Free HTML Editors

Notetab Light

This is the freeware sibling of the commercial Standard and Pro versions. It is a general text editor that has lots of features, including a useful “Clipbook” facility that has numerous HTML editing conveniences. Its commercial cousin Notepad Pro comes with syntax highlighting. (Note: to get the free version, go to the “Download” page and look for “Notetab Light”.)

CodeLobster PHP Edition

This is a free code editor with syntax highlighting support for PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It has support for autocompletion of HTML tags, attributes and closing tags; an HTML code inspector; a CSS autocomplete facility supporting style property names and values; JavaScript autocomplete that supports keywords, DOM elements and properties; PHP autocomplete that support standard PHP and user’s classes, variables, functions, constants, keywords, etc; a PHP debugger; SQL autocomplete; context sensitive help; class view; browser preview; project manager; and so on. This is a Windows program.

HAPedit (HTML ASP PHP Editor)

HAPedit is useful for people who develop both dynamic and static web pages. It provides syntax highlighting for HTML, ASP, PHP, JavaScript; provides a project manager; features code completion, an SQL console, FTP manager, PHP code “compilation”, integrated PHP help, brace matching, search and replace with regular expressions, statistics on your page (ie, rendered size, images, links, etc), and so on. This is a Windows program.

Arachnophilia

This editor comes with built-in FTP facility, making it possible for you to author your web page and publish it without leaving the editor. It has a spell-checker, an internal browser view mode that is able to show your HTML changes as you type, a global search and replace facility across all open documents, built-in tutorial on HTML, JavaScript, frames; etc. There are apparently two versions available – the older one runs on Windows systems, the newer one is written in Java and is apparently cross-platform.

PSPad

PSPad is a full featured text editor that you can use to edit HTML, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, C, etc. It even has built-in facilities allowing you to edit binary files. There is project support, the ability to directly edit files via FTP on your server, a macro recorder, search and replace in files, text comparison (differences between two files with the differences highlighted in colour), syntax highlighting, spell checking, internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla, integrated HTML TIDY (for validating HTML code and fixing them), code explorer for Pascal, HTML, PHP, XML (etc), matched bracket highlighting, etc.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a source code text editor with syntax highlighting (C, C++, Java, C#, HTML, PHP, JavaScript, ASP, SQL, Objective-C, etc), multiple document handling using tabs, auto-completion of keywords (customizable), regular expressions in the search and replace function, macro recording and playback, brace and indent highlighting, collapsing and expanding of sections of code (to zoom in and out of pieces of code such as to provide an outline overview of your text/code), etc.

Quanta Plus Web Development Tool

Quanta Plus is a Linux HTML editor for KDE. It contains an assortment of features such as syntax highlighting, easy configuration of toolbars, site uploading facility, the ability to update a site from CVS (with a plugin), document structure tree, etc.

Bluefish

From the announcement by one of their development team: “Bluefish is a programmer’s HTML editor, designed to save the experienced webmaster some keystrokes. It features a multiple file editor, multiple toolbars, custom menus, image and thumbnail dialogs, open from the web, CSS dialogs, PHP, SSI and RXML support, HTML validation and lots of wizards.” I’ve seen a lot of good things said about this editor by other webmasters. Bluefish runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Tru64/Alpha, NetBSD, OpenBSD, HP-UX and Mac OSX.

HTML-Kit

This HTML text editor is intended for use by web developers, and comes with support for writing HTML, XML and scripts. Among its features are internal preview of your web pages (requires IE 4.x and above to be installed), integration with HTML Tidy (a HTML and CSS validation program), auto-completion of keywords, etc. HTML-Kit can be extended using plugins, and runs on Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000.