General and Web Programming Fundamentals
  • Introduction
  • Program creation and design
    • Program design
      • Algorithms
      • Pseudocode
    • Programming conventions
    • Writing programs
      • Source code editors
      • Integrated Development Environments
      • Code repositories/Version control
      • Compilers/Interpreters
  • Programming Fundamentals
    • Operators
      • Arithmetic
      • Logical
      • Assignment
    • Constants and Variables
    • Datatypes
      • Primitive Datatypes
        • Character
        • Integer
        • Boolean
        • Floating point
        • Nothing (Null)
      • Composite Datatypes
        • Arrays
        • Strings
        • Classes
        • Structs
      • Literals
    • Data structures
      • Lists
      • Queues
      • Stacks
      • Map/dictionary
      • Trees
      • Graphs
    • Control structures
      • Selection (Conditional)
        • If/Else
        • Ternary
        • Switch
      • Iteration (Loops)
        • For loops
        • While loops
        • Do-While loops
        • For-Each loops
    • Functions
      • Parameters and arguments
      • Lambda expressions
      • Higher Order Functions
    • Space and Time
    • Scope
    • Standard libraries
  • Programming Paradigms
    • Procedural (Imperative) Programming
    • Object-oriented programming
    • Functional Programming
    • Declarative Programming
    • Event Driven programming
  • Programming Languages
    • Short history of programming
    • Low-level programming languages
    • High-level programming languages
  • Web Development
    • What is the web?
      • Web browsers (clients)
      • Webservers (serving web pages)
      • W3C
    • Markup languages
      • HTML
        • HTML Tags
      • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
        • CSS Properties
      • XML
      • Markdown
    • Scripting Languages
      • JavaScript
      • TypeScript
    • JSON
    • JavaScript Frameworks
  • Acknowledgements
    • About the author(s)
  • License
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  1. Program creation and design
  2. Writing programs

Source code editors

PreviousWriting programsNextIntegrated Development Environments

Last updated 1 year ago

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Code is simply text in a chosen programming language that is interpreted and executed. You can write code in a variety of environments. The most straightforward source code editor is the command line interface (CLI) (the console/command prompt in your operating system). A benefit of writing applications in the CLI is that it is simple and straightforward to get started as some form of CLI is usually built into the operating system for many languages or included when you install a programming environment. An issue with writing code in the CLI is that many other environments provide tools and resources to improve the process. Source code editors have characteristics specifically designed to simplify and speed the development process, such as , , and functionality.

Over the years a number of source code editors have been popular and are still popular and opinions and feelings about them are as strong as opinions and feelings about a religion. Thus, here comes a list of popular source code editors and my best suggestion is for you to test a few and find out what works best for you.

  1. Atom

  2. Brackets

  3. Eclipse

  4. Emacs

  5. Gedit

  6. NetBeans

  7. Notepad++ (Windows only)

  8. SlickEdit

  9. Sublime Text

  10. TextMate (macOS only)

  11. UltraEdit

  12. vi/Vim

  13. Visual Studio

  14. Visual Studio Code

If I had to make a recommendation I would recommend Visual Studio Code as it is free, works on all platforms, supports practically all programming languages and has all the common necessary tools.

syntax highlighting
indentation
autocomplete
brace matching
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