10 Best Source Code Editors for your Development needs

From students to professional software engineers, coding is the most important process of software development regardless of whether it is a college project or a enterprise project. Source code editor is basically a text editor program specifically designed to edit computer programs and is used by the programmer to create or edit the source code. Here in this post, we present you a list of 10 best popular source code editors which are widely used all over the world for development purpose. The source code editors listed here are standalone applications and are free.

Why use Source Code Editors?

Source code editors is used to work with wide range of computer programming languages in one single applications. They offer features like syntax-highlighting, auto-complete and bracket matching. These features help simplify the and speed up the process of inputing the code and editing them.

Here are the 10 best free source code editors you can count on:

1. Vim (Cross-Platform)

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems, however you can download it for all platforms. And hence it is an acronym for “Vi IMproved” Released under a software license compatible with the GNU General Public License, Vim is free and open source software. Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

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2. Notepad++ (Windows)
Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License. It is distributed as free software. The project is hosted on SourceForge.net, from where it has been downloaded over twenty million times. Based on a powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.

Download Notepad++ | Homepage

3. Smultron (Mac)

Smultron is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It should work perfectly for a whole variety of needs – like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on. Smultron has all open documents in a list with beautiful Quick Look icons to your left just like e.g. iTunes so you can easily switch between many documents – you can also choose to display them as tabs if you prefer it that way.

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4. Emacs (Cross-platform)

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Emacs has, perhaps, more editing commands compared to other editors, numbering over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. As of May 2010, the latest stable release of GNU Emacs is version 23.2.

Download Emacs | Homepage

5. Crimson Editor (Windows)

Crimson Editor is a professional source code editor for Windows. While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for programming languages such as HTML, C/C++, Perl and Java. Syntax Highlighting for HTML, C/C++, Perl, Java, Matlab and LaTeX. Also, it can be extended for other programming languages based on custom syntax files.

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6. jEdit (Cross-platform)

jEdit is a mature programmer’s text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. jEdit includes Syntax highlighting that provides native support for over 130 file formats. Support for additional formats can be added manually using XML files. It supports UTF-8 and many other encodings. It has extensive code folding and text folding capabilities as well as text wrapping that takes indents into account. The application is highly customizable and can be extended with macros written in BeanShell, Jython, JavaScript and some other scripting languages.

Download jEdit | Homepage

7. KDevelop (KDE)

KDevelop is a free, open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for MS Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. It is a feature-full, plugin extensible IDE for C/C++ and other programming languages. It is based on KDevPlatform, and the KDE and Qt libraries and is under development since 1998. The current version 4.0.0 was officially released at 1st May 2010. The previous stable version 3.5.5 supports many programming languages such as Ada, Bash, C, C++, Fortran, Java, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. Released under the GNU General Public License, KDevelop is free software.

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8. PSPad (Windows)

PSPad editor is a freeware text editor and source editor intended for use by programmers. PSPad has many software development-oriented features, such as syntax highlighting and hex editing, and is designed as a universal GUI for editing many languages including PHP, Perl, HTML, and Java. It integrates the use of many project formats for handling and saving multiple files. Other features include autocompletion, tabs, FTP client and find/replace using regular expressions. PSPad interface is based on the MDI with tabs for editing multiple files and better open document manipulation.

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9. Eclipse (Cross-platform)

Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment (IDE) and an extensible plug-in system. It is written primarily in Java and can be used to develop applications in Java and, by means of various plug-ins, other languages including C, C++, COBOL, Python, Perl and PHP. The IDE is often called Eclipse ADT for Ada, Eclipse CDT for C/C++, Eclipse JDT for Java and Eclipse PDT for PHP.

Download Eclipse | Homepage

10. NEdit (Cross-platform)

NEdit is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which combines a standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the thorough functionality and stability required by users who edit text eight hours a day. It provides intensive support for development in a wide variety of languages, text processors, and other tools, but at the same time can be used productively by just about anyone who needs to edit text. NEdit, is entirely a volunteer effort, benefits from a strong developer and user community. As of version 5.1, It is freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Download NEdit | Homepage