If you develop web sites you probably already know a lot about text editors. I'm sure you already have a favorite text editor. However, if you are just learning now about web development, web design or web hosting then you need to start getting familiar.

A text editor is simply that -- a program that allows you to edit text. Since your HTML, PHP or other such scripting code is all text you will need to routinely edit this text to make changes to your website content and design. Using a text editor makes this process so much simpler and more convenient than previous.

When I first started working on websites in 1996 and 1997, I used to use Notepad on Microsoft Windows to type out my HTML code. When I was done with my updates to my HTML code I would then save the file to my computer and then once I have the website saved I would subsequently use an FTP utility or FTP via command prompt or via the web browser itself to upload the HTML file to the server. Every time I would make a small change to the HTML file, whether fixing a typo or rewriting a segment or seeing how the page looked I would have to re-edit the HTML file in notepad, save over the local file on my computer and then re-upload the HTML file using FTP. Finally I would then have to refresh the browser. As you can see this could become a onerous and time-consuming process that slowed down web development and design. This was especially the case when one would develop a dynamic website using CGI, Perl or other such language (equivalent to PHP or ASP) because web browsers on a local machine didn't parse, interpret or run the code.

Nowadays using a modern text-editor, you don't even need to upload a file to see the result in many cases. Smart text editors have their own mini-browsers, PHP compilers/interpreters and can show you what the web page would look like once uploaded online. The other benefit of modern text editors is that they save directly to the web server or directly to FTP so when you save the file you are editing it immediately becomes available online for viewing and you don't need to open and launch and use a separate FTP client for such changes to your website. This helps you to streamline and make web site design more efficient and enjoyable. The other benefit of most modern text editors is that they color-code various parts of the HTML, PHP, ASP, SQL and other such programming language part of the text making coding more pleasant.

Some of my favorite text editors include UltraEdit for Windows and TextWrangler for Mac. UltraEdit is a Windows PC text editor available for free trial for 30 days but then you gotta pay for it. It is a very fast and powerful text editor that has been around for a while. If you use it regularly, you'll probably love it. TextWrangler is a nice light-weight and relatively powerful free text editor for Mac users. I currently use it for almost all of my web programming and am happy with it.