What is the best software to use to start coding on Windows/Dell?

I spent quite a lot of time researching this very question for myself. A lot of people give their recommendations but not the criteria by which they choose.

If you are looking to be a front-end developer then I would also recommend using Brackets.io. I am very new to this myself and haven’t worked with many different editors or for very long, but here is the result of me research and the consideration I used to decide:

1. Latency. Latency is how slow or delayed the actions at each stage of the coding. This is something I hadn’t even considered when I started looking into it, but became one of the more important factors for me. It includes how long a program takes to load, how responsive it is to type in, how fast can you test you code, and so on. Notepadd++, intelliJ, and Brackets.io, had very low latency in the comparisons I found. Sublime and Atom were middle-to-fast, Netbeans was middle, while, Visual Studio and Eclipse performed in the middle-to-slow ranges.

2. Cost. I wanted something cheap or free to start with. Why spend money before I can test it… Most of them are free to use. Notepadd++, Brackets.io, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Sublime and Atom. intelliJ has a free basic version, but it misses many essential elements needed for front end and it expensive to buy.

3. Easy to use. I wanted something I could start with straight away and find intuitive. I found many recommendations for Netbeans – as graphical – but when I started, I found it just as confusing without knowing what I need to do, can do, should do… so simpler is better. Notepadd++, Brackets.io were best for that. Sublime might have been too from layout, but set up was far more complicated. Brackets.io had a built in plugin manager, which made it easy to install and remove plugins, change look, and track what plugins are installed, while Sublime required me to copy in code and set things up. I found an entire step by step guide and still found missing files, shortcuts that didn’t work… In short, set up is not straight forward. I haven’t tried Notepadd++, but to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t have plugins.

4. Language Support. Different editors can support different languages. By default Brackets.io supports HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and with plugins also Python and a few others. Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans, and Sublime support almost everything. intelliJ supports almost everything – if you pay for it. I don’t know about Notepadd++ or Atom.

5. Special features. And lastly, the special features. There are 2 features that I was most interested in at the beginning.

(i) Auto-Complete. This is the feature that saves a lot of time writing code by suggesting what code or options you are trying to type, closes the elements in HTML, etc. I have only tested this on Brackets.io, which seems to work nicely. I have seen some of the possibilities of sublime, which looked very impressive, once you learn them all. They are not as intuitive though.

(ii) Linting. This was a new term for me. It is a feature that checks the code spelling and syntax as you type it. Very much like MS Word does with text as you type. I was told Netbeans has this built in with Java, and most of them seem to have this possibility via plugins. Not sure about Notepadd++.

(iii) Live Preview. This is a special feature of Brackets.io. It allows you to link your editor to the browser (currently only with Chrome) and see the output of your HTML as you type it. This is a very useful feature and I don’t know why the others don’t have it already.

(iv) Inline Editors. This is another special feature that is solely in Brackets.io. It allows you open a sub-window where you can quickly see any CSS descriptions or JavaScript rules that affect any specific line of HTML. Again, something which I don’t know why it doesn’t exist in any of the other editors.

If I have made any mistakes i appologise, If anyone else has anything else to add or correct, please feel free to do so. This is right now to the best of my knowledge and understanding of it. Please do take into consideration that I, myself, am very new to this still.

I hope it helps.