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List of Text Editors and IDEs

Table of Contents

Introduction

This is a small, hand-maintained list of text editors and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), useful for programmers and other developers.

Open Source Text Editors and IDEs

Cross-Platform Open Source Editors

  • Vim and gvim - a cross-platform vi-derivative editor (with many enhancments) with a Windows-conventions-emulating configuration (:source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim). Has many plugins available on the site, supports Unicode and encodings, syntax highlighting, has both console and a GUI versions. Vim licence (open-source and GPL-compatible licence).

  • XEmacs - cross-platform Emacs derivative, with console and GUI versions. Is mostly written in and extendable with the built-in Emacs Lisp scripting language. Very hard to get used to from my experience. (GPLed).

  • gedit - a text-editor for the Gtk+/GNOME environment, with many plugins and extensions, and good unicode support. (GPLed)

  • geany - another gtk+-based programmer's editor. (open-source, GPLed)

  • jEdit - a cross-platform programmer's text editor written in Java, with many plugins. (Open-Source, GPL 2.0).

  • Kate - a programmer's editor for KDE (the K Desktop Environment). As of this writing (January 2010), it crashes a lot on MS-Windows. Contains syntax highlighting, good support for Unicode and bi-directional scripts, and other features.

Cross-Platform Open Source IDEs

  • Eclipse - an open-source IDE written in Java. Very comprehensive and contains intellisense, automated refactoring , code completion, and enhanced browsing tools for Java and other languages.

  • NetBeans - a Java IDE from Sun which uses SWING (and thus has a non-native and quirky look-and-feel) with good support for Java and support for other languages, including C and C++.

  • SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop - open-source IDEs for Microsoft .NET / Mono.

  • The Eric Python IDE - a "full featured Python and Ruby editor and IDE, written in Python".

  • Padre, the Perl IDE - an open-source IDE written in Perl, and intended primarily for Perl development.

  • Lazarus, the Free Pascal IDE - an IDE written in the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC), and primarily intended for writing using it. Emulates Delphi, but allows cross-platform and cross-UI development. (open-source, GPL/LGPL and other licences).

  • Anjuta: the GNOME IDE - an IDE for the GNOME environment. (open-source, GPLed).

  • KDevelop - an IDE for the KDE desktop environment, written in Qt/C++ and primarily intended for C/C++. As of this writing (February, 2010), may have stability problems on Windows. (open-source, GPLed).

  • Code::Blocks - an IDE written in C++ (and primarily for it) using the wxWidgets toolkit. Runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, and Mac OS X and supports multiple compilers.

Platform-specific Open Source Editors

  • Notepad++ - a free source code editor for Microsoft Windows with syntax highlighting, scripting and many extensions. (open-source, GPLed).

Non-Open-Source Text Editors and IDEs

Non Open-source (and probably platform-specific) Editors

  • Textpad - a proprietary programmer's text editor for MS-Windows.

  • UltraEdit - a commercial, proprietary, text editor for MS-Windows, and x86-Linux.

  • BBEdit - a proprietary text editor for Mac OS X.

  • TextMate, E Text Editor and E Text Editor for Linux/UNIX - TextMate is a commercial (and not open source) programmers' editor that has become popular on Mac OS X, and E Text Editor is a commercial version of it for Windows, with source available for compiling on Linux and other systems.

Non Open-source (and probably platform-specific) IDEs