Can someone recommend me a good free javascript editor?

Hey guys,

I’m new to the forum, just registered today. And I’m wondering whats the best javascript editor out there?

I’m going to school for web development and I’m taking a javascript class next semester, the problem is the class is online so i have to teach myself.

I have previous coding experience with html, css, actionscript 2 and coldfusion.

I want to know whats the best editor out there is? I have used Dreamweaver for my previous coding and i don’t like it. It feels to bloated and has way to much stuff i never use.

Anyone want to share what they use? Make me a recommendation, it doesn’t matter weather its for mac or pc. I have a mac that has both OSX and Windows 7 on it.

I have Dreamweaver CS5 and Visual Studio 2010. What’s your opinion on both of these as javascript editors? Anyone ever use visual studio for web development?

I would really appreciate any help you can give me. Anyway thanks for reading my long post, and any advice is really appreciated.

Thank You,

Emiljan

I use Notepad++, mostly for the code highlighting. I used to use Dreamweaver, but now I’m on a computer without Adobe. DW’s autosuggest thing was pretty nice, but I found that as I started doing more complicated JavaScript, it broke and wasn’t terribly helpful.

perhaps have a look HTML-Kit

Any plain text editor will work for JavaScript. It makes it easier if the one you use supports colour coding and recognises JavaScript. Apart from that there isn’t really anything special you need in the editor since all of the major browsers either have a complete JavaScript debugging tool built in (IE8, Opera, Safari, Chrome) or can easily have one added as a plugin or extension (IE6, IE7, Firefox). The debugging tool will allow you to set breakpoints in your code and to examine the values of any variable at any point in the processing and so provide everything you need to be able to test apart from something to run the tests automatically (and you will not need that unitl you start writing really complex JavaScripts (eg. your own library with equivalent functionality to some of the existing JavaScript libraries such as jQuery). Once tyou reach that point a stand alone automated testing tool for JavaScript would then be a useful addition.

Thank You,

I really appreciate all of your comments!

Any free editors that support code-completion? Also i use Firefox as my primary browser. Any good add-on’s that can help me debug JavaScript code?

Google Chrome comes with its own debugger, and so does IE8.
With Firefox you can use some extensions such as Firebug or Venkman

I usually prefer to debug in Chrome first, and then perform further testing in other browsers.

Aptana works, if you want a regular IDE with code completion, rather than just a simple a text editor.

if you’re looking for an editor on steroids then Netbeans could be worth a look. well, actually it’s an IDE as well.

some of the bells and whistles include:

  1. code colouring

  2. code completion

  3. automatic source formatting (indenting)

  4. automatically creates a corresponding closing bracket or html element when a bracket or element is opened.

  5. when the cursor is postioned next to a bracket, the matching bracket is highlighted.