Best Text Editors in the UK
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What are Text Editors in the UK?
Text editors are software applications that allow users to create, edit, and manipulate plain text files. They are essential for writing and editing code, documentation, notes, and other types of text-based content. Text editors typically offer basic features like syntax highlighting, search and replace, and line numbering for developers, as well as more advanced features like version control integration, autocomplete, and code folding. While simple text editors allow basic editing, more advanced versions are widely used for their versatility and customization options, especially in programming and content creation. Compare and read user reviews of the best Text Editors in the UK currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
PimNote
Pimtel
PimNote is a simple text editor for faster document access. It also combines the useful and lacking features of all other text editors. Designed for knowledge management. One-click access to the recent file list helps you write a new idea to the related file quickly before forgetting it. The unlimited and searchable recent file list helps you easily reach an old file that was opened a long time ago. The one-click find history list and search help you type less. Designed for remote working. No freezing from a remote file monitoring/opening/writing when disconnected. Files are cached for offline use by just closing the application without closing the tabs. Auto reconnect the network drive while opening the file. Repeated file notifications are informed politely on the top bar instead of a pop-up dialog box that requires frequent actions and tends to be mispressed. -
2
Visual Studio Code
Microsoft
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. -
3
IntelliJ IDEA
JetBrains
IntelliJ IDEA is a JetBrains IDE for professional development in Java and Kotlin. It unlocks productive development and helps you write high-quality code with ease. Built to get the job done, it provides all of the essential tools and cutting-edge technology support you need. With a smooth, comfortable workflow and a strong focus on privacy and security, it lets you code with confidence and pleasure.Starting Price: $16.90 per user per month -
4
Sublime Text
Sublime HQ
A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. Use Goto Anything to open files with only a few keystrokes, and instantly jump to symbols, lines or words. Make ten changes at the same time, not one change ten times. Multiple selections allow you to interactively change many lines at once, rename variables with ease, and manipulate files faster than ever. The Command Palette holds infrequently used functionality, like sorting, changing the syntax and changing the indentation settings. With just a few keystrokes, you can search for what you want, without ever having to navigate through the menus or remember obscure key bindings. Sublime Text has a powerful, Python API that allows plugins to augment built-in functionality. Package Control can be installed via the command palette, providing simple access to thousands of packages built by the community.Starting Price: $80 one-time fee -
5
Notepad++
Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GNU General Public License. Based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.Starting Price: Free -
6
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 -
7
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 -
8
Obsidian
Obsidian
Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. The human brain is non-linear: we jump from idea to idea, all the time. Your second brain should work the same. In Obsidian, making and following "connections" is frictionless. Tend to your notes like a gardener; at the end of the day, sit back and marvel at your own knowledge graph. Note-taking is incredibly personal. Tried every app, but there's always something not quite right? You deserve better. Obsidian is built to be extensible. With 22 core plugins and 149 community plugins, set up your own toolkit and get running in minutes. You'll even be able to install third party plugins or build your own once Obsidian reaches v1.0. Sky's the limit. In our age when cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy policy any day, the last thing you want is proprietary formats and data lock-in. With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder.Starting Price: $25 one-time payment -
9
EditPlus
Sangil Kim (ES-Computing)
EditPlus is a text editor for Windows with built-in FTP, FTPS and sftp capabilities. While it can serve as a good Notepad replacement, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers.Starting Price: $35 -
10
CryptPad
CryptPad
CryptPad is built to enable collaboration. It synchronizes changes to documents in real time. Because all data is encrypted, the service and its administrators have no way of seeing the content being edited and stored. Store and manage documents with CryptDrive. Create folders, shared folders, and tags to organize documents. Upload and share files (PDFs, photos, video, audio, etc.). Team drives are shared between users and allow for collaborative organization and fine-grained access controls. CryptPad does not profit from user data. This is part of a vision for online services that respect privacy. Unlike the big platforms that pretend to be "free" while making profits from personal information, CryptPad aims to build a sustainable model funded willingly by users. We offer CryptPad's functionality for free because we believe everyone deserves personal privacy, not just people with disposable income.Starting Price: €5 per month -
11
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 -
12
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 -
13
EmEditor
Emurasoft
EmEditor is a fast, lightweight, yet extensible, easy-to-use text editor for Windows. Both native 64-bit and 32-bit builds are available, and moreover, the 64-bit includes separate builds for SSE2 (128-bit), AVX-2 (256-bit), and AVX-512 (512-bit) instruction sets.Starting Price: $39.99 -
14
Komodo IDE
ActiveState Software
Code faster with the IDE for today’s web languages – Python, PHP, Perl, Golang, Ruby and more. -
15
Overleaf
Overleaf (Writelatex Limited)
There's nothing complicated or difficult for you to install, and you can start using LaTeX right now, even if you've never seen it before. Overleaf comes with a complete, ready to go LaTeX environment which runs on our servers. With Overleaf you get the same LaTeX set-up wherever you go. By working with your colleagues and students on Overleaf, you know that you're not going to hit any version inconsistencies or package conflicts. -
16
Dev-C++
Embarcadero
Embarcadero Dev-C++ is a new and improved fork (sponsored by Embarcadero) of Bloodshed Dev-C++ and Orwell Dev-C++. It is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and code editor for the C/C++ programming language. It uses Mingw port of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) as its compiler. Embarcadero Dev-C++ can also be used in combination with Cygwin or any other GCC based compiler. Embarcadero Dev-C++ is built using the latest version of Embarcadero Delphi. Embarcadero Dev-C++ has a low memory footprint because it is a native Windows application and does not use Electron. Optimized for parallel compilation on modern multi-core machines. -
17
SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey
The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to develop the SeaMonkey Internet Application Suite (see below). Such a software suite was previously made popular by Netscape and Mozilla, and the SeaMonkey project continues to develop and deliver high-quality updates to this concept. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users. Under the hood, SeaMonkey uses much of the same Mozilla Firefox source code which powers such products as Thunderbird. Legal backing is provided by the SeaMonkey Association (SeaMonkey e.V.). The Internet browser at the core of the SeaMonkey Internet Application Suite uses the same rendering engine and application platform as Mozilla Firefox, with popular features like tabbed browsing, feed detection, popup blocking, smart location bar, find as you type and a lot of other functionality. -
18
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". -
19
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. -
20
Geany
Geany
Geany is a powerful, stable and lightweight programmer's text editor that provides tons of useful features without bogging down your workflow. It runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS is translated into over 40 languages, and has built-in support for more than 50 programming languages. One the primary reasons for Geany's existence is that there is a need for a decent, GUI, lightweight, cross-platform, flexible and powerful IDE/editor. Many editors meet one or more of these requirements but fall short on others. Using the GPL v2 license, Geany assures that not only can you customize and hack it, but that everyone benefits from changes the community makes. Many parts of Geany are heavily customizable like color themes (Geany Themes) or adding new filetypes. Furthermore, Geany provides many settings to let you adjust it to your needs and preferences. Many supported filetypes including popular programming languages like C, Java, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, etc. -
21
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. -
22
UltraEdit
IDM Computer Solutions
For almost 3 decades, UltraEdit has been the go-to text editor for 2+ million users and many Fortune 100/500/1000 enterprise customers. Renowned for its power and performance in handling and processing huge files and data, UltraEdit is also a highly configurable and fully themed code editor with support for nearly any source language or syntax. Often called the "Swiss army knife" of text editors, UltraEdit is a powerful tool for users in a wide range of responsibilities and industries. From programming and project management to large file manipulation, from data sorting and column/block editing to remote (FTP/SFTP) file operations, from advanced file searching and text data reformatting, there's almost no problem that UltraEdit can't solve in the world of text editing. UltraEdit is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and is supported by a professional development team and customer service staff located in the USA. -
23
CodeLobster IDE
CodeLobster Software
When you start developing with PHP, you face the problem of deciding which IDE to choose. Most companies sell their IDE's for high prices ($100-$500). We, on the other hand, offer a multifunctional portable IDE absolutely FREE with all these standard features: PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript highlighting; advanced PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript autocomplete; a powerful PHP debugger; context and dynamic Help; a code validator; a SQL manager and much more. CodeLobster IDE streamlines and simplifies the PHP development process. You don't need to keep in mind the names of functions, arguments, tags or their attributes we've implemented all these for you with autocomplete features for PHP, HTML, JavaScript and even CSS. And you can always get necessary help information by pressing F1 or using the special Help control. An internal free PHP Debugger allows you to validate your code locally. -
24
Brackets
Brackets
With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, Brackets is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser. It's crafted from the ground up for web designers and front-end developers. Brackets is a lightweight, yet powerful, modern text editor. We blend visual tools into the editor so you get the right amount of help when you want it without getting in the way of your creative process. You'll enjoy writing code in Brackets. Brackets is an open-source project, supported by an active and passionate community. It's made by other web developers like you! Instead of jumping between file tabs, Brackets lets you open a window into the code you care about most. Want to work on the CSS that applies to a specific ID? Put your mouse cursor on that ID, push Command / Ctrl+E and Brackets will show you all the CSS selectors with that ID in an inline window so you can work on your code side-by-side without any popups. -
25
Caret
Caret
Based on the amazing Ace editing component, Caret brings professional-strength text editing to Chrome OS. With Caret, you no longer need to install a second OS to get what other platforms take for granted: a serious editor for local files, aimed at working programmers. Caret offers syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages, and all of the standard themes that come with Ace, including emulations of coloring from other editors like Eclipse, XCode, and the Chrome Dev Tools. Once you've gotten used to making many changes with just a keystroke or two, it's hard to go back to just one cursor. Caret offers multiple cursors and selections, and support for Sublime keybindings like Ctrl-D (select next match). Why bother learning keyboard shortcuts? With the command palette (Ctrl-Shift-P), you can just start typing what you want, Caret will fuzzy-search the menu configuration, find the command you want, and execute it for you. You never need to touch the mouse again. -
26
Code Browser
Code Browser
Code Browser is a folding text editor for Linux and Windows, designed to hierarchically structure any kind of text file and especially source code. It makes navigation through source code faster and easier. Code Browser is especially designed to keep a good overview of the code of large projects, but is also useful for a simple CSS file. Ideal if you are fed up of having to scroll through thousands of lines of code. It supports syntax highlighting for all major languages and custom syntax highlighting can also be added. Although Code Browser was initially designed to edit programs, it can also be used for different tasks such as plain text outlining or helping to understand existing source code. I've added a page with suggestions to take advantage of folding. -
27
GoCoEdit
Gogolith
GoCoEdit is a code and text editor optimized for fast opening and editing of local (on iOS device) and remote (on server) files with your iOS device. It supports advanced syntax highlighting for many programming languages and has a stylish interface with many dark and light themes. One app fits all. Buy once and use GoCoEdit on all your iOS devices. It's universal! (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) BY THE WAY! That's not all. Some features of GoCoEdit can be extended by yourself.Starting Price: $8.99 -
28
CoffeeCup HTML Editor
CoffeeCup Software
If yes, then consider the HTML Editor your new best friend. Feel empowered with handy tag references, intuitive tools like code completion, website components that update instantly across all pages, live previews, and dozens of other extraordinary tools and features. We implemented end tag highlighting because we got so tired of hunting for that ending div tag </div>. This new feature works for the other tags too, so enjoy! We created bunches of free, 100% responsive templates. The new Template Installer imports these designs into the HTML Editor with just two clicks. Want to learn CSS Grid? Download a template and play with the code. This is how CoffeeCup makes web development fun! The new welcome screen will give your web development a fast take off. Need to make a quick static page? Then click New HTML Page. Do you want to begin with a snazzy responsive Template, start a complex web project, or simply fiddle with some PHP? The web fun all starts right from this new start screen.Starting Price: $19 per month -
29
WordPad
Microsoft
WordPad is a basic text-editing app you can use to create and edit files, include text with different fonts and colors, insert pictures, and add links to other files. You can use WordPad to open and save text files (.txt), rich text files (.rtf), Word documents (.docx), and OpenDocument text files (.odt). Files in other formats will open as plain text files and might not appear as expected. Some features, like headers, footers, and annotations, aren’t supported in WordPad. If you open a file with these features and then save the file in WordPad, you’ll lose the content in these features. If you want to change such a file, but don’t want to lose the original content, tap or click Save as and save the file with a different name. That way you can make changes to a copy of the file while keeping the content in the original file intact. For more info about what each button does, press and hold the button for a description (or if you’re using a mouse, point to the button). -
30
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