The best text editors are simple, easy to use, and can protect even the most inexperienced coders from making formatting mistakes. When choosing your text editor software, keep in mind that it should be functional and seamlessly aligned with your personal preferences. This will ensure a comfortable collaboration you can always come back to when the next project is due.
Whether you’re creating robust code or a simple snippet, the text editor you choose should automatically increase your efficiency rate.
Top 5 Best Text Editor Software Programs
- Sublime Text 3 – The Game-Changing Text Editor: High Responsiveness + Extensive Plugin Options + Transferable License Key
- Atom – The Best Free Text Editor Available: Highly Customizable + Community-Created Feature Packages + Best Free Editor
- Visual Studio Code – The Most Robust Features: Integrations + Source Control Tools + Full-Featured
- Code Spaces – The Best Offline Abilities Available: Collaborative + Functions Offline + Browser-Based
- Espresso – The Most Productive Text Editor Available: Interface Features + Drag and Drop Capability + Smooth + Excellent Interface
- Vim – The Fastest Text Editor Available: Incredibly Fast + Keyboard Capable + Dependable
1. Sublime Text 3 – Extensive Plugin Options + Transferrable License
Pricing: Free Trial, then $80 Fee
This software is highly versatile, has elegant functionality, and dozens of useful plugins. Unlike a lot of other text editing software options, Sublime Text 3 offers video tutorials on how to apply any of the multiple plugins they offer, making the project development easier while enhancing your coding skills. Some of the most powerful efficiency features of Sublime Text include file tree project views, multiple curser capability, a command palette, and Emmet: a plugin that allows you to create HTML markup with CSS selectors.
While this editor is flexible, its cross-platform support could use improvements, its subscription price could be more affordable, and the pop-up to upgrade from a free membership to a paid subscription can get in the way of the work you’re doing. Otherwise, it is a top text editing software program.
Key Features:
- Extensive plugin options
- Transferable license key
- Extendable
Reasons To Buy:
- Incredibly Well-Designed
- Easy to use
- Multiple Platform Compatible
Reasons To Avoid:
- Expensive subscription fee
- Insistent pop-up to purchase a paid plan, which can interrupt workflow
2. Atom – The Best Free Text Editor Available
Pricing: Free
Atom is an open-source text editor offering a range of packages and themes. It can be used by both novice and expert developers for free. Its lightweight and intuitive interface is user-friendly, highly customizable, and offers excellent community support with extensive plugin options and customizations. It comes with several useful features, such as smart auto-completion, multiple panes, a variety of pre-installed themes, customization capabilities, and more. Atom operates through the Electron framework and is built on JavaScript, HTML, Node.js, and CSS.
As soon as you install this software on your computer, you are up and running, ready to start adding plugins and customize your text editor without things like errors, loading times, or pop-ups interrupting your work flow. This software is developed by GitHub, a well-known versioning tool that allows you to work with multiple developers and contributers.
Key Features:
- Source code integration
- Intuitive interface
- Lightweight
Reasons To Buy:
- Incredibly Well-Designed
- Easy to use
- Multiple Platform Compatibility
Reasons To Avoid: - Might be too intermediate for advanced editors
- Intermittent crashes and system errors could slow down your work flow
3. Visual Studio Code – The Most Robust Features
Price: Free
Visual Studio Code is a source-code editing tool for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux that supports a variety of programming languages. It is predictive with versatile plugin options that you can customize to meet your specific needs. The general setup of Visual Studio Code is excellent with an easy flow and is ideal for your integrative development environment (IDE) setup. With Visual Studio Code, your terminal, debugger, and source control are all easily available to you in one place, making it a lot easier to crank out projects that need to get done more quickly. While the program extensions lack a little in versatility and functionality, their general setup makes up for it with high efficiency and functioning capabilities.
Visual Studio Code can be challenging for novice programmers due to the need to occasionally customize and install your own plugins with the prior knowledge of the systems and setup of a program like this. That being said, there are also some specialized niche features of Visual Studio Code that could make navigating the program and customizing IDEs and plugins more difficult.
Key Features:
- Extensive programming languages
- Versatile plugins
- Quick loading time
Reasons To Buy:
- Easy to use
- Versatile language capabilities
- Visually succinct
Reasons To Avoid: - Niche features that could be confusing for novice programmers
- Extra configuration and customization needed for some extensions
4. Code Spaces – The Best Offline Abilities Available
Price: Unknown (invite-only)
Code Spaces is a GitHub remote coding community based on Visual Studio Code Spaces where coders can move their developer workstations off of local machines and into the cloud. GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Millions of people use GitHub to build amazing communities and projects together.
Code Spaces uses full VS code and offers highly customizable DEV containers that can be adjusted to fit the unique requirements of your project, community, or team. GitHub’s website states that Code Spaces is even faster than your laptop, saying “GitHub’s own 35GB dev image starts in under 10 seconds. Scale your cloud VMs up to 32 cores and 64GB of RAM. And with low-latency connections across four regions, you won’t even remember it’s not your local machine”. The only down sides of this program are that, while GitHub is an excellent platform, it can only be used with GitHub and no other platforms. It’s also currently only an inbite-only program, so you would have to find your way around that!
Key Features:
- Offline working capabilities
- Preferences are synced
- Extensible and configurable
Reasons To Buy: - Customizable environments
- Can move your developer workstations off local machines to the cloud
- Secure, productive workspaces
Reasons To Avoid: - Limited to GitHub
- Limit of 5 Code Spaces
- Currently invite-only, early-access software
5. Espresso – The Most Productive Text Editor Available
Price: Free trial, then $99
Espresso is an Android-specific UI test automation framework. It has a smooth design and is easy to use while remaining highly efficient and functional. The autocomplete feature saves time and is user-friendly for all levels of developers. Utilizing Junit makes Espresso easy to use within leading IDEs, and automatically syncs your test actions with the user interface of your application. While some features do provide a little extra work and a bit of a challenge, there are several benefits to the software that make it worth the hassle. Espresso is easy to use, provides fast feedback and offers stable testing capabilities. For example, some disadvantages of the program are that it’s only used for UI testing, which could limit the scope of what you’re able to work on with it. This program could also be difficult for beginning coders, as some background knowledge is necessary in order for the functions of this program to run smoothly.
Key Features:
- Time-saving autocomplete feature
- Extract and edit live editing sheets
- Stylistic pinpointing
Reasons To Buy: - Easy to use
- High functionality capabilities
- Project syncing for ease of use
Reasons To Avoid: - Only Mac OS compatible
- Expensive
References and Links
- https://www.trustradius.com/products/atom/reviews?qs=pros-and-cons#overview
- https://www.capterra.com/p/186634/Visual-Studio-Code/reviews/
- https://www.slant.co/options/37690/~github-codespaces-review
- https://www.g2.com/products/espresso/pricing
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCZQPL8u_YI
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Z-rUixnzk
- https://github.com/features/codespaces
- https://comparecamp.com/atom-review-pricing-pros-cons-features/