CSS is a simple language that it does not need a special editor to write. But having the right code editor will help you minimize errors while writing the CSS code, and overall boost your productivity. I know that for some developers, a code editor is a personal preference; some of you might already have one depending on your needs and project requirement.
If you just get started however and not sure which code editor you’d like to use, here we highlight several of the best options — free and paid — editor that comes with great features. Without further ado, let’s jump to see the full list.
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Visual Studio Code
A relatively new code editor compared to the others that are on this list, Visual Studio Code has quickly become one of the most popular code editor currently, especially among web developers.
It features numerous syntax highlighting for many languages out of the box, including CSS and CSS Pre-processor like SCSS and LESS. Some of the extentions such as CSS IntelliSense, CSS Peek, and CSS Modules make it even more powerful when working with CSS.
Notable Feature: Fast, Works out of the box with many language and tools like Gulp and Grunt, and great collection of extensions.
Notepad++
A free source code editor, and notably a “Notepad” replacement in Windows. It’s simple, run fast, and supports several languages, including CSS and comes with features like Word completion, Function completion and Function parameters hint to help be more productive when composing CSS.
Notable Feature: Syntax highlighting and folding, Macro recording and playback, and Document Map
WebStorm
JetBrain’s IDE that implements proper auto completion for everything, including CSS, also you can get notified about CSS problems on the fly. It also integrates with tools like Stylelint out-of-the-box which could help you on format and maintain consistency on your CSS codes.
Notable Feature: Seamless integration withe web development tools like Stylelint, Grunt, Gulp, and NPM. Built in tools for debuggin and tracing, and smarter auto-completion.
Coda
An advanced code editor with a built-in CSS editor that provides you two CSS editing mode for more flexible designing experience, able to see the result instantly after changes made. On top of that, you can also override a site’s CSS right within its Live Preview tool in the editor.
Notable Feature: TouchBar integration, live preview, and built-in SFTP/FTP.
Atom
A free and open-source code editor built by Github. It comes with more than just code editing features. It has an embedded Git Control that seamlessly integrates with GitHub. You can also install numerous add-ons for CSS to enhance the experience with CSS editing.
Notable Feature: Easily extendable and hackable through various APIs and works with CSS and popular CSS pre-processors out of the box.
Sublime Text
Another popular code editor for web development. It works cross-platform and natively supports many languages and markup languages including CSS and provide numerous extensions to improve the CSS editing experience within the editor. It is arguably the base inspiration of modern code editor. It introduces several features such as the Multiline selection, “Go to Anywhere”, and the Command Pallete which also improves the developers productivity.
Notable Feature: Super fast, advanced code editing features like “Go to Anywhere” and Multiline selection, and subl CLI.
Brackets
A free and and lightweight editor created by Adobe Systems specifically for web development. It is written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and natively supports CSS Pre-processors.
It introduces a unique experience in editing with so called “Inline Editing”. You can press Command / Ctrl + E and it will show you all the CSS selectors with that ID in an inline window and allows you edit the CSS selector directly within the current file instead of jumping between multiple files.
Espresso
A beautiful macOS app for code editing. It comes with a nice GUI tool to easily edit CSS styles. This tool will appear in the lower half of the right sidebar when editing the stylesheets. It allows you to adjust text styling, text color, alignment, font, size, line-height as well as the layout such as including padding, margins, display style, floats, etc.
Notable Feature: GUI tool for editing CSS, native SCSS and LESS supports, auto-completion.
TextMate
A code editor for macOS with some advanced editing features and native support for many programming language including CSS. TextMate is quite popular for its TextMate grammar, .tmLanguage, which is adopted in many popular code editors like Atom and Sublime Text to create custom syntax highlighting for a language.
Notable Feature: Native Macros support to automate repeated task, Snippets and Shell integration.
bbEdit
bbEdit also known as TextWrangler is a lightweight but advanced code editor built for macOS. Aside of some essential features like syntax coloring for various programming languages, code folding, and code auto-completion, bbEdit also comes with a built-in SFTP/FTP support, and seamless integration with various macOS features such as AppleScript, Automator, and Unix scripting.
Notable Feature: macOS integration, and built-in GUI tool for editing HTML.
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