An HTML editor is one of the most important tools needed and widely utilized by most graphic or web designers in creating excellent and great-looking websites, logo creation, or other digital art.

We have scoured the web looking for the best and 100% free HTML editors you can enjoy and put to use today. Below are the resources you’ll ever need.

1. Alleycode HTML 2.21

Alleycode HTML Editor is an absolutely free HTML/XHTML and PHP editor that runs on Windows. It was once selected as one of PC World’s 101 Fabulous Freebies in 2006.

2. ActiveState Komodo Edit

Komodo Edit is a free text editor for dynamic programming languages. It was introduced in January 2007 to complement Active State’s commercial Komodo IDE product. With the release of version 4.3, Komodo Edit is built on top of the Open Komodo project. Many of Komodo’s features are derived from an embedded Python interpreter.

3. Aptana

Aptana Studio is an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for building Ajax web applications. It includes support for JavaScript, HTML, DOM, and CSS with code-completion, outlining, JavaScript debugging, error and warning notification and integrated documentation. Additional plugins allow Aptana Studio to be extended to support Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Adobe AIR, Apple iPhone and Nokia WRT (Web Runtime). Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse and is available as standalone on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, or as a plugin for Eclipse.

4. Arachnophilia

Arachnophilia is a source code editor written in Java by Paul Lutus. It is the successor to another HTML editor, WebThing. The program is licensed as Careware software. The name Arachnophilia comes from the term meaning “love of spiders”, a metaphor for the task of building on the World Wide Web.

5. BBEdit

BBEdit is designed for use by software developers and web designers. It has native support for many programming languages and custom modules can be created by users to support any language. BBEdit is not a word processor, meaning it does not have text formatting or page layout features. The application contains powerful multi-file text searching capabilities including strong support for Perl-compatible regular expressions. BBEdit allows easy previewing and built-in debugging of HTML and provides built-in prototypes for most HTML constructs. It also includes FTP and SFTP tools and integrates with code management systems. BBEdit shows differences between file versions and allows for the merging of changes. Support for version control, including CVS, Perforce, and Subversion is built in.

6. Bluefish

Bluefish was started by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink in 1997 to facilitate web development professionals on Linux desktop platforms.  Bluefish is an advanced text editor with lots of tools for development of dynamic websites. Bluefish supports development in (among others) HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, C, C++, JavaScript, Java, Google Go, Vala, Ada, D, SQL, Perl, ColdFusion, JSP, Python, Ruby and shell. Bluefish is available on most platforms, including Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X, and Windows. Bluefish is developed in C/GTK+ and can be used integrated in GNOME or independent from GNOME.

7. Coda

Coda is a commercial and proprietary web development application for Mac OS X, developed by Panic. The concept for Coda came from the web team at Panic, who would have five or six different programs for coding, testing and reference. The lack of full-featured website development platforms equivalent to application development platform Xcode served as the purpose for Coda’s creation.

8. E Text Editor

E Text Editor is a text editor for Microsoft Windows. Its notable features include a personal revision control system; branched, multi-level, graphical undo; and the ability to run TextMate bundles through the use of Cygwin.

9. Eclipse

Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment (IDE) and an extensible plug-in system. It is written mostly in Java. It can be used to develop applications in Java and, by means of various plug-ins, other programming languages including Ada, C, C++, COBOL, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby (including Ruby on Rails framework), Scala, Clojure, Groovy and Scheme. It can also be used to develop packages for the software Mathematica. Development environments include the Eclipse Java development tools (JDT) for Java, Eclipse CDT for C/C++, and Eclipse PDT for PHP, among others.

10. EditPlus

EditPlus is a 32-bit text editor for the Microsoft Windows operating system, developed by Sangil Kim of ES-Computing. The editor contains tools for programmers, including syntax highlighting (and support for custom syntax files), file type conversions, line ending conversion (between Linux, Windows and Mac styles), regular expressions for search-and-replace, keystroke recording, spell check, full support for Unicode editing, customizable keyboard shortcuts, auto-completion, code folding, and more. Files can be browsed and edited in tabs, and an internal file browser is implemented in the software.

11. Emacs

Emacs is primarily a text editor, not a word processor; it concentrates on manipulating pieces of text, rather than manipulating the typeface (the “font”) of the characters or printing documents (though Emacs can do these as well). Emacs provides commands to manipulate words and paragraphs (deleting them, moving them, moving through them, and so forth), syntax highlighting for making source code easier to read, and “keyboard macros” for performing arbitrary batches of editing commands defined by the user.

12. EmEditor

EmEditor is a lightweight extensible commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows. It was developed by Yutaka Emura of Emurasoft, Inc. EmEditor includes full Unicode support, 32-bit and 64-bit builds, syntax highlighting, find and replace with regular expressions, vertical selection editing, editing of large files (up to 248GB or 2.1 billion lines), and is extensible via plugins and scripts.

13. Geany

Geany is a lightweight cross-platform GTK+ text editor based on Scintilla and including basic Integrated Development Environment (IDE) features. It is designed to have short load times, with limited dependency on separate packages or external libraries. It is available for a wide range of operating systems, such as BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows. Among the supported programming languages are C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML, LaTeX, CSS, Python, Perl, Ruby, Pascal, Haskell and many others.

14. HTML-Kit

HTML-Kit is an proprietary HTML editor for Microsoft Windows made by chami.com. The application is a full-featured HTML editor designed to edit, format, validate, preview and publish web pages in HTML, XHTML and XML -languages. HTML-Kit enables running batch actions such as global search and replace in multiple files, Internet Explorer and Mozilla / Netscape side-by-side previewing, W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines checking through HTML Tidy, internal Command Prompt, TimeTracker, translations, Text to Speech Wizard and UnicodePad.

15. Notepad++

Notepad++ is distributed as free software. The project was hosted on SourceForge.net, from where it has been downloaded over 27 million times and twice won the SourceForge Community Choice Award for Best Developer Tool. The project is hosted on TuxFamily since June 2010. To display and edit text and programming language source code files, Notepad++ uses the Scintilla editor component.

16. NetBeans

NetBeans IDE is an open-source integrated development environment. NetBeans IDE supports development of all Java application types (Java SE (including JavaFX), Java ME, web, EJB and mobile applications) out of the box. Among other features are an Ant-based project system, Maven support, refactorings, version control (supporting CVS, Subversion, Mercurial and Clearcase).

17. NoteTab

NoteTab is a freeware and also a commercial text editor for Windows. It was developed by Eric Fookes of Fookes Software, Switzerland. The program’s name refers to the fact that it was one of the earliest text-editors capable of editing several open documents on different tabs (tabbed document interface). The first version, known as Mini NoteTab, was released in 1995; version 5 was released in 2006, version 5.7 in 2008, version 6 on May 4, 2009. Before version 5, the latest version of NoteTab Light was 4.95.

18. PHPEdit

PHPEdit is a commercial IDE developed by the French company WaterProof SARL. It is written in Delphi and runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, and is designed mainly for the PHP language, but supports many other languages such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, INI, PHPEditScript, PlainText, SQL, XML, and XSLT.

19. PHPStorm IDE

PhpStorm provides an intelligent editor for PHP code, HTML and JavaScript with on-the-fly code analysis and automated refactoring for PHP and JavaScript code. Code completion supports PHP 5.3 including namespaces and closures. Full-fledged editor for SQL queries with editable query results is available.

20. Programmer’s Notepad

Programmer’s Notepad (PN1) is an open-source text editor targeted at users who work with source code. It was released in 1998 by Echo Software (a trading name for Simon Steele). PN1′s successor, Programmer’s Notepad 2 (PN2), was released in 2002 and is now based on Scintilla. Despite being based on Scintilla, PN2 supports multi-line regular expressions for search and replace actions.

21. PSPad

PSPad editor is a freeware text editor and source editor intended for use by programmers. First released in 2001, this software is produced by the single Czech developer Jan Fiala for the Windows platform.

22. RJ TextEd

RJ TextEd is a freeware Unicode text and source code editor for Windows, that can also be used as a simple web development tool. The editor uses a variety of techniques for syntax highlighting in the source. It can use auto completion and hints to assist in editing source code. Previews of HTML/ASP/PHP code are supported. A syntax file editor is included.

23. Scintilla

Scintilla is a free source code editing component. It comes with complete source code and a license that permits use in any free project or commercial product. Scintilla includes features especially useful when editing and debugging source code. These include support for syntax styling, error indicators, code completion and call tips. The selection margin can contain markers like those used in debuggers to indicate breakpoints and the current line. Styling choices are more open than with many editors, allowing the use of proportional fonts, bold and italics, multiple foreground and background colours and multiple fonts.

24. Smultron

Smultron is a text editor for Mac OS X that is designed for both beginners and advanced users; it was originally published as open source and is now sold through the Mac App Store. It is written in Objective-C using the Cocoa API. It is able to edit and save many different file types, and has syntax highlighting support for many popular programming languages including C, C++, LISP, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, HTML, XML, CSS, Prolog, IDL and D.

25. skEdit

skEdit (formerly called skHTML) is a text editor for Mac OS X (Universal), aimed at web designers and programmers, developed by Sean Kelly a software engineer working for Apple Inc.

26. TED Notepad

TED Notepad is a freeware portable text editor for Microsoft Windows. The software has been developed by Juraj Šimlovi? since 2001, originally as a school project. It has a similar cosmetic look to Notepad, but provides variety of features for advanced plain-text editing. Includes experimental features like line completion or selection jumping.

27. TextMate

TextMate is a general-purpose GUI text editor for Mac OS X created by Allan Odgaard. Notable features include declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections and snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system.

28. TextPad

TextPad is a text editor for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. First released in 1992, this software is currently in its fifth major version. It is produced by Helios Software Solutions.

29. TextWrangler

TextWrangler is a text editor for Mac OS X from Bare Bones Software. It was originally a commercial product, but (beginning with version 2.0) has become the freeware alternative to their flagship editor, BBEdit, and the successor to their previous freeware editor, BBEdit Lite.

Like BBEdit, TextWrangler is not a word processor and so lacks formatting and style options — it is limited to editing and manipulation of plain text, but while this limits desktop publications, it allows for much greater power and flexibility editing text. TextWrangler has features common to most programming text editors, such as syntax highlighting for various programming languages, a find and replace function, spell check, and file comparison.

30. TopStyle

TopStyle is a CSS/XHTML/HTML editor for Microsoft Windows developed by Nick Bradbury and now maintained by Stefan van As. The editor is code-centric rather than WYSIWYG, with integrated support for previews using either the Mozilla Gecko, Internet Explorer Trident, or Apple Inc. Webkit layout engines. The software is available as a commercial version with a trial period.

31. UltraEdit

UltraEdit is a commercial text editor for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (Intel) created in 1994 by Ian D. Mead. The editor contains tools for programmers, including macros, configurable syntax highlighting, code folding, file type conversions, project management, regular expressions for search-and-replace, a column-edit mode, remote editing of files via FTP, interfaces for APIs or command lines of choice and more. Files can be browsed and edited in tabs.

32. WebStorm

WebStorm provides automatic code completion, on-the-fly code analysis, refactoring support and VCS integration.

33.Vim

Vim is a text editor written by Bram Moolenaar and first released publicly in 1991. Based on the vi editor common to Unix-like systems, Vim is designed for use both from a command line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Vim is free and open source software and is released under a license that includes some charityware clauses, encouraging users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda.[3] The license is compatible with the GNU General Public License.

34.Vi

Vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by (and thus standardized by) the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.

35. ASP.NET Web Matrix

Microsoft WebMatrix is a free web development tool that was released by Microsoft in early 2011, allowing developers to build websites capable of running on Windows or Linux platforms. It allows developers to use free open source web applications written in either PHP or ASP.NET.

36. Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is available for both Mac and Windows operating systems. Recent versions have incorporated support for web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting languages and frameworks including ASP (ASP JavaScript, ASP VBScript, ASP.NET C#, ASP.NET VB), ColdFusion, Scriptlet, and PHP.

37. Amaya

Amaya (formerly Amaya World) is a free and open source WYSIWYG web authoring tool with browsing abilities, created by a structured editor project at the INRIA, a French national research institution, and later adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Amaya is used as a testbed for web standards and replaced the Arena web browser. Compared with those of other modern web browsers, Amaya’s system requirements are minor.

38. Blue Griffon

BlueGriffon is a free open source WYSIWYG HTML editor. It replaces Nvu, an earlier program that was also written by Daniel Glazman. It is based on Gecko, the rendering engine inside Firefox, and uses XULRunner, the runtime environment for Gecko. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

39. Coffee Cup HTML Editor

The CoffeeCup HTML Editor is an HTML editor that supports both raw HTML and WYSIWYG editing. Originally created by Nicholas Longo and Kevin Jurica, it was first released to the public in August 1996.

40. EZGenerator

EZGenerator is a web design program created by Image-Line. The program is intended to be accessible to users with no experience in code such as HTML or CSS, and displays results in a WYSIWYG manner. EZGenerator is available for Windows operating systems.

41. FirstPage

FirstPage is a family of HTML editor products by EVRSOFT, running on Microsoft Windows. The features include HTML editing, formatting and validation with syntax highlighting, templates and partial WYSIWYG support, JavaScript code snippets, DOM tree browser and various wizards. There are rather function-rich free versions and commercial extensions, which mostly bring bigger libraries of templates and code snippets.

42. Freeway

Freeway (originally Uniqorn) is a WYSIWYG web design application for Mac OS X (older versions also run under Mac OS 9), developed by the English company Softpress Systems. There are two flavours of Freeway: Pro and Express, both currently at version 5. Freeway Express has fewer features and is aimed more at the amateur web designer. Freeway is based on a pre-Mac OS X print publishing application called Uniqorn, also developed by Softpress, but discontinued when Apple stopped supporting QuickDraw GX in Mac OS 8.

43. HyperPublish

Hyper Publish is a visual WYSIWYG hypermedia authoring tool created by Visual Vision, a Italy based software company. The software is born from a research work performed in 1995/96 at Politecnico di Torino and has been designed and optimized for hypermedia and hypertext management, focusing on Web content development and CD authoring. Its unique WYSIWYL interface permits visual linking and live links, and probably makes it different from any other multimedia / hypermedia authoring tool.

44. KompoZer

KompoZer is an open source WYSIWYG HTML editor based on the now-discontinued Nvu editor. KompoZer is maintained as a community-driven fork, and is a project on Sourceforge. The current pre-release, KompoZer 0.8 beta 3, released February 2010, uses Gecko 1.8.1. The current stable version is 0.7.10, released in August 2007.  KompoZer’s WYSIWYG editing capabilities are one of the main attractions of the software. In addition, KompoZer allows direct code editing as well as a split code-graphic view.

45. Microsoft Expression Web

Microsoft Expression Web, code-named Quartz, is an HTML editor and general web design software product by Microsoft. It is part of the Expression Studio suite. Expression Web can design and develop web pages using XML, CSS 2.1, ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX, XHTML, XSLT, PHP and JavaScript. Expression Web 4 requires .NET Framework 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 to install and run.

46. Microsoft Sharepoint Designer

SharePoint Designer and its sister product, Microsoft Expression Web are successors of Microsoft FrontPage. While Expression Web serves as the full-featured successor to FrontPage, SharePoint Designer features focuses on designing and customizing Microsoft SharePoint websites. For instance, it only includes SharePoint-specific site templates. It retains more FrontPage features than Expression Web, such as web components, database, marquee, hit counter, navigation bars, map insert, etc. Although SharePoint Designer 2007 (the first version of this product) could be used as a generic HTML editor, SharePoint Designer 2010 (the subsequent version) may no longer operate in absence of Microsoft SharePoint Server or Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

47. Seamonkey

SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code.

48. Sandvox

Sandvox is a WYSIWYG template-based website creation tool by Karelia Software, based around WebKit. Released May 16, 2006, it competes directly with Apple’s iWeb and Realmac’s RapidWeaver. Sandvox can be purchased with either a Regular or Pro license. The Pro license unlocks more advanced features, such as the ability to include raw HTML pages and “pagelets” within the created website, along with Google Webmaster Tools integration. In 2007, Sandvox 1.2 won the runner-up Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X User Experience.

49. RapidWeaver

RapidWeaver is a template-based website creation tool, from Realmac Software, available for Mac OS X. It uses user-selectable templates to define a website’s complete appearance. This enforces consistency in the website’s appearance and function, although some may see it as too constraining. The software can use third-party templates, and technically skilled users can also create their own. There are also plugins, which add new features to the application.

50. Quanta Plus

Quanta Plus, originally called Quanta, is a web Integrated development environment (IDE) for HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP and any other XML-based languages or scripting languages. It is part of KDE, a Linux desktop environment, released in the Kdewebdev package. Quanta was licensed under GPL before the release of version 2.0 final. Quanta is capable of both WYSIWYG design and handcoding.

51. Microsoft Publisher

Microsoft Publisher is an entry-level desktop publishing application from Microsoft, differing from Microsoft Word in that the emphasis is placed on page layout and design rather than text composition and proofing. The current version is Microsoft Publisher 2010 for Windows; there is no version for Macintosh.

52. WebPlus

WebPlus is a website design program for Microsoft Windows, developed by UK-based software company Serif. It allows users to design, create and upload their website onto the internet without any knowledge of HTML or other web technologies. Much like Microsoft Word, WebPlus uses WYSIWYG drag and drop editing to add and position text, images and links as they would appear on the finished web page. Once a user has designed their site, WebPlus can preview the site in a web browser before uploading the site using the in-built FTP.

53. WorldWideWeb

WorldWideWeb, later renamed to Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web, was the first web browser and editor. When it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.

54. Nvu

Nvu (pronounced “N-view”) is a WYSIWYG HTML editor, based on the Composer component of Mozilla Application Suite 1.7. It is intended to be an open source alternative to proprietary software like Microsoft Expression Web and Adobe Dreamweaver. As a WYSIWYG editor, it is designed to be easy for novice users, and does not require any knowledge of HTML or CSS to use. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

55. Maqetta

Maqetta is a free and open-source, web-based WYSIWYG HTML editor designed to edit HTML5 documents and web applications. Its name is derived from the Spanish word maqueta, that means “mock-up”. Maqetta was developed by IBM and later donated to the Dojo Foundation as an open source project under the terms of either the modified (revised) BSD license or the Academic Free License (? 2.1). The editor was developed in response to a perceived need for open-source HTML5 development tools equivalent in capability to those available for Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

We hope that these tools will be of great use to you in your web design work. Should you find this post useful, feel free to share it around, and leave us a comment here if you have some other HTML or Web editor tools you want to share.

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Filed under: Logo Designer, Tools & Resources by impactlogo on Tuesday, April 10, 2012 | Social tagging: ActiveState Komodo > Aptana Studio > Arachnophilia > Best HTML Source Code Editors > Free HTML Editors > Free HTML Source Code Editor > Free HTML Source Code Editors > HTML > HTML editor > JavaScript > Mac OS X > Windows