Easy to use (but advanced enough) editor?

Which editors have you tried?

Your first requirement is fairly standard - I can't think of a current editor that doesn't do it - some might remember the state of unsaved files or edits as well.

I use Sublime Text which "out of the box" is very basic but you can extend it with plugins. There's a colour picker plugin available for that. Other plugins for things like fast creation of blocks of HTML are also available - you type "ul.myListClass>li*10" which expands:

PHP:

<ul class="myListClass">
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
</ul>


Editors are a very personal thing and what one person finds great another will detest.

 

Notepad++, best editor out there ;-)

http://notepad-plus-plus.org

 

Coda

 

Brackets, the free open source tool from Adobe might fit the bill.



Also (fairly simple but paid):

1. skEdit
2. Taco HTML Edit

It might be good to name these (if you can) so we know which ones not to suggest!

 

Coda2
May be used as a simple editor, but has tons of built in or pluggable features if later on you want to expand: FTP, Source Control, ect...

 

I think the most popular choices around are Coda 2, Sublime Text, and Espresso (my personal choice – Espresso does some interesting "WYSIWYG" stuff with CSS).

 

Haven't tried live Reload in Firefox, but if you can't get it to work, maybe this bracket extension will help.

https://github.com/pwalczyszyn/brackets-livereload

 

Sublime Text 2 or 3 -- 3 is currently in beta so I use 2 at the moment.

Sublime Text 2

Couple it with this:

Sublime Text 2 Package Installer

and this:

Codekit 2

And you're pretty much set for life.

 

Sublime Text 3 is the standard. Atom isnt ready yet. Bakets Im not a fan of yet. Its like Atom in terms of what was used to build it. Atom is made by git and intended for users to code in an array of languages where as Bracets is open source focused on web development and made completely free by Adobe. Adobe uses it as a baseline for Edge.

 

sublimetext is good, but i've found that brackets from adobe for web developing is awesome IMHO, his extensions and ability to edit css without changing window is georgeous!

 

I do get the impression that SublimeText isn't particularly alive to be honest - it's had a single update in just about a year now and I get the impression that a lot of people are moving over to Atom for this reason.

I'm currently using Atom and whilst it does lack some features from Sublime Text that I really quite like, it's definitely getting there and on the whole I'm very happy with it - it's my primary editor.

I do quite like Brackets but I feel it really is only suited to HTML and CSS - for example, not so much server side languages. Also it may have been fixed now but I recall having issues with Brackets and Sass.

Also I despise text editors which use spaces in lieu of tabs by default.

 

Last update was 29th of August.

I think its extensibility is beneficial. That and the fact that it's a native C++/Python app that can handle files bigger than 2MB, which can be helpful if you find yourself opening SQL dumps from time to time.

 

I was working with sublime up until recently but fell in love with atom. It's free and awesome. Web storm is great too.

Sublime text 2 - http://www.sublimetext.com
Atom - https://atom.io
webstorm - https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/

 

Flux at www.theescapers.com is great, but might be a little expensive for a casual user...

AP

 

As with many things in life "It depends..."

Just starting out and want a What You See Is What You Get editor that you can drag boxes around in? Then Flux (http://www.theescapers.com/flux/index.html) or even SquareSpace (http://squarespace.com/) could be ideal.

Looking just to do some HTML editing? SublimeText2 is probably your best bet.

If you want something that is a bit more complex with a simple way to sync files between local development and remote servers, Coda 2 is probably a more suitable option.

Looking to do some back end work, serious debugging and complex stuff, grab PHPStorm from JetBrains.

 

I've never really gotten on with Flux to be honest. A few years ago I took a look and it was quite nice but having looked at the latest version I'm not a fan.

To be honest if you're at the level where you would otherwise be using a WYSIWYG editor you're probably best off using a solution such as WordPress to put your site together. Makes things very easy whilst still retaining a level of flexibility. I'm not a huge fan of WordPress honestly for reasons that are beyond the scope of this thread but it's a good place to start for a lot of people.

In terms of text editors though, right now I'm very happy with Atom.