Text editors are useful for editing all kinds of documents. Even Notepad can be called as a text editor. However, for serious programmers, notepad isn’t enough. They require auto-completion, syntax highlighting and many more features to increase productivity. This article will discuss the top text editors for programmers in 2024.
Top Five Text Editor’s For Programming
1. Vim
Vim is one of the oldest text editors and is still used by millions of people worldwide. It is the default text editor of Linux based operating systems. It is also available for Windows and Mac. It is completely free and open-source.
It has features like syntax highlighting, auto completion etc. Another advantage of Vim is that it is extremely customisable. There are thousands of scripts out there which work in unison with Vim to give you the perfect coding environment. Moreover, it has an active community supporting its development, so it is always being updated to meet the latest standards.
2. Atom
Atom is a new text editor developed by GitHub. It has started gaining a lot of attention recently. Although it hasn’t been around for long, it is still stable, free, open-source and highly customisable. It has separate versions available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
It comes with an ever increasing collection of packages to enhance the user experience. It has fuzzy finder which is immensely useful to open files fast, auto completion, regex finder etc.
On the flip side, sometimes it may hang for a moment while dealing with large files. Also, it is a slower compared to other top text editors. It also has an upper limit on the size of files it can handle. More than a couple of MB’s is too much for Atom at the moment.
3. Sublime Text
Sublime Text is one of the most popular Text Editor’s. It is available for all three platforms – Windows, Linux and Mac. It has lots of features such as Distraction Free Mode, Goto Anything, Regex search, lots of themes etc.
It has tons of packages available to fulfill your needs. For e.g. if you are developing a particular WordPress plugin, you just need to download a package called sublime-text-2-wordpress from GitHub and it will offer you auto completion for WordPress functions and commands.
It is fast, stable and it offers almost each and every feature that should be present in a text editor. There is no doubt that it is the most complete text editor available at present.
4. Notepad++
Notepad++ is one of the best Text Editor’s at the moment. Unfortunately, it can only be installed only on a Windows machine. It is open source and completely free. It provides all the key features one expects in a text editor – custom syntax highlighting, bookmarks, regex search and replace, and various plugins so that users can customize it according to their requirements.
It is probably one of the fastest text editors ever made. It is the ideal choice if one prefers a minimalistic text editor.
5. GNU Emacs
Emacs was first released in 1976. Since then, several versions of Emacs have been created but the most popular one is GNU Emacs. It is available on all major platforms – Windows, Linux and Mac. It is one of the most powerful editors and can pretty much do anything. It has the “Goto Anything” feature which is present only in Vim and Sublime Text. It also has auto complete, perfect syntax highlighting, custom themes etc.
One disadvantage is that Emacs doesn’t support regex find or replace functions out of the box. Also, PHP support has to be manually installed.
All of the above Text Editor’s have their pros and cons. Some are more suitable than others in different situations. A good programmer will keep a couple of Text Editor’s installed so that he can use the one which is more suited for the particular work he is doing at that time.