The free unlicensed version of BBEdit is certainly worth having around on a Mac. You can install three command-line tools for BBEdit: one for the editor, one for its difference engine, and one for its multifile search. It can edit and run Perl, Python, Ruby, and Shell scripts, as well as check syntax for Perl and Python scripts.īBEdit’s support of HTML and Markdown is good-actually better than its JavaScript support. BBEdit has an extract function that copies a selection or find result into a new buffer, and a clippings function. The licensed version also integrates with the Git, Perforce, and Subversion version control systems.īBEdit 11 was a major rewrite of the product, making it even faster than it was before, as well as still being able to handle ginormous files gracefully BBEdit 12 is a 64-bit version with dark mode support. Both versions do syntax highlighting the licensed version also does a certain amount of autocompletion, mostly for function names, variable names, a few keywords, and ctags. BBEditīBEdit 14 (available in $49.99 licensed and free unlicensed versions) is a Mac-only HTML and text editor that supports about 35 programming and markup languages, with community support (of varying quality) for many other languages available through the BBEdit website.

If you have a Windows machine or VM, you should have Notepad++ installed, ready when you need it.Ĭost: Free, open source. Notepad++ is still useful in a pinch, and it’s a free download. Later on, its minimalist approach felt less useful to me, and I adopted other tools that reduced the number of keystrokes required to generate code. Notepad++ stayed out of my way, which allowed me to concentrate on the code I was trying to build. At the time, I preferred it to Visual Studio 2008 for that purpose.

I formerly used Notepad++ extensively when developing JavaScript applications on Windows machines. However, it’s far from the most fully featured JavaScript editor in terms of being able to generate code, perform operations such as refactoring, and navigate quickly within a large project. With syntax coloring and folding, capable editing functions (including column-mode editing and regular expression support for search and replace), and a certain amount of function completion and parameter hinting, Notepad++ can easily be your primary code editor for JavaScript.

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