burkyburk - generally specific

Ah yes, the text editor. Dare I say, your number one companion as a coder? As a new web developer, (in the game for 2 months), I’d like to share my opinion on the four text editor’s I have tried. This is not intended to be an endorsement, simply just my observations on the four I have used. So here we go….

#1. Sublime Text.

Right out of the gate, I will start off by saying Sublime is the #1 used and the go-to text editor for the majority of programmers. It simply gets the job done. I have yet to hear of any of my peers having an issue or bug with it. A key component to the success of Sublime is it’s large fan base and community of users. These users have made thousands of plugins and themes to completely customize your Sublime experience. And did I mention Sublime just works? Yes. It is as stable and reliable as can be.

#2. Brackets

Brackets is made by Adobe, the brains behind the ever-so popular Photoshop suite. That alone may give you and idea of what this text editor is geared towards. Brackets has amazing design and front-end capabilities. It comes with a live preview feature that shows you a preview of the page you are building while you are creating it. This editor has huge support for Photoshop. It has a feature called Extract that gives you design info from imported PSD files including colors, fonts, gradients, and measurement information. How cool is that?

#3. Light Table

Light Table touts itself as the “next generation code editor”. This is a pretty bold statement, and it may very well be true. However, I feel as though I was unable to tap into it’s full potential. One of the main features of Light Table is to be able to evaluate your code while you are typing it. This sounds pretty neat, but I was unable to get this feature to work correctly. I fear this code editor maybe isn’t too newbie friendly or I was just doing something wrong. I will say however, I much prefer the aesthetic of this editor. The minimal, lightweight design is beautiful.

#4. Atom

Atom is currently my text editor of choice. It’s made by the fine folks at Github, and is backed by a growing community. Atom looks similar to Sublime from the start and has the same amount of reliability. Also, it’s updated religiously. I would say once a week. They have a team that is constantly finding bugs and ways to improve the application. That’s something I love and support. Atom is extremely customizable and I love it’s easy to understand user interface. You can search for new plugins and themes very easily, and see what plugins and themes have been downloaded the most/are the most popular.

So there you have it, my two cents. I will continue to play around with all of these editors and report back if I have new substantial findings. I have no doubt new editors will come out as well. But, for now, Atom has my attention!