We all know that the field of web development has been changing rapidly. And if you are a software or a web developer, you need to keep updating your skills. With that in mind, it’s essential to pay attention to an integrated development environment or IDE as they can help you take your programming skills to the next level.
Here’s the problem, though — the landscape of web development IDE available now is huge, and it’s only growing. To help you find the best IDE for web development, we’ve compiled a list of the 23 IDEs that offer some unique features. Keep reading to learn about IDEs that will help you handle your programming task by making them quick and easy for you.
Let’s get started with a general introduction to IDE before diving deep into the best IDE list for web development.
What is an IDE?
Starting from the shell script and command-line coding, we have come a long way in today’s arena of development environments. All the heavy work is today done by the IDEs or Integrated Development Environment. It is arguable who developed the first IDE for their company or the public, but the most popular opinion favors TurboC, developed in 1991 for the C language. Since then, IDEs have been developed for every language that has existed, Java, JavaScript, or HTML.
Web development IDEs are powerful tools equipped with heavy features such as autocomplete, syntax checking, debugger, provide a suggestion, views live web page inside the IDE for better understanding of the output, etc. There is no predefined notion of the pool of features that an IDE should have. IDEs are like a helping hand; the more features they provide, the more convenient it becomes for the programmer to develop the code. For example, given below is a visual representation of the Atom IDE for web development. The following image shows the suggestions it provides when we type a keyword into it:
The IDE then writes the code itself after we indicate our choice. This saves time while typing and cuts down on the time if you forget a tag and would have gone ahead to Google it out. In the next section, we will be highlighting top IDEs used for web development with their unique features and drawbacks or downsides, if any. Since IDE selection is purely based on the user’s needs, it is up to you to install one and leave another.
Best IDEs For Web Development
The following 23 best IDEs list is the result of hours and hours of research. And we hope it will assist you in choosing the perfect IDE. Let’s get to it, shall we?
- Visual Studio Code
- Eclipse
- Brackets
- WebStorm
- Atom
- XCode
- IntelliJ IDEA
- Sublime Text
- AWS Cloud 9
- NetBeans
- Light Table
- PyCharm
- RJTextED
- Code::Blocks
- GNU Emacs
- Codelobster
- Komodo Edit
- Codeanywhere
- PHPStorm
- Aptana Studio 3
- BlueFish
- Codepen
- CKEditor
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is a web development IDE that has been regularly voted the popular choice among developers as the most used text editor. It is considered to be the most regularly used text editor on the State Of JS. Visual Studio Code IDE is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems. Visual Studio Code is developed by Microsoft and has been voted as the most popular editor on StackOverflow. VS Code is easy to use and fastens up the process of coding, equipped with a great community and support.
Top Features:
- Intellisense enabled autocomplete.
- Imported Modules.
- Integrating with GitHub.
- Wide theme selections.
- Great in-built templates.
- Integrated tools for testing the code.
- Version control system enabled.
Eclipse
Eclipse is a free web development IDE, and you can use it for web development and other types of programming goals. Eclipse is a prevalent choice among every age group, and it is embedded with features. Available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, you can easily combine multiple language support and other features into any of Eclipse’s default packages, and the Eclipse Marketplace allows for virtually unlimited customization and extension.
Top Features:
- An in-built debugger is available.
- Tremendous plugin support to extend the functionalities.
- Good programming language support.
- Integration with Git available.
- Contains a fast compiler within.
Brackets
Brackets is a very lightweight and lightning-fast web development IDE, which is essentially a source code editor. I have worked for a couple of years on Brackets, and I found it to be the only IDE that is purely built for web developers. Brackets have got huge plugin support and are entirely free to use. Created by Adobe Systems, this open-source software can help you build code in all the web programming languages, including Perl, Ruby, Python, etc.
Top Features:
- Live preview window for the live output.
- Support for the preprocessor.
- In-built JavaScript debugger.
- Tons of plugin support.
- Quick-Edit features enabled.
- Available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
- Allows collaborative working on the code for multiple developers.
- Highly secured plugin system to prevent malicious activities.
- Includes code-folding and syntax highlighting.
WebStorm
WebStorm is a very popular web development IDE used for developing high-end web applications enabling developers to use the full power of the JavaScript ecosystem. With it, you can experience intelligent code compilation, lightning-fast error detection, robust navigation, and refactoring for popular frameworks. WebStorm is developed by JetBrains and has since been a popular choice among developers for its rich language support, great in-built features, and ease of use. WebStorm is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS and supports many web programming languages, including back-end languages.
Top Features:
- In-built debugger support.
- In-built testing capabilities.
- Syntax error detection.
- Integration with Git.
- Advanced coding assistance for better code development in new web frameworks such as React, Vue, etc.
- Analyze the result to provide the best code compilation results.
- Powerful, customizable features.
- Provides good templates.
- Integration with Mercurial.
- Huge plugin support.
Atom
Atom, also called Atom by GitHub, is a trendy web development IDE founded by the GitHub community, which is essentially a desktop application built using web technologies. Being a product of the most popular collaborative development platform, Atom has vast community support that listens and works on the feedback. Atom has excellent features and is my personal favorite for developing web pages as it is a free and open-source text editor. It is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS and has a huge package repository to cater to the developers’ needs.
Top Features:
- Ease of use with excellent navigation UI.
- Collaborative support for multiple developers.
- A large number of packages available for every need.
- In-built auto-complete and suggestion feature.
- Free to use and open-source.
XCode
XCode is a tool-rich IDE for web development and other purposes available only for the Mac operating system. XCode can be fully integrated with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, allowing users to create the operating system tools. Apple Inc. has recently launched its updated stable version of the IDE, 12.1, on October 20, 2020. The Command Line Tools (CLT), included in XCode, enables UNIX-style development via macOS’s Terminal app.
Top Features:
- Takes advantage of the LLVM compiler.
- It contains an interface builder.
- Smart analyzer to analyze the code.
- Includes a lot of tools for web development.
- The command-line tool is available for testing.
IntelliJ IDEA
Designed primarily for the Java programming language, IntelliJ is one of the best IDEs for web development. IntelliJ has excellent support for plugin and web development languages such as HTML, CSS, Ruby, Python, etc. IntelliJ is a robust, integrated development environment with in-built tools for developers’ assistance and comes with tremendous community support that helps whenever you get stuck.
Top Features:
- Integration with Git for better code development.
- Multiple build system support.
- Server deployment tools are integrated.
- Suggestion and auto-complete integrated in-built.
- Huge language and environment support.
- Maintains the program flow.
- In-built duplicate code analyzer.
- Comes with the database editor.
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a paid IDE for web development and is very popular among developers today. Sublime Text is fast, integrated with multiple tools, and supports Python and C and all the web programming languages. The Sublime Text provides great plugin support to enhance the capabilities of the editor. As a shareware cross-platform source code editor, it supports a diverse range of programming languages.
Top Features:
- Autocomplete and suggestion provided in-built.
- Go-To feature to quickly navigate between files.
- Highly customizable editor.
- Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux OS.
- The command palette allows keyboard invocations.
- Huge plugin repository for every need.
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