Every year, many new Code Editors are launched, and the developer finds it challenging to choose one. Following is a curated list of Top 15 source code and text editor software for Windows and Mac platforms. All the editors in the list are Free to use. The code editor could be standalone or integrated into an IDE.
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Best Free Code Editors for Windows & Mac
1) Notepad++
Notepad++ is a popular free to use code editor written in C++. It uses pure win32 API which offers greater execution speed and small program size. It runs only in the window's environment, and it uses GPL License.
Support syntax highlighting for languages like PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
Auto-completion: Word completion, Function completion
Macro recording and playback
User-defined Syntax highlighting and folding
Entirely customizable GUI
Multi-view and Multi-Language support
Download link: https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
2) Atom
Atom is useful code editor tool preferred by programmers due to its simple interface compared to the other editors. Atom users can submit packages and them for the software.
Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux
Price: Free
Features:
Package Manager Integrated for Plugins support
The feature of smart autocompletion
Supports Command Palette
Multiple panes
Allow cross-platform editing
Download link:https://atom.io/
3) Visual Studio Code [VS Code]
Visual Studio Code is an open source code editor software developed by Microsoft. It offers built-in support for TypeScript, JavaScript, and Node.js. It's autocompleted with IntelliSense features provides smart completions based on variable types, essential modules, and function definitions.
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Price: Free
Features:
Easy working with Git and other SCM (Software Configuration management) providers
Code refactoring & debugging
Easily extensible and customizable
Download link:https://code.visualstudio.com/
4) Brackets
Brackets is a lightweight tool developed by Adobe. It is best text editor that is open source. It allows you to a toggle between your source code and the browser view.
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Price: Free
Features:
Quick Edit UIfeature puts context-specific code and tools inline
Offers live preview, preprocessor support, and inline editors
Pleasant looking UI
Especially developed tool for macOS
It comes with the inbuilt extension manager for fast & effective extension management.
Download link:http://brackets.io/
5) NetBeans
NetBeans is an open-source code editor tool for developing with Java, PHP, C++, and other programming languages. With this editor, code analyzers, and converters. It allows you to upgrade your applications to use new Java 8 language constructs.
Platforms: Mac Windows Linux
Price: Free
Features:
Easy & Efficient Project Management
Offers fast & Smart Code Editing
Rapid User Interface Development
Helps you to write bug-free code
Download link:https://netbeans.org
6) Bluefish
Bluefish a is a cross-platform editor is a speedy tool which can handle dozens of files simultaneously. The tool allows developers to conduct remote editing. This code editor tool offers many options to s programmers and web developers, to write websites, scripts, and programming code.
Price: Free
Platforms: Mac Windows Linux
Features:
Loads hundreds of files within seconds
Auto-recovery of changes in modified documents after a crash, kill or shutdown.
Project support feature helps you to work efficiently on multiple projects.
Vim is an advanced text editor open source tool which is also considered to be an IDE in its way. This tool allows managing your text editing activities with vim editors and UNIX System which can be used on-premise or online.
Price: Free
Platform: Linux
Features:
Extensive plugin support
Powerful search and replace
Integrates with many tools
Macro recording and playback
Support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
Download link: https://www.vim.org/
8) Geany
Geany is a text editor which uses GTK+ toolkit. It also has certain basic features of an integrated development environment. The tool supports many filetypes and has some nice features.
Allows you to add a note for applying the indent settings in the project preferences
Navigating through the source code
Allows popup menu on message window notebooks and sidebar
Show status message on attempt to execute empty context action
Download link: https://www.geany.org
9) Komodo Edit
Komodo edit is an easy to use and powerful code editing tool. It allows you to do debugging, unit testing, code refactoring. It also provides code profile, plus integrations with other technologies like Grunt, PhoneGap, Docker, Vagrant and many more.
Price: Free Trial
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
Multi-Language Editor
A lot of contemporary color schemes
Native Unicode support and Unicode compatibility checking
Emacs is a Unix based text editor tool which is used by programmers, engineers, students, and system administrators. It allows you to add, modify, delete, insert, words, letters, lines, and other units of text.
Price: Free
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
Complete built-in documentation
Full Unicode support for many human scripts
Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code.
A packaging system for installing and downloading extensions
jEdit, a code editor program which is written in Java. This open source tool supports hundreds of plugins and macros. It offers a large collection of plugins maintained by a worldwide developer team.
Features:
Built-in macro language & extensible plugin architecture
Allows copy and paste with an unlimited number of clipboards
You can download plugins with the help of the plugin manager.
Register contents are saved across editing sessions.
Allows auto indent, and syntax highlighting over 200 languages
Price: Free
Platform: Mac, Windows & Linux
Download link: http://www.jedit.org/
12) TextMate
TextMate is a versatile plain text editor for mac with unique and innovative features. The tool offers support for many programming languages, writing prose in structured formats such as blogging, running SQL queries, writing screenplays, etc.
Price: Free
Platform: MAC
Features:
Auto-Indent for Common Actions
CSS-like Selectors to find the Scope of Actions and Settings
Dynamic Outline for Working With Multiple Files
Function Pop-up for Quick Overview and Navigation
Run Shell Commands from Within a Document
Visual Bookmarks to Jump Between Places in a File
Download link: http://macromates.com/
13) gedit
Gedit tool is designed as a general-purpose text editor. It offers simple and eases to use GUI. It includes features for editing source code and structured text like markup languages.
Price: Free
Platforms: Mac & Windows
Features:
Support for syntax highlighting for languages like C, C++, Java, HTML, XML, Python, etc.
Editing files from remote locations
Support for text wrapping and auto indentation
Search and replace with the support of regular expressions
A flexible plugin system which allows you to add new features
Download link: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit
14) Light Table
Light Table is an IDE and text editor tool for coding software. The tool offers fast feedback and allowing instant execution, debugging and access to documentation.
Price: Free
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
Inline Evaluation
Light Table is a lightweight, clean, and sleek interface.
Powerful editing and plugin manager
The feature of println to keep track of critical values in your code
Download link: http://lighttable.com/
15) Blue Griffon
BlueGriffon is an open source HTML editor powered by Gecko, which is Firefox's rendering engine. It has a simple interface and most usual features needed to create web pages that are compliant with W3C web standards.
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Features:
Easy to change the color of font or to adjust the border style
Opens Tabs from Last Session
Shortcuts for CSS Editing
Multiple Themes for Source View
Download link: http://bluegriffon.org
With time old programming languages become obsolete while new programming languages are launched, but they never gain traction. A common question amongst beginners (and coders alike) is the programming language they should invest learning in, that is in demand, stable outlook, and plenty of jobs.
Here, is a list of top 10 languages that you should learn -
1) Python
Created: Python language developed by Guido van Rossum. It was first released in 1991.
Pros:
Supports multiple systems and platforms
Object-Oriented Programming (OOPs) driven.
Helps to improve Programmer's Productivity
Allows you to scale even the most complex applications with ease
Extensive Support Libraries
Cons:
Note ideal for Mobile Computing
Python's database access layer is bit underdeveloped and primitive.
Usage/Application: Web and Internet Development, Scientific and Numeric applications, Desktop GUIs, Business applications. It is widely used in AI and Machine Learning space.
Salary: An average salary for any Python developer in United State is $114,383 per year.
Reason Selected: Machine Learning, AI, and Data Science are emerging fields and Python is a staple programming language in such software programs.
2) Java
Created: James Gosling primarily designed Java at Sun Microsystems in the year 1996
Pro.
Object- Oriented language
Java offers APIs for different activities like Database connection, networking, XML parsing, utilities, etc.
Powerful open source Rapid Development tools
A large number of open source libraries
Cons.
Memory management in Java is quite expensive
The absence of templates can limit you to create high-quality data structures.
Usage/Application: Java mostly used for developing Android apps, web apps, and Big data.
Salary: An average salary for any Java developer in United State is $101,013 per year.
Learning difficulty: Learning Java is simple and easy.
Reason Selected: Java has wide and growing adoption. There is and will never be a shortage of jobs requiring Java Skills.
3) R
Created: R was designed by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at the University of Auckland. This project was conceived in 1992, but it's initial version released in 1995 and a stable beta version in 2000.
Pros:
R is a comprehensive statistical analysis language which encourages you to develop new ideas
As a statistical language which is considered to be very easy to code
R is open-source software. Therefore, anyone can use and change it
R is good for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows.
R is cross-platform which means it can seamlessly run on different operating systems.
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Cons:
In R, quality of some packages is not up to the mark
R does not have the best memory management. Therefore, it may consume all available memory.
Usage/Application: Data Science projects, Statistical computing, Machine learning
Salary: An average wage for any R developer ranges from approximately $90,042 to $136,616 per year
Learning Difficulty: Hard
Reason Selected: Data Sciences is a booming field and R is primarily used for Data Analysis.
4) Javascript
Created: JavaScript was earlier called LiveScript when it first shipped in with Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995. Later, it was renamed as a JavaScript.
Pros:
Client-side JavaScript is very fast as it can be run quickly in the client-side browser
JavaScript is relatively simple to learn.
It can work smoothly with other languages and can be used in a huge variety of applications.
Grease monkey support to write snippets of JavaScript which can execute on specific web pages
Cons:
JavaScript only allows single inheritance, so multiple inheritances are not possible
No copy or equal method is available in JavaScript.
JavaScript interpreted differently by different browsers.
Usage/ Applications: JavaScript usage include web/mobile app development, game development, and desktop app development.
Salary: An average wage for Javascript developer in the United States is around $110,981 per year
Learning Difficulty: Easy
Reason Selected: With NodeJS JavaScript now supports Server-Side Scripting as well. JavaScript is an indispensable language there will always be a need for JS skills.
5) Swift
Created: Swift was developed by Apple in July 2010 so that iOS developers do not need to work with Objective-C.
Pros:
The Swift program codes are near to natural English, so it is easy to read
Easy to add new features to this language which makes swift high- level language
The language does not have long code line.
Automatic Memory Management feature prevents the memory leaks.
Cons:
With the continues updating of swift versions of Apple, Swift is somewhat unstable
As it is a new programming language the pool of Swift developers is very limited
Usage applications:
Swift is specially designed language which works with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks to create all types of iOS apps.
Salary: An average salary for iOS developer in the United States is around $130,801 per year
Learning difficulty: Easy
Reason Selected: Apple! Should we say more?
6) C++
Created:
C++ is a programming language that was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1983.
Pros:
It is a popular language, and thus, there are many compilers and libraries
Other programming languages like C, C#, and Java have very similar syntax to C++, make it easy to learn for everyone who knows C++.
No garbage collector is running in the background.
Cons
The syntax is complex, and the standard library is small, making this language very difficult to learn for the beginner programmer.
C++ program can't support garbage collection or Dynamic Memory Allocation
The object orientation system in C++ is unnecessarily basic compared to other languages.
Usage applications: C++ is widely used in Game Development, Advance Computations, and Graphics Compilers
Salary:
The average salary of C++ developers in the United States is $113,865 per year.
Learning Difficulty: Hard
Reason Selected: C++ is robust language and is widely used in diverse fields. Will never go out of fashion
7) C#
Year Created:
C# is a computer programming language. It's the first version released in 2001.
Pros:
C# uses almost similar syntax which follows by C so it easy to understand for those who know C language
Easy Integration with Windows
Fully integrated with the .NET library which provides access to a repository of functionality and support.
Safer than its namesakes (C/++) as pointer types are not permitted
Cons:
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It allows pointers in 'unsafe' blocks
Usage applications: Widely used in Enterprise Cross-Applications Development, Web Applications
Salary:
The average salary for 'C# developer' ranges from $66,493 per year to $101,775 per year
Learning Difficulty: Hard
Reason Selected: Widely used in Enterprise software and the skill is in demand.
8) PHP
Year Created:
Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1994
Pros:
Running with PHP is simple
Functional and Object-Oriented Programming
Large Open Source Software Community
A reasonably good system of automation tools available for testing and deploying
Cons:
Error handling facility is poor as PHP lacks debugging tool
PHP is not secure as it is one of the open source languages
Developing a website with PHP Web Development is slower than other programming languages.
Usage applications: Web Applications, Content Management Systems, eCommerce Applications