What are your favorite editors for development? (I.D.E.'s etc)

[chiloqui]

I dual-boot so Netbeans is my IDE of choice currently, Though I haven't tried Eclipse and hear a lot about it and it also supports multi-os. For office style documents (and spreadsheets, presentations) I use LibreOffice. For basic quick code editing I usually use Notepad++ or GEdit.

Any suggestions on a good html5 + css3 WYSIWYG editor? Netbeans and Eclipse seem to both leave a lot to be desired in this area. I always do themes & styling by hand and realized how much time I could save. It wouldn't have to support Wordpress classes or anything advanced, I imagine that would be hard to do and more of a niche product but it would give me a way to come up with ideas and scrap a few designs a lot faster. I don't expect anything to be fool proof and know I will be coding anyway if not just for the validation.

 

[essellar]

Stay far, far away from WYSIWYG for HTML. Really. It doesn't work. HTML is about structured text. WYSIWYG can italicize text, but it can't tell you why it's italicized. That stuff is actually important, not just to the users you probably think you'll never have who are helped by various accessibility technologies, but also to Teh Googles. For realz, A11y is the same thing as SEO. Search engines are extra nice to sites that are extra nice to users. (Yes, Amazon will always outrank your little online shopping cart, but you probably still want to outrank everyone else's little online shopping cart.) The JetBrains tools (PhpStorm would probably be most appropriate) have live plugins for browsers, so you can see the result of what you're doing while you do it, and the developer tools in the browser will let you play with the CSS live. You do need some basic knowledge, of course, but it's a lot easier than save & reload ten thousand times.

Eclipse is, um, taxing on your machine, and that's before you've installed the plugin/editor/view for the language you want to work in. It's good, but it's speed can best be described as "eventually". Just typing can feel like an old dumb terminal session (where your keystrokes had to go from your terminal's keyboard to the time-sharing computer and be echoed back to the terminal's screen after ack). If you've got a screaming machine, it's tolerable. NetBeans is a speed demon in comparison.

If you need more of a truly code-aware code editor than a full-featured IDE, one that can give you syntax and class/function/type hinting and not just keep your parentheses and indents straight, that can work with a version control system, but doesn't have all of that bells and whistles and performance issues that are required for enterprise-class application refactoring and so forth, take a look at Microsoft Visual Studio Code. It's cross-OS (Win, Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedora/CentOS and OS X all supported), free, the other kind of free as well, and MS is good at performant code editors. It's new, though, so you might want to check around the web for reports of issues before you commit to it.

 

[chiloqui]

Ya I always planned to go back and structure code after, I just meant for faster design. I definitely don't want something frontpage would barf out that would make a pure mess of code... I was probably wishing for something on the other hand that don't really exist ~_^. Thanks for the suggestion on phpStorm, I'll look more into it. For backend coding Netbeans I do like because I'm use to it and some of the plugins help out a quite a bit like php enhancements and code completion. Microsoft Visual Studio I'll look into as well because it can't hurt Thanks again for the suggestions!

 

[essellar]

That's MS VS Code, not the regular Visual Studio. You can find it here.

 

[sperko]

I like to keep things simple for my projects and use Notepad++ and Sublime Text for raw code editing with a little help from the Firefox inspector when it comes to stylesheets, and xampp for local developing

 

[ken.gervais89]

Very good advice from essellar, and he's dead on in that WYSIWYG html editors are crap. You should run from freeware crap like WebDwarf, Kompozer and RocketCake (even though I've never actually tried RocketCake) and the shareware WYSIWYG editors aren't much better.

That said, I have to admit that I've used a WYSIWYG html editor, even though WYSIWYG only gets used when a page is all text, in which case using it makes text/paragraph formatting easier. I use 2 older versions of Namo Wed Editor (not free) (I use versions 4 and 6 (I also have version 8, but have used it only once, talk about wasting money on that upgrade. Lesson learned) and so far both (mostly version 4) have worked for me. If one doesn't help me get what I want done, the other will at least help clue me in (sorta), because they both give me the freedom to edit (I love the editor in 4) code directly, and if I choose to, offers the ability to view what my output will look like simply by click the preview tab. Most times I will load the saved html into different browsers over using the preview option. If I continue adding code, I simply save and refresh the browser to see how things look.

I've grown fond of (or accustomed to using) Namo (well, the editor anyway), and I must say even though it's far from perfect, I like the editor for writing code. I've not checked, nor even care to see what Namo's latest incarnation looks like, because I like using the older version 4 for most of my coding. I will occasionally use version 6, partly because it seems to work better with some of the more complex coding.

Which editor you end up choosing is still pretty much a matter of personal preferences.

 

[ChatIndia]

for Java, NetBeans
for Android Devleopment, Android Studio
for C# and Windows App Development, Visual Studio Community 2015
for PHP (when doing a project), PHPStorm
When Just editing random files, Sublime Text

 

[dudeguyx]

Brackets by Adobe, hands down best experience I've had. If I need a non-web intended IDE : I like Geany (GNU Linux) or Notepad++ (Windows) - I've heard good things about this Vi.

 

[jensen]

Thanks for the link essellar.
You are really on the edge of development.
The site says MS VS is only about a year old and they have just launched version 1.2 in May this year.