Visual tools are all well and good, but sometimes you need to do some old-school coding by hand. Here's our pick of the best text editors.

Sublime Text
Available across all of the three main desktop platforms, Sublime Text is a great general-purpose text editor that offers plenty of power to anyone working on websites. It's especially well suited to anyone wedded to the keyboard, providing powerful shortcuts and tools to leap about a document, make (multiple) selections, filter the file, and quickly make edits.
Switching between projects is also lightning fast — perfect for anyone juggling multiple clients. Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, but a licence must be purchased for continued use.

Brackets


 It's early days yet for Adobe's open-source text editor, but we already like what we see. The editor is created from the code that builds the web, and the developers note that if you can codein Brackets, then you can code on Brackets. In other words, although you initially get a simple, usable editor, seasoned programmers should be able to hack it to their liking.

Notepad++


 Notepad++ was one of the earliest text editors we used on Windows. But the app deserves its place on this list, because it can still compete with the best of them. For no money whatsoever, you get a capable (if sometimes workmanlike) editor with plenty of features, and you can also mess about with the interface to make it better suit your requirements.

ICEcoder


 ICEcoder is an open-source code editor that lets you work directly within the browser, whether you’re online or offline. Very lightweight, you can install it and start using it almost instantly. Despite its size, it contains many great features you'd expect from a code editor, including broken tag indicators, highlighting themes and secure login.

Bluefish


 Bluefish is a text editor with plenty of designer-friendly tools and options. Among the goodies on offer are syntax highlighting (ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, PHP and more are supported), code folding, powerful find and search and replace tools and autocompletion. Bluefish also supports document templates; has wizards to add CSS, forms, tables, forms, audio and video objects; and quick tag editing and easy previewing of the current document.

Code Writer


 Windows tablets hardly look set to blaze past Android and iPads, and the app ecosystem is therefore relatively limited. We're therefore delighted Code Writer exists. The editor boasts a sleek interface that's perfectly suited to the UI formerly known as Metro, and the app provides advanced features such as code outlining, syntax-error flagging, text formatting, and auto-correct. Handily, snapped view is also supported, so you can code while 'researching' things on the likes of Twitter.

DroidEdit Pro


 Quite a few text editors exist for Android, but many of them feel rough and ready. DroidEdit Pro is anything but, and for the low price tag you get an app that looks great and works nicely for coding on the move. The simple interface gets out of the way, and the app supports syntax highlighting, bracket matching, Dropbox, and SFTP/FTP. There are also configurable shortcuts, to cut down on hunting and pecking on smaller Android device keyboards.

 Atom
Launched in 2008, GitHub has become the code storage and development site of choice worldwide, and so any new tool it releases is going to cause a big stir.
That's certainly been the case with Atom. Dubbed "a hackable text editor for the 21st Century", it's designed to be simple to use out of the box, but also easily expandable using hundreds of packages.
Since launching in invite-only private beta earlier this year, it's recently been made fully open source and available to download for free.

Vim


 Vim is essentially the text editor people flock to when they look at the others on this list and consider them toys for newbs. There's a pretty steep learning curve, due to its overtly techie nature; but if you can cling on or are just looking for something more powerful to work with, you'll find plenty to like in Vim's flexible tools, customisation and macros, and efficiency-oriented commands.

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