Flame wars over one’s choice of editor are a regular occurrence on almost all the tech mailing lists that I subscribe to. In fact, in my opinion, the amount of time and energy that is spent on debating this topic can be easily spent on researching the feature set of a perfect editor that would fit everyone’s needs.

But, since that is really a far fetched thought, I decided to spend some thinking of the best ways to make my workflow as a web developer as editor agnostic as possible.

And what did I come up with ?

Online Code Editors. These are editors that run online and are available from any computer anywhere in the world. So, without further ado, here is a list of some of my favorite online editors.



The people behind Kodingen call it the cloud development environment. It is an IDE for the cloud, and I absolutely agree with them. Kodingen integrates an image editor, a really excellent code editor and a lot of nifty features into one cool looking package. It displays line numbers, features syntax highlighting and SVN integration. The only hitch is that they’re still in Beta and are only letting limited people through.

EditArea is a free and open source Javascript based editor that can be hosted on your own server. It offers syntax highlighting, search and replace support, multi language support and a number of other features that you’d expect from a first class editor.

Bespin is a Mozilla Labs project that aims to create an editor for web development that can be embedded into webpages, much like EditArea. It is based on some of the latest emerging standards such as HTML 5 and so you’d need a fairly recent browser if you’re going to use Bespin. Like Mozilla’s web browser – Firefox, Bespin is designed to be easily extensible using plugins developed in Javascript. In fact, the editor is so good that the guys behind Kodingen also provide an option to use Bespin as one of the editors for their IDE.

Using Amy Editor feels as if you’re using a OS X based desktop application as that is where this editor get it’s visual cues from. Apart from that, Amy Editor is probably one of the most feature rich editors in this roundup. It has support for opening multiple files in different tabs, syntax highlighting support for multiple languages and let’s you manage multiple projects from within the editor. Oh, and there is some basic debugging support present too.

PHPAnywhere is one editor that could easily replace my current PHP programming needs without much effort. For one, it comes with a built-in FTP editor that lets me edit files directly on my server. It also has excellent syntax highlighting and project management features. What more could a PHP programmer ask for ?

Those were some of my favorite Online Code Editors. Do you guys use any online editors for your needs ? Do you find them useful ? Let us know in the comments.

