HTML Text Editors

HTML text editors can be easy to learn and are primarily for people who want to code HTML directly. Even though I use Dreamweaver for publishing, I still rely on my handy text editor to fix the HTML that a WYSIWYG Editor can't do, or to view the source code directly (although most WYSIWYG editors have some sort of source code view/edit option) to track down coding and CSS bugs.

Learning how and editing the HTML source directly — either through a text editor, HTML editor, or a WYSIWYG editor in HTML mode — can be beneficial because you must learn how to insert your own tracking code or Adsense code directly into the HTML.

Homesite - This tool has been around for years. Some of my clients love it and it really does have some great features now. If you haven't tried it, you really should take a look. Homesite is now owned by Adobe.

BBEdit (Mac Only) - BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit's best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files (even unopened files on remote servers), project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Mac OS X Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a complete set of robust HTML tools.

CoffeeCup HTML Editor - CoffeeCup is another HTML editor that has been around for years. I started using CoffeeCup many years ago and my decision to abandon it had to do with the visual feedback of WYSIWYG editors when I was first learning how to build web pages. CoffeeCup is an excellent product and highly recommended. They also provide a visual editor where you can drag and drop images and text, and have the ability to create a page in either the HTML editor or the Visual editor, easily going back and forth between them to make changes.

HotDog Pro - I started building web sites back in 1995 using the Hot Dog editor which then was just a plain HTML editor. Their "hot social" product is the latest version which provides a very flexible, text based HTML authoring environment. Take a look and download a free copy.

Text editors, especially programmable text editors, typically have features available that you won't find in a WYSIWYG source code editor or a simple plain text editor.