002 Text Editors

A text editor specifically designed for programming will help you program more effectively in several ways.

• It will provide syntax highlighting. That will do things like set all commands be one color, all strings be another color, all constants be another color, etc. Having the color differences will make it easier to read the code.

• It will use default settings that will make writing code easier, like indentations (tabs or spaces) and monospaced fonts that line up the code nicely.

• It will usually give you auto-completion. That is when you begin typing a function name or reserved word, and the editor will prompt you with the rest of the word so you just press tab and it is written out.

• Most will help with debugging.

• Some will have refactoring capabilities.

• Most will also have git control integration to help with code versioning.

There are lots of options for text editors. Many are free. For the lessons on this site, any one you choose will be great.

Paid Editors

• PHPStorm This is our favorite editor. It has everything. It is also very popular among professional programmers. If you plan on programming PHP professionally, then it is worth the investment. However, it is definitely not the only great option.

• Zend Studio This is an editor that was created on top of the popular Eclipse platform by Zend, the creators of PHP.

• Komodo IDE A full IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for many web development languages, including Python, Perl, Go, Ruby, Node.js, and PHP.

• Cloud 9 IDE An editor completely in the web browser. It offers the ability to code anywhere you have a browser along with the ability to have multiple developers working on the same code simultaneously.

Free Editors

• Sublime Text 3 Sublime is a very popular, fast, and free editor. It has a lot of plugins that add a lot of functionality. It does not update very often, and is not open source, but a lot of people use it and love it.

• Notepad++ A free and open source text editor. It is for Windows only.

• Atom Another free and open source text editor, but more modern. It is built on node.js and has a ton of plugins. It works in any operating system.

• Visual Studio Code A free text editor from Microsoft. It is light weight and fast. It is gaining a lot of popularity, especially among front end developers. It also works on Linux and Mac, not just in Windows.

• VIM A free and open source text editor that is based on vi, which began as a light weight text editor for Unix based systems. It does not have built-in GUI, so it is used completely from the command line. You can get a GUI for it, if you like. It has a much higher learning curve than the other editors, but once learned, can be extremely efficient. Note that this is not an editor for anyone who wants to dabble in coding. It is hard core.

• Gnu Emacs Another free and open source text editor that comes from the Unix world. It is very powerful and has a high learning curve. It is built using the Lisp programming language and can do anything. Also, hard core.

• Eclipse Built in Java and originally designed as a Java text editor, it is free and open source. It has plugins to use with most programming languages, including PHP.