Brackets is a free and open source text editor developed at Adobe under the MIT license, featuring inline editing, live preview, and a wide range of extensions.
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Notepad++
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Notepad++ is a popular free and open source text editor available under the GPL license, featuring syntax highlighting and folding, auto-complete, multi-document management, and ac customizable GUI.
When I'm designing a specific page, I can line up all the folders and files in the left File Tree panel. This keeps me organized and able to find things as I need them. Once I'm organized, I'm ready to start coding. Brackets allows you to control quite a bit of your environment, which contributes to your efficiency at coding in an effort free environment. One of the standard features of the color coding of tags really makes a difference. As I'm reviewing the code, generally I can quickly notice a missing </> or some other typo. Plus the color coding often helps you quickly find a particular line you need. And speaking of color, when you hover over a hexadecimal value in the code, a box pops up showing you the color of that code. This is particularly helpful when you have multiple colors and you want to make sure that your CSS is spot on.
I believe Notepad++ will meet the needs of the vast majority of Microsoft Windows users looking for a more robust (and free) text editor than Notepad, which comes bundled with the Windows operating system. Notepad++ is packed with features, frequently updated, and consumes little resources. And incredibly, this software is free of charge
Editing CSS classes are done particularly well. It’s very simple and straightforward. Brackets will throw errors while editing so you know where you may have made a wrong turn. Very helpful
The simple UI is refreshing. Often times code editors throw too much on the screen. Brackets keeps it simple and it’s appreciated!
As it is a javascript based program it can have some performance issues, especially with larger files (too large and it can't even open them).
Themes are limited to the editor area, but it would be nice to be able to customize the file-tree and gutter areas.
And the smallest quibble of all, make the open files area resizable. It's a little annoying to have to scroll up and down when you have plenty of screen space to see all the open files.
It is only available for Windows (sorry, Linux and Mac users!).
It lacks some of the features of higher-order integrated development environments or code editors like Visual Studio Code, such as integration with Git or other versioning tools.
It works best for small text files and lighter tasks such as indenting text blocks you copy and paste from elsewhere. You could use this for all your programming needs, but there are better options out there for a primary tool for that purpose.
As far as usability, text editors are about as simple as you can get in the GUI world. The little features that make Brackets unique are intuitive enough that you don't really need a manual to find them and come to rely on them. If anybody knows enough about coding and markup enough to be looking for different editors, they will be up to speed before the download finishes.
There are lot of features to talk about. Especially the usability is good. Everyone can easily to use and user-friendly. Can also update easily. Can also write and execute the programming languages like C, C++ etc. Encoding is also the major feature that helps me a lot and converter as well.
Brackets has a very extensive support site. Everything is organized nicely for easy navigation. If you can't find an answer you can easily file an issue with them and they will be quick to respond. What's cool is you can also message them on Slack, if you request an invite first. Slack is a very popular program right now so it's great having that integration.
I haven't needed to utilize any support related to Notepad++. I guess this is a good thing because I found it to be quite intuitive. There are almost infinite features you can tweak and plugins you can download but I haven't had to do that because Notepad++ is really good right out of the box.
Atom is very similar to Brackets as it is a javascript based editor. I haven't used it as much, I tried it briefly when I was having an annoying bug in Brackets. It has a very rich ecosystem of plugins. Some of my learned behaviors and tools from Brackets were missing. I'm sure there were third-party plugins to match it, but I never got the chance to dig into it. Sublime Text is actually my other daily work horse and it compliments Brackets well. It is a compiled, native application. As such I can open the massive csv files (millions of rows) that Brackets just can't. They won't replace each other and they work well together.
If you're looking for a free and feature-rich option with an active plugin ecosystem, extensive language support, and regular expression capabilities, Notepad++ is a strong choice.If you prefer a straightforward, user-friendly interface and don't require as many advanced features, TextPad could be a good fit. TextPad is also an option if you're comfortable with its licensing terms. I use Notepad++ as its free and open source with lot of plugins to play with and modify your code
Since this is an open-source tool, the ROI is very high. Anything it produces has a huge return on such a small investment of time learning to use the tool.
I was able to use this to augment the lackluster web development editor used by Eclipse. I use Brackets for the view, Eclipse for the server logic and server plugin.
The amount of convenient open-source plugins have improved productivity (minification, formatting, beautification).
