From the course: Introduction to Web Design and Development

Choosing an editor for writing code

From the course: Introduction to Web Design and Development

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Choosing an editor for writing code

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- If you're sold on writing code, you'll need to get an editor for writing it. CodePen is an awesome way to learn code, experiment quickly or share code with others, but it's not a long-term development environment. At its simplest, you need a text editor to edit your HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding files. Notepad on Windows or Text Edit on Mac are already present on your computer. However, these programs are somewhat lacking, starting with the code isn't color-coded, making it harder to read and find errors. You can write code with these programs, but should you? There are many other choices for code editors, most of which are free. In my experience, the favorite choice seems to change every five years or so. Let's look at a few of the most popular options. Currently, the editor that most developers seem to use is called Visual Studio Code, or VS Code. It's free, runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and it comes from Microsoft. You'll see VS Code used in a number of LinkedIn Learning courses, including many of my own. Recently, VS Code was made to run directly in a web browser. You can access this version of VS Code at vscode.dev. Another favorite is Atom at atom.io from GitHub. Atom is also free and runs on Mac, Linux and Windows. Atom is open source and highly customizable, making it a favorite with developers who enjoy customizing their workspaces. You may think that it's odd that two editors come from Microsoft. GitHub was purchased by Microsoft in 2018, however, VS Code and Atom were created in 2014 prior to the merger. Many designers are fans of Brackets at brackets.io. Brackets was formerly an editor from Adobe and runs on Mac or Windows. Adobe has released Brackets as an open source project, which will be maintained by the Brackets community going forward. Finally, Sublime Text was favored by the web development community for years, but it's recently fallen out of favor. It's located at sublimetext.com and has a fee of $80 to use the editor. Many front-end developers still have Sublime installed on their machines even if they no longer use it often. It works on Mac, PC and Linux. These are just a handful of my favorite editors. In all likelihood, your employer will point you to a preferred editor or you'll develop a favorite through your college, coding bootcamp or through watching LinkedIn Learning videos.

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