Top Code Editors

Altaf Shaikh
2 min readMar 29, 2021

There are a lot of different editors and it largely boils down to personal preference. Most Python programmers use complex but extremely powerful IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), such as PyCharm. As a beginner, however, that’s probably less suitable; our recommendations are equally powerful, but a lot simpler.

Our suggestions are below,

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. It includes support for debugging, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring.

Download it here

Gedit

Gedit is an open-source, free editor, available for all operating systems.

Download it here

Sublime Text 3

Sublime Text is a very popular editor with a free evaluation period and it’s available for all operating systems.

Download it here

Atom

Atom is another popular editor. It’s free, open-source and available for Windows, OS X and Linux. Atom is developed by GitHub.

Download it here

Why are we installing a code editor?

You might be wondering why we are installing this special code editor software, rather than using something like Word or Notepad. The first reason is that code needs to be plain text, and the problem with programs like Word and Textedit is that they don’t actually produce plain text, they produce rich text (with fonts and formatting), using custom formats like RTF (Rich Text Format). The second reason is that code editors are specialized for editing code, so they can provide helpful features like highlighting code with color according to its meaning, or automatically closing quotes for you. We’ll see all this in action later.

Soon, you’ll come to think of your trusty old code editor as one of your favorite tools. :)

Originally published at https://blog.teachmebro.com.

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