Compare the Top Code Editors for Startups as of April 2025

What are Code Editors for Startups?

Code editors are software tools that allow developers to write, edit, and debug source code for programming and web development. These editors provide essential features like syntax highlighting, code completion, auto-indentation, and error detection to enhance productivity and reduce coding errors. Many code editors also offer integrations with version control systems (like Git), debuggers, and build tools, allowing developers to manage their code and workflows efficiently. While some code editors are lightweight and focused solely on text editing, others offer extensive features and customization options through plugins and extensions. By providing a streamlined environment for coding, code editors are essential for software development, web development, and scripting tasks. Compare and read user reviews of the best Code Editors for Startups currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Visual Studio Code
    VSCode: Code editing. Redefined. Free. Built on open source. Runs everywhere. Go beyond syntax highlighting and autocomplete with IntelliSense, which provides smart completions based on variable types, function definitions, and imported modules. Debug code right from the editor. Launch or attach to your running apps and debug with break points, call stacks, and an interactive console. Working with Git and other SCM providers has never been easier. Review diffs, stage files, and make commits right from the editor. Push and pull from any hosted SCM service. Want even more features? Install extensions to add new languages, themes, debuggers, and to connect to additional services. Extensions run in separate processes, ensuring they won't slow down your editor. Learn more about extensions. With Microsoft Azure you can deploy and host your React, Angular, Vue, Node, Python (and more!) sites, store and query relational and document based data, and scale with serverless computing.
  • 2
    Apache NetBeans

    Apache NetBeans

    Apache Software Foundation

    Apache NetBeans is a versatile, open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used for developing applications across a wide range of programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML5, and C/C++. Known for its modular architecture, NetBeans provides robust tools and features that cater to the needs of developers working on desktop, mobile, and web applications. It includes intelligent code editing, debugging, and profiling capabilities, along with a built-in visual GUI builder for designing Java-based user interfaces. NetBeans also offers support for version control systems like Git, SVN, and Mercurial, facilitating seamless team collaboration. As an Apache Software Foundation project, NetBeans benefits from an active community that continuously improves and expands its functionality, making it a reliable and flexible choice for developers across various domains.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    Atom

    Atom

    GitHub

    Atom is a hackable text editor for the 21st century, built on Electron, and based on everything we love about our favorite editors. We designed it to be deeply customizable, but still approachable using the default configuration. A text editor is at the core of a developer’s toolbox, but it doesn't usually work alone. Work with Git and GitHub directly from Atom with the GitHub package. Create new branches, stage and commit, push and pull, resolve merge conflicts, view pull requests and more—all from within your editor. The GitHub package is already bundled with Atom, so you're ready to go! Atom works across operating systems. Use it on OS X, Windows, or Linux. Search for and install new packages or create your own right from Atom. Atom helps you write code faster with a smart and flexible autocomplete. Easily browse and open a single file, a whole project, or multiple projects in one window.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 4
    BBEdit

    BBEdit

    Bare Bones Software, Inc.

    The leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac, with high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text.
    Starting Price: $49.99
  • 5
    NoteTab

    NoteTab

    Fookes Software

    For some NoteTab is simply the best Notepad replacement out there. For webmasters it’s the fastest HTML editor. For others it’s the most versatile text editor. For power users it’s a unique text-processing work horse. What will it be for you? In a moment, we’re going to reveal to you the 10 most significant features that have turned NoteTab into one of the most awarded text editors ever. But first an interesting fact in case you’ve never heard of NoteTab before. The tab bar. It’s a feature users have always loved about NoteTab. Open as many files as you like, each one with its own tab. Rearrange tabs any way you like in the convenient tab bar.
    Starting Price: $39.95 one-time payment
  • 6
    Vim

    Vim

    Vim

    Vim is a highly configurable text editor built for creating and changing any kind of text efficiently. It is included as "vi" with most UNIX systems and with Apple OS X. Vim is rock stable and is continuously being developed to become even better. Vim is persistent, multi-level, with an extensive plugin system, support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats, powerful search and replace feature, and it integrates with many tools. Vim online is a central place for the Vim community to store useful Vim tips and tools. Vim has a scripting language that allows for plugin like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax highlighting, colorization as well as other advanced features. These scripts can be uploaded and maintained using Vim online. Vim stands for Vi IMproved. It used to be Vi IMitation, but there are so many improvements that a name change was appropriate. Vim is a text editor which includes almost all the commands from the Unix program "Vi".
  • 7
    TextMate

    TextMate

    MacroMates

    Powerful and customizable text editor with support for a huge list of programming languages and developed as open source. Making multiple changes at once, swapping pieces of code, and a lot more is made trivial with TextMate’s easy way to add multiple insertion points. Select what you want to search, what you want to search for, and TextMate will present the results in a way that makes it easy to jump between matches, extract matched text, or preview desired replacements. See what files have changes in the file browser view, what lines have changes in the editor view, bring up a diff of the current file’s changes, commit a subset, TextMate supports it all for all the major version control systems. One file mixing languages? Projects using different build systems? Third party code with different formatting preferences? TextMate can handle it all by associating detailed scope selectors with key shortcuts, settings, etc.
  • 8
    Kate

    Kate

    KDE

    Kate is packed with features that will make it easier for you to view and edit all your text files. Kate lets you to edit and view many files at the same time, both in tabs and split views, and comes with a wide variety of plugins, including an embedded terminal that lets you launch console commands directly from Kate, powerful search and replace plugins, and a preview plugin that can show you what your MD, HTML and even SVG will look like. Kate supports highlighting for over 300 languages making it easier to read code in almost all programming languages. Kate also understands how brackets works and will help you navigate inside complex code blocks hierarchies. On-the-fly spellchecking is also included and will help you check your text before publishing. Work on multiple files at the same time with split views. Use the project sidebar to navigate your project directory structures and use Kate's smart tabs to quickly access your recently opened documents.
  • 9
    BlueGriffon

    BlueGriffon

    Disruptive Innovations

    The next-gen Web and EPUB Editor based on the rendering engine of Firefox. BlueGriffon® has a long list of famous ancestors and proudly inherits from all of them: Netscape®, Mozilla® Composer and Nvu. It is powered by Gecko, the same rendering engine you can find at the heart of Firefox®, and is filled with tons of powerful features. BlueGriffon® is used by millions of users around the world, including Universities, Governments and even the European Parliament. It is officially recommended by the French Government as the Web Authoring Tool for the French Administration in its effort to rely on and promote Free Software. BlueGriffon® is used by millions of users around the world, including Universities, Governments and even the European Parliament. It is officially recommended by the French Government as the Web Authoring Tool for the French Administration in its effort to rely on and promote Free Software.
    Starting Price: $87.75 one-time payment
  • 10
    Pinegrow

    Pinegrow

    Pinegrow

    Pinegrow is a Mac, Windows and Linux web editor that lets you build responsive websites faster with live multi-page editing, CSS & SASS styling, CSS Grid editor and support for Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, Foundation and WordPress. Pinegrow is a desktop website builder that opens and saves standard HTML and CSS files. That means you won’t be locked into a proprietary file format. Just open and edit your existing projects. Use Pinegrow alongside other web development tools. Build websites offline, without internet connection. Create as many websites as you want. Quickly build the layout of your webpage with powerful visual tools for adding, editing, moving, cloning and deleting HTML elements. Insert multiple elements with repeater and modify the layout of all selected elements with one move. Inspect active CSS rules, use rich visual controls, CSS Grid editor, Dev tools-like editor or code - all working together as one. Edit SASS and LESS, live, without any external tools.
    Starting Price: $6 per month
  • 11
    Textastic

    Textastic

    Textastic

    Textastic for Mac is the perfect desktop companion to the popular iOS code editor. With support for more than 80 source code and markup languages, Textastic brings the powerful syntax coloring engine of the iOS source code editor to the Mac. You can use your own TextMate, and Sublime Text, compatible syntax definitions. Textastic for Mac is based on the code editor that powers the iOS app. It uses native macOS APIs like Core Text for maximum speed. Code completion, file navigation with the symbol list and support for modern Mac features like Auto Save and Versions make your life easier. With iCloud Drive, you can sync your files across your macOS and iOS devices with ease. The app packs in support for 80 source code and markup languages, iCloud auto-save and macOS Versions. Built with the ability to import syntax definitions, themes and templates from TextMate.
    Starting Price: $7.99 one-time payment
  • 12
    Pulsar

    Pulsar

    Pulsar-Edit

    A community-led hyper-hackable text editor. Pulsar works across operating systems. Use it on OS X, Windows, or Linux. Search and install new packages or create your own right from Pulsar. Pulsar helps you write code faster with a smart and flexible autocomplete. Easily browse and open a single file, a whole project, or multiple projects in one window. Split your Pulsar interface into multiple panes to compare and edit code across files. Find, preview, and replace text as you type in a file or across all your projects.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 13
    Boost Note

    Boost Note

    Boost Note

    Boost Note is a powerful, lightspeed collaborative workspace for developer teams. Built to empower developers productivity with the most solid note taking experience for developers. Not just a GitHub flavored markdown. Put diagrams with Charts.js, Mermaid, and PlantUML in documents to maximize visibility. Choose from keymaps like Vim, over 150 themes, and more to create your own Markdown editor. Manage your documents programmatically. Grab an authentication token and access Boost Note's APIs via simple HTTP requests. Automate your documentation work with over 2,000 external tool integrations via Zapier. Collaborate with your colleagues and share information your way. Have all your teams in one shared workspace. Write documents as a team with Boost Note's realtime editing. Check revision history of a doc. You can easily roll back to one of the previous versions in one click. Keep your important data safe through granula access control based on workspace.
    Starting Price: $3 per member per month
  • 14
    Quiver

    Quiver

    Quiver

    Quiver is a notebook built for programmers. It lets you easily mix text, code, Markdown and LaTeX within one note, edit code with an awesome code editor, live preview Markdown and LaTeX, and find any note instantly via the full-text search. A note in Quiver is comprised of cells, snippets of text, code, Markdown, LaTeX (via MathJax) or diagrams (sequence diagram, flowchart). You can freely mix different cell types within one note. You can set different languages for different code cells, too. The programmer's notebook should make code editing effortless. Quiver packs the awesome ACE code editor in code cells, with syntax highlighting support for more than 120 languages, over 20 themes, automatic indent and outdent, and much more. Quiver lets you write in Markdown with inline formatting and custom CSS options. A live preview window renders Markdown as you type. Quiver uses MathJax to typeset mathematical equations written in LaTeX.
  • 15
    Nova

    Nova

    Panic

    If we're being honest, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art. There are great reasons to make cross-platform apps — to start, they're cross-platform — but it's just not who we are. Founded as a Mac software company in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like. Long ago, we created Coda, an all-in-one Mac web editor that broke new ground. But when we started work on Nova, we looked at where the web was today, and where we needed to be. It was time for a fresh start. It all starts with our first-class text-editor. It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: smart autocomplete, multiple cursors, a Minimap, editor overscroll, tag pairs and brackets, and way, way more. For the curious, Nova has built-in support for CoffeeScript, CSS, Diff, ERB, Haml, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Smarty, SQL, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML.
  • 16
    Emacs
    At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more. A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions. Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick.
  • 17
    CodeRunner

    CodeRunner

    CodeRunner

    A lightweight, multi-language programming text editor and IDE for macOS. CodeRunner was designed to support all of the most widely used programming languages and run them instantly. The app is configured to run code in 25 languages out-of-the-box, and additional languages can be configured to run by simply entering their terminal command. With over 200 syntax modes, lots of advanced editing features and thoughtful details, CodeRunner will quickly become your go-to editor for any and all kinds of text files. CodeRunner's code completion is the best you'll find in any IDE. Intelligent matching of typed text enables completions beyond single words. Quickly find the right completion among thousands with the extra-fuzzy search algorithm, helpful documentation snippets, and smart ranking of results. Don't clutter your code with print-statements for debugging. Instead, use CodeRunner's built-in debugging features to set breakpoints and step through your code.
    Starting Price: $19.99 one-time payment
  • 18
    Bluefish

    Bluefish

    Bluefish

    Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and web developers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open-source development project, released under the GNU GPL license. Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris. Bluefish 2.2.12 is a minor maintenance release with some minor new features. Most important is a fix for a crash in a simple search. Python 3 compatibility has been further improved. Encoding detection in python files has been improved. Triple-click now selects the line. On Mac OSX Bluefish deals better with the new permission features. Also using the correct language in the Bluefish user interface is fixed for certain languages on OSX.
  • 19
    gedit

    gedit

    The GNOME Project

    gedit is the text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. The first goal of gedit is to be easy to use, with a simple interface by default. More advanced features are available by enabling plugins. A flexible plugin system which can be used to dynamically add new advanced features.
  • 20
    Writebox

    Writebox

    Writebox

    Writebox is a simple and distraction-free text editor for web. Writebox accesses your file contents, file name and folder tree through Dropbox/Google API. We don't store your file contents in our server, we save it in your local cache. We don't read your file contents, we just convert the file encoding to show characters correctly. We store the filepath of the file you last opened in Writebox in our server. This is for syncing the last edited file across devices. We collect analytics data through Google Analytics when you use Writebox. This is used only for service improvement. Writebox is a simple and distraction-free text editor for Chrome, iOS and the web.
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