Top 5 Free Editors for Web Development
In this video you will learn about top 5 free editors for web development in 2020 which are worth mentioning.
Introduction
Hi I'm Oleksandr Kocherhin from monsterlessons-academy, where I'm teaching you how to become a developer or improve your skills of being a developer in learning by doing way. And if you are new here don't forget to subscribe and I will link everything that I'm mentioning in the description.
So let's get started.
Content
So what editor should you pick? The correct answer here from my point of view "It depends". You literally can't use single editor or IDE to develop in all languages and frameworks. So mostly it depends on the language. For example if you are developing apple applications for IOS for example it doesn't make much sense to take anything else except of XCode. Because it gives you lot's of features like super autocomplete, compiler and preview of your application.
So if you have some specific language which has an awesome support in single IDE then just take it.
The other case if you use a general language. It means that all editors gives almost the same features like autocomplete, code highlighting, maybe you don't even need to compile you application or you can do it from console and so on. In this case choosing the editor is just a matter of own preference. For example if you are writing javascript, typescript, php, python, ruby or any other general language editor is just a matter of taste or money.
If you want a short answer here just download Visual Studio Code and you are good to go. It's the most popular text editor which is created by Microsoft using Elecron. It means that you can easily run it on any operational system and it is quite fast. It supports lots of languages natively or through plugins. But what is best there is javascript and typescript support. If you are a beginner, especially if you are doing web development I can highly recommend it.
What do we have more on the market that is worth mentioning? There is Sublime Editor. It's really fast and is the oldest editor. It's not really being updated but is stable and can also being extended with plugins.
There is also Atom which is developed by Github. It is also written in Elecron as Visual Studio Code and it was really popular because it came on the market. But in comparison to VsCode it's really slow so I can't recommend it.
And there is Brackets. It's created by Adobe and mostly focused on web development with html,css,javascript. From the performance it's similar to VsCode but just less popular.
Now several words about using IDE. Except of specific case like XCode for example I can recommend only Intelij Idea IDEA for general languages. There are lots of them with focus on specific language in every of them. There is PHPStorm for php, PyCharm for python, RubyMine for ruby, WebStorm for web development and much more. It's a paid IDE but it has huge amount of features and it really convenient to use. It has everything like syntax highlighting, go to definition, auto import, debugger, console, tons of configs and much more. But there is a huge problem there. You really need a good machine in order to use IDEA because it eats tons of resources.
So as you can see either you take specific IDEA like XCode or maybe Android Studio or VsCode or you try Intelij IDEA. All other stuff you can simply skip.
But as you saw in any of my other videos or courses I use neither of them. The editor that I'm using is VIM and here is why. After several years of development when you start to writing things fast and you don't need to spend a lot of time thinking and you just code things you want to optimize your coding speed and efficiency. And the problem here is that it's almost not possible with all editors and IDE that I talked about before. Sure there are some hotkeys and possibilities but not a lot.
There are only 2 editors which are highly configurable but takes lots of time to configure and master. It's VIM and Emacs. So if you are new to programming and you don't code hundreds of files per day I can't recommend you spending time on this editors because it just not worth it and it's better to focus on pure programming.
But at the moment when you want to improve your efficiency with your editor you should definitely have a look on Vim or Emacs.
Call to action
I hope that this video helps you to understand what editor do you need to choose and spare you time to check all of them.
Also don't forget to check my full courses regarding different web technologies. I will link them down in the description box below.
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