There’s this perception that the best coders tend to code on a notepad and I will leave that to you for any criticism but you must always go with your instinct and choose the option that suits you the most. WYSIWYG or “What You See Is What You Get” does provide the option for the noobs to deal with code and create amazing stuff. It has simplified code for the new users and thus helped in better adoption. Here are some of the Open Source WYSIWYG text editors that are worth checking out.

KompoZer: Kompozer is a open source web development tool built on NVU. It is a full featured web authoring system that has an integrated FTP client, an intuitive tabbed user interface and support for all major operating systems.

Quanta Plus: Quanta Plus is a web development tool for the K Desktop Environment. It is designed for quick web development and is rapidly becoming a mature editor with a number of great features. It is highly extensible and able to run custom script. It has an excellent visual CSS editor that has code hints and auto-completion of syntax.

CSSED: Cssed is a GTK2 application for creating and maintaining CSS style sheets. It is a small editor that tries to ease the CSS editing. It features autocompletion, CSS syntax validation, selector wizard for complex rules, color wizard, box wizard and other useful features to help web developers to create and maintain CSS style sheets.

Aptana: Aptana is a new integrated development environment for building interactive web pages. It’s likely to be a big hit among Web 2.0 developers since it facilitates speedy coding of JavaScript behaviors and CSS styles. Aptana has a nice code assistant that’s customizable and the application ships with several popular JavaScript libraries that developers can import and employ. The application comes with third-party libraries like JQuery, Prototype, script.aculo.us, Yahoo UI and Dojo among others.

jEdit: jEdit is a programmer’s text editor written in Java. It uses the Swing toolkit for the GUI and can be configured as a rather powerful IDE through the use of its plugin architecture. It can run on Mac, Windows and Linux and has syntax highlighting for HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript and many other languages.

Notepad++: Notepad ++ is a very popular open source text editor for Windows. Though not strictly just for web designers, it has an excellent source code editor the supports HTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript. Notepad 2 is an another very lightweight text editor that can be used as replacement to Windows Notepad.

OPEN BEXI HTML Editor: OPEN BEXI HTML Editor is a WYSIWYG HTML editor which allows you to create Web pages and generate HTML code from your browser without any HTML knowledge. It lets you create, update and remove HTML components. It is suitable for beginners and experts.

Amaya: Amaya is a free, open source web editor and web browser developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Amaya started as an HTML or CSS editor and has since grown into an editor for many XML-based systems like SVG and MathML.

Bluefish Editor: Bluefish Editor is a lightweight, fast editor for web designers and programmers. It has useful wizards for HTML documents, great project management features and a powerful search and replace option for quickly batch-replacing source code.

Selida: Selida is a very niceÂ WYSIWYG Web page editor for Windows. It offers a lot of features that make it easy to edit Web pages and is free.

WYM Editor: WYM Editor is a WYSIWYG editor which goal is to produce XHTML-CSS compliant code. WYM editor lets the writer concentrate on the structure and the content of the document not on the visual layout. It is very easy to integrate into your Content Management System.