Which text editor has the most useful autocomplete for web page editing?

Question

Which text editor has the most useful autocomplete for text editing?

That is, when you type a tag like <p>, the editor will automatically add </p> and put the cursor after the first tag. It should also display a context sensitive list of valid tags when you press CTRL+Space (or similar hotkey)

I've been using Notepad++. I avoid Visual Studio because of the bloat. I installed Aptana Studio yesterday and it looks interesting.

What's your experience? What text editor have you used that has HTML, CSS and JavaScript autocomplete features that help you write web pages quickly?

Answer 1

I haven't used it much, but e texteditor is the Windows equivalent to TextMate on OSX which many people love. It has shortcuts for inserting open/close tags, inserting close tags, wrap selection in tags, etc. It also has autocomplete for some languages like CSS/JS, start typing and hit Esc.

Edit: I use TextMate, and e for the rare times I work in Windows

Answer 2

I'll put in a vote for Aptana Studio that I mentioned above. I may like other editors a little better, but I'm enjoying how focused it is on web page editing. It has autocomplete like I described, plus it also has autocomplete for several popular JavaScript libraries like JQuery.

I haven't been using it long enough to be 100% confident about it, but it's good enough to keep using to develop the current web app project.

Please add more suggestions and your editor experience. I'll update this in a couple of weeks with my own experience.

Answer 3

I agree, Aptana Studio is a great environment to build web projects in. It's much more full-featured than your standard text editors though, and while it includes native support for html/css/javascript (and ajax too!), it also has plugins available for an assortment of other common web related work, such as php support to name one.

Answer 4

I tried many editors and I prefer MS Visual Studio 2005. On my machine it runs much faster than Eclipse and supports autocomplete for both html, css and javascript. There are free versions (e.g. Visual Web Developer - http://www.microsoft.com/express/vwd/) and it's really worthy to give a try.

Answer 5

A bunch of texteditors are available on the mac. BBedit, Coda and my favorite is TextMate.

Activestate Komodo and Edit are quite good, and Eclipse is quite popular.

All offer code complete for html, css, php, ruby and more

Answer 6

Expression Web has great xhtml/css editors. It also has syntax highlighting for both ASP.NET and PHP,

Answer 7

I keep coming back to VS2005 too.

Answer 8

well someone has to suggest the big ones...emacs aka the OS that happens to be a text editor. I'been using it now for a couple of years and living it for about 6 - 8 months now. nxhtml mode and yasnippet give everything textmate has, plus more.

I work on all 3 major platforms regularly and the only thing that comes close to configurability and flexibility is vim, but i like lisp so i went that way.

Answer 9

The best auto-completion feature I've used for web development is the one included in the Aptana Studio IDE. Aptana is based on Eclipse, and can be run standalone on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, or it can be used as a plug-in for Eclipse. You can download the community edition for free.

Answer 10

i've been using vs2008 for a while. has the advantage of sticking with one IDE. long term benefit for every programmer.

notepad++ is great with highlighting but its auto-complete is very limited. its mostly for users that don't need the extra help.

expression web and dreamweaver are the same. meaning its has a lot of automated tools and controls over css and html. its good for beginners who are having trouble with hand coding.

aptana is great in a lot of ways. love the extra support for jquery and other javascript libraries but its too heavy and non responsive if you're a fast coder.

Answer 11

I really like jEdit. It's very powerful, has many language modes, there are plugins to help with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it's very configurable, and it's cross-platform.

Answer 12

The Eclipse (galileo) IDE with web tools (WTP) installed is the best for me. the auto complete and suggestions are very good, and it easily merges with my normal development environment (Java on Tomcat). I have tried Aptana, but I feel that the autocomplete is not complete. For instance, when you say <div> it does insert </div> but when you say <div style=" and then do a ctrl+space (or whatever shortcut) after the quotes, Aptana is clueless, but Eclipse (with WTP) gives me the possible styles.

For Javascript, Eclipse with WTP is a lot better than Aptana.

Answer 13

sure a thing. I think textmate is something

Answer 14

There is an Early Access version of JetBrains WebIDE (same company that developed R# and IntelliJ Idea). It has very powerful autocomplete for html, css and javascript (also great debugger for JS). There's also great refactoring. It is really the most intelligent IDE I've ever seen. You should try it.

Answer 15

JetBrains WebIDE has the best JavaScipt/CSS/(X)HTML support.

Answer 16

I tried a lot of them....

I code in my Textmate (for Mac), when i need to create new classes I really like to wake up the Aptana Studio IDE, maybe it needs to be able to auto-load editor when we are inside a embedded source, everytime i code in a .php template which contains PHP, XHTML, JS Code, and as soon as now i cant use all these autocompletion/ocurrences, intelligent class autocompletion features at the same time.

Really really good mac code editor: Textmate Really really good opensource web IDE: Aptana Studio

Answer 17

Dreamweaver does WYSIWYG and source. Has great auto complete capabilities.

Also Coda For mac is a very nice source only editor for mac with good auto complete.