 7 years now, and I’ve gone through so many text editors in my quest for finding the perfect text editor. I will go through now and give you my opinion on all the text editors I’ve used. Let me say now that this review are for the programmers who hard code every single line and pixel.

Dreamweaver was the first IDE I ever used for developing websites. It has a nice color scheme and the ftp support is very solid. The only draw back is that it can be a little slow at times to upload and download files. Dreamweaver supports auto-upload on save command. It also nicely synchronizes all your server files with your local files. It feels good to know that I always have the latest back up of my website. What I don’t like about it is that it’s a very heavy program. It’s designed not just for coders, but also for designers. There are more configuration options than I care to think about. It’s also a very expensive piece of software.

Next comes Notepad++. This text editor is so close to being the perfect text editor. If it had a better ftp plugin, I would give this editor a grade of a 100. Sadly though, the ftp plugin is quite annoying. First, if you are editing a file for more than 15 minutes without using the ftp, the plugin will automatically disconnect and collapse your tree structure. I get quite a few errors when trying to run general operations like save or download. There have been a few times where the ftp plugin lost some of my files. When downloading, it would download 80% of the file without displaying an error. So if I was editing code somewhere along the top, and a uploaded the file back to the server, I would lose the bottom 20% percent. If you have WAMP server and you are coding locally, Notepad++ is perfect. But if you have to edit files through ftp, It can be a little frustrating.

Next comes Aptana Stuido. I was very excited when I heard and read about Aptana. First, their ftp support is very good. I can actually open up multiple ftp sites, and drag and drop files between them. It also has nice CSS support like Dreamweaver. The downside is that it’s written in JAVA. Not to say there is anything wrong with JAVA applications, but it can be a little slow at times. Sometimes, I feel like there is a small delay between my keystrokes and the text display. It’s not the most stable program and Aptana has crashed enough for me to make that comment. Sometimes, the FTP can be slow and I just end up using Filezilla to transfer images and videos. It’s a bit of a hassel to set up at first because you have to install the PHP and JQuery packages in order to start editing files. But, I’m just being really picky. Aptana is still a good Web Development IDE and it’s the application I use when I develop websites on Windows. Although, it’s definitely not my default text editor. It’s still a little too heavy to get that kind of treatment. Notepad++ gets that award.

Finally we have Coda! It’s just a beautiful text editor. It’s lightweight, but at the same time, you can do so much with it. It’s FTP support is fast and stable. It almost feels like I’m browsing a local directory. I just get things done faster when working in Coda, and I also feel happier. This is the difference between free open source software and paying for software. Coda cost a $100 to use. But it’s true that you get what you pay for. All the other text editors listed above are free. Also take note that Coda is only for Mac OS.

Which now brings up another question. Should you develop websites on a Mac or a Windows PC?

Honorable Mentions

Gedit – Gedit is for linux. I feel like I spend more time trying to customize it and make it my perfect text editor than actually programming on it. But it’s very good.

UltraEdit – This text editor is not free. But it’s pretty good. I didn’t actually purchase it because Aptana could do everything I needed to do while still being free. UltraEdit is like Notepad++, but with better support.