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Best free web development IDE


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Hello Neowin I spend a lot of time doing web development now, I am looking for a nice free web development IDE.

 

I program in Javascript, HTML 5, CSS3

 

I am currently using Visual Studio with the web essentials plug in.

 

Your ideas? Thanks.

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Friend of mine is visiting and chiming in, web stuff for the most part isn't my thing. He says for free he rather liked Aptana Studio or Eclipse if VS isn't doing it for you, but he strongly prefers WebStorm (or PHPStorm) if you don't mind spending a few bucks, says it's the best $50 he spent for web dev. Haven't used it myself but if it's anything like their other IDE's (I use their PyCharm myself occasionally when I'm not using VS2013) it'll probably be excellent.

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Hello Neowin I spend a lot of time doing web development now, I am looking for a nice free web development IDE.

I program in Javascript, HTML 5, CSS3

I am currently using Visual Studio with the web essentials plug in.

Your ideas? Thanks.

For just Javascript, HTML and CSS you should use sublime text.
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For Javascript, HTML and CSS(/SASS) I use Sublime Text 3 with a ton of extra packages. For everything else I'm a huge Eclipse fan.

 

There's a few types of developers. You have the ones using Eclipse with plugins (and Eclipse-based things like Aptana), then you have the ones using JetBrains IDE's (PHPStorm, Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, ...) and those in the Microsoft world who use Visual Studio. Then a few that use NetBeans (but I've never seen it used professionally) and some stick with vim or another text editor.

 

Try out a few different ones. If you want free and with a ton of features, Eclipse is probably your best bet (although it might need some setup for more advanced web stuff).

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For text-only developing, I actually use Geany.  It's very basic, but has plenty of features that I have found useful.

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Phpstorm is by far the best but can be overkill if not working on large projects... Sublimetext is insanely fast and 'just works' oob better than anything I have used

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Why is everyone suggesting a shareware IDE in a thread about the best free one? Just because you didn't pay for Sublime Text doesn't make it free.

 

Atom is looking pretty good, though it's alpha right now. Open source and founded by github.

https://atom.io

 

RJ Texted is surprisingly good, it's closed source, but has a ton of features built in.

http://www.rj-texted.se

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I use HTML-Kit 292 (free). No HTML 5 support though.

 

The Inspector in Chrome is awesome; it allows you to emulate a number of different platforms/devices. Check it out.

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Why is everyone suggesting a shareware IDE in a thread about the best free one? Just because you didn't pay for Sublime Text doesn't make it free.

 

Atom is looking pretty good, though it's alpha right now. Open source and founded by github.

https://atom.io

 

The OP said he's spending a lot of time doing web development.. It would be stupid to recommend something like Atom to someone who is doing a lot of web dev.. i test it regularly and it's slow, crashes and it's still clunky... it's improving every week but it's not ready for real world use. SL2 on the other hand can be evaluated for a 'reasonable amount of time' i.e. long enough to fall in love with it making you actually want to pay for it.

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The OP said he's spending a lot of time doing web development.. It would be stupid to recommend something like Atom to someone who is doing a lot of web dev.. i test it regularly and it's slow, crashes and it's still clunky... it's improving every week but it's not ready for real world use. SL2 on the other hand can be evaluated for a 'reasonable amount of time' i.e. long enough to fall in love with it making you actually want to pay for it.

That's why I mentioned it's in alpha and suggested a stable IDE as well? I don't think now is a good time to buy Sublime Text unless you're fine with using the current version forever. There's a great possibility that Sublime Text 3 never gets released or that Atom passes it in functionality next year. The last blog post/beta build was in December of 2013 and the one before that in June. Atom could be great pretty soon, like you said, it's improving every week. He should keep an eye on it, the latest build that updated a few days ago doesn't crash nearly as much as the one before.

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