Free HTML Editors / Free Web Editors
Beginning and Advanced HTML editors, WYSIWYG web editors, website builders
Free HTML Editors, Web Editors, and WYSIWYG Web Editors and Site Builders
Looking for a better editor (or perhaps even your first editor) to design your website? This page lists free HTML editors, Web editors, WYSIWYG editors, web site builders, as well as specialized editors optimized for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or even the numerous web scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, Java, JavaScript, ASP, etc.
The editors are separated into two sections: the WYSIWYG Web Editors / Site Builders allow you to design your website using a What You See Is What You Get interface - somewhat like a wordprocessor where you can see what your page will look like (mostly) as you type; and Site Builders that allow you to design your site from pre-packaged templates (and sometimes also allowing you a WYSIWYG interface to change elements from that tempate).
The other section lists the Free HTML Editors / Free PHP/Perl/JavaScript (etc) Editors which are basically ASCII text editors with additional features that make it easier for you to code pages for the web. Very often, this includes syntax highlighting for the HTML/CSS elements (and perhaps also for PHP, Perl, JavaScript, ASP, Java elements as well). If you write your pages using raw HTML, or if you plan to learn to write HTML, these are the editors you will want to check. You may also want to look at the Free Programming Editors and ASCII Text Editors page, which lists more editors that can be used to edit / create HTML web pages. My decision of whether to put an editor on that page or this page is sometimes arbitrary, so it's best to look at both pages to see if you can find what you want there.
If you are looking for a commercial web editor, which includes both the ability to edit using a WYSIWYG interface as well as edit "raw HTML" code,
produce valid CSS and HTML code and supports
Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX, one well-known and well-loved web editor is
Adobe
Dreamweaver Creative Suite 4 (see
my Dreamweaver tutorial if you're getting this).
Related Pages
- How to Start / Create a Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide
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- Free Drawing and Painting Software, Free Image and Photo Editing Programs
- Free Text Search and Replace Utilities - make those pesky tasks more pleasant
- Free Resource Editors, Compilers and Icon Editors - create icons for your website's favicon icon.
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Disclaimer
The information provided on this page comes without any warranty whatsoever. Use it at your own risk. Just because a program, book, document or service is listed here or has a good review does not mean that I endorse or approve of the program or of any of its contents. All the other standard disclaimers also apply.
Skip to: [ Free HTML Editors ] [ Free WYSIWYG Web Editors and Site Builders ]
Free HTML Editors / ASCII Text Web Editors
- Notetab Light
This is the freeware sibling of the commercial Standard and Pro versions. It is a general text editor that has lots of features, including a useful "Clipbook" facility that has numerous HTML editing conveniences. Its commercial cousin Notepad Pro comes with syntax highlighting. (Note: to get the free version, go to the "Download" page and look for "Notetab Light".)
- CodeLobster PHP Edition
This is a free code editor with syntax highlighting support for PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It has support for autocompletion of HTML tags, attributes and closing tags; an HTML code inspector; a CSS autocomplete facility supporting style property names and values; JavaScript autocomplete that supports keywords, DOM elements and properties; PHP autocomplete that support standard PHP and user's classes, variables, functions, constants, keywords, etc; a PHP debugger; SQL autocomplete; context sensitive help; class view; browser preview; project manager; and so on. This is a Windows program.
- HAPedit (HTML ASP PHP Editor)
HAPedit is useful for people who develop both dynamic and static web pages. It provides syntax highlighting for HTML, ASP, PHP, JavaScript; provides a project manager; features code completion, an SQL console, FTP manager, PHP code "compilation", integrated PHP help, brace matching, search and replace with regular expressions, statistics on your page (ie, rendered size, images, links, etc), and so on. This is a Windows program.
- Arachnophilia
This editor comes with built-in FTP facility, making it possible for you to author your web page and publish it without leaving the editor. It has a spell-checker, an internal browser view mode that is able to show your HTML changes as you type, a global search and replace facility across all open documents, built-in tutorial on HTML, JavaScript, frames; etc. There are apparently two versions available - the older one runs on Windows systems, the newer one is written in Java and is apparently cross-platform.
- PSPad
PSPad is a full featured text editor that you can use to edit HTML, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, C, etc. It even has built-in facilities allowing you to edit binary files. There is project support, the ability to directly edit files via FTP on your server, a macro recorder, search and replace in files, text comparison (differences between two files with the differences highlighted in colour), syntax highlighting, spell checking, internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla, integrated HTML TIDY (for validating HTML code and fixing them), code explorer for Pascal, HTML, PHP, XML (etc), matched bracket highlighting, etc.
- Notepad++
Notepad++ is a source code text editor with syntax highlighting (C, C++, Java, C#, HTML, PHP, JavaScript, ASP, SQL, Objective-C, etc), multiple document handling using tabs, auto-completion of keywords (customizable), regular expressions in the search and replace function, macro recording and playback, brace and indent highlighting, collapsing and expanding of sections of code (to zoom in and out of pieces of code such as to provide an outline overview of your text/code), etc.
- Quanta Plus Web Development Tool
Quanta Plus is a Linux HTML editor for KDE. It contains an assortment of features such as syntax highlighting, easy configuration of toolbars, site uploading facility, the ability to update a site from CVS (with a plugin), document structure tree, etc.
- Matrix Y2K Freeware HTML Editor
Matrix Y2K is a HTML editor with support for multiple languages, multiple documents, syntax highlighting, search and replace, character maps, links validator, internal preview of your page, external preview (launches browser), image file browser, table wizard, forms support and the ability for you to create a library of scripts.
- Bluefish
From the announcement by one of their development team: "Bluefish is a programmer's HTML editor, designed to save the experienced webmaster some keystrokes. It features a multiple file editor, multiple toolbars, custom menus, image and thumbnail dialogs, open from the web, CSS dialogs, PHP, SSI and RXML support, HTML validation and lots of wizards." I've seen a lot of good things said about this editor by other webmasters. Bluefish runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Tru64/Alpha, NetBSD, OpenBSD, HP-UX and Mac OSX.
- HTML-Kit
This HTML text editor is intended for use by web developers, and comes with support for writing HTML, XML and scripts. Among its features are internal preview of your web pages (requires IE 4.x and above to be installed), integration with HTML Tidy (a HTML and CSS validation program), auto-completion of keywords, etc. HTML-Kit can be extended using plugins, and runs on Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000.
Free WYSIWYG Web Editors and Website Builders
- NetObjects Fusion Essentials
This WYSIWYG web editor and site builder (click the "Downloads" page on their site to get it) features drag and drop website layouts, site management tools, a built-in FTP facility to publish (upload) your web pages, a photo gallery, a form builder, rollover images, support for Flash and Quicktime, an e-commerce tool, etc. This program is a subset of their full commercial software, NetObjects Fusion 11. Note: for the free version, you will need to register online while installing to get a serial number.
- KompoZer - Easy Web Authoring
KompoZer is a WYSIWYG web editor that allows you to build websites in an easy way, using a visual interface. It is essentially an updated version of Nvu with bug fixes. You can learn how to create a website using KompoZer with thesitewizard.com's tutorial How to Design and Publish Your Website with KompoZer.
- SeaMonkey Composer (Mozilla Composer)
Seamonkey, the web browser suite from Mozilla, comes with a WYSIWYG web editor that allows you to quickly code web pages using a wordprocessor-like interface. For more information, please read the detailed review of the Mozilla Composer on thesitewizard.com. You can also find a comprehensive tutorial on How to Design and Publish Your Website with Mozilla Composer there.
- Amaya Web Browsing and Authoring
Amaya is an open source browser and WYSIWYG web authoring environment that purports to allow its users to develop web pages without knowing anything about HTML or CSS. You can create your pages and view them using this software. It supports CSS, HTML, XHTML, MathML 2.0 (which allows you to browse and write web pages containing mathematical symbols), etc. There are versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. A more detailed review of this editor can be found in the article: Review of Amaya: W3C's Free WYSIWYG Web Authoring Environment.
- Trellian WebPAGE
Trellian WebPAGE is a free WYSIWYG web editor with a drag and drop interface, a preview screen that allows you to see your page under three common screen widths (640, 800 and 1024), built-in FTP uploader, table creation wizard, form creation tool, etc. It also has a syntax highlighting HTML editor for people who may want to switch to the HTML mode for some fine tuning.
- Nvu - Complete Web Authoring System
(Update: Nvu has been discontinued. Beware of scam sites pretending to be the Nvu website and asking for donations/support. The official site is gone, and there are no replacement sites. In the meantime, use KompoZer, which is just Nvu with some bug fixes and a new name.) Nvu is a WYSIWYG editor that is designed to make the creation of web sites as easy for novices as it is using commercial web editors like DreamWeaver. It is based on the Mozilla Composer web editor (see elsewhere on this page) and includes new features that will eventually make its way back into Mozilla Composer. This open source editor is available for Linux and Windows. You can find a tutorial on How to Design and Publish Your Website with Nvu on thesitewizard.com. There is also a longer review of Nvu available.
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