Updated on May 17th.
Coding is an essential part in the life of developers. Building good applications or web pages requires a good and reliable code editor or IDE. More and more developers are choosing Linux over other operating systems for the purpose of coding applications these days. Whether you are a beginner or an expert developer or simply willing to learn how to code you would want a good code editor. In this article, we will talk about the top five best code editors for Linux distributions.
Gedit: a pre-installed text and code editor
Gedit comes in-built with Ubuntu and some other popular Linux distributions. Gedit is aimed at simplicity and beginners. Don’t underestimate however its capabilities from its simple looking interface. Gedit comes with support for programming languages like Python, Html, Java, XML, Perl and many others. It’s like a notepad editor but with additional features. Overall, Gedit is a simple yet powerful text editor.
gedit for linux
Read: How to Install Notepad++ in Ubuntu 22.04
Eclipse
Eclipse Linux code editor is without doubt the best IDE with very useful features. Eclipse provides various development environments like Eclipse Construction Documents Technologist (CDT) for C and C++, Eclipse PDT for PHP, Java development environment for Java development, integrated environment for Python, and many more. It comes with useful features like syntax highlighting, code formatting, find and replace and code templates. Eclipse is a free to use software provided under the EPL (Eclipse Public License). Simply download the Eclipse package from the link provided below to install it.
Download link for different Eclipse IDEs for Linux (for 64bit users only): https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/
For 32bit users: https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epp/downloads/release/helios/R/eclipse-jee-helios-linux-gtk.tar.gz
eclipse for Ubuntu
You may be interested to read: How to Know whether you have a 32 or 64-Bit Ubuntu OS?
Brackets: a Linux HTML editor
‘Brackets’ is the best HTML code editor in the market. Brackets is an open-source editor for editing HTML code and comes handy when designing beautiful websites. It supports live preview so you can preview the outcome of your html code without opening the browser. To install Bracket you just need to type in a few commands in terminal and you are good to go.
The best way to install software is through the Snap app store. The main advantage of installing software with snap is that you don’t need to worry about updating apps. It will automatically update apps whenever updates are available and notify you. The detailed instructions of installing the snap app store in any Linux distribution is provided in the link below.
Instructions to install Snap app store: https://docs.snapcraft.io/installing-snapd
Then,
sudo snap install brackets
Let it download and install:
It will look like this after installation:
brackets for linux
Read: How to Install Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 22.04
Visual Studio Code
Visual studio code is another code editor available for Linux. Visual Studio is a Microsoft Product but unlike other major products of Microsoft, VS code is open-source. Which means you can download and install the VS code for free. VS Code is not an IDE but just code editor. You can code in different programming languages such as C, C++, Python, and all other major programming languages.
Install VS code by running following command in terminal. I am assuming that you have installed the snap store on your PC.
sudo snap install code –classic
visual studio for Ubuntu
You may be interested to read: How to install and uninstall applications on Ubuntu ? A Beginner’s guide
Atom
Atom is another code editor for Linux. It is an open-source code editor developed with modern Design, customizability and trend in mind. Atom is a feature-loaded open-source code editor for Linux. Atom is a cross-platform text editor that comes with so many features; you should definitely give it a try. To install Atom, just perform the following command in the terminal after installing snap.:
sudo snap install atom –classic
But keep in mind that snap version is huge in size and the installation is slower then the usual .deb installation. Therefore, if you are concerned about storage and speed then it is preferable to install Atom via .deb Installation file which is only available for 64-bit versions of Linux distribution. 32-bit users should stick with the snap installation. To install Atom via .deb package, just download it from this link: https://atom.io/ and install.
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a simple yet powerful text editor. It comes with useful features like go anything, few key shortcuts and jump to any word, line or Syntax. It allows you to select and edit multiple texts simultaneously. It is a feature-rich code editor but comes with one and the only downside is that it is not free to use. You can download it for free but you have to pay a license fee after installing.
For 32 bit users: https://www.techspot.com/downloads/downloadnow/5546/?evp=03bf42ec64191089b657f7748afc9c80&file=7
For 64bit users: https://www.techspot.com/downloads/downloadnow/5546/?evp=03bf42ec64191089b657f7748afc9c80&file=6
Sublime as one of the best code editor for linux
So these are the five best code editors available for Linux distribution. If you are a beginner in coding or professional programmer, these five code editors will come in handy.
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I would also recommend IntelliJ IDEA Community. It has a very good built-in Git client and very strong support for a lot of programming languages.
Thanks soltesz – I will have a look.
You missed the point of vscode: it IS an IDE due it’s sophisticated plugin concept and the (mostly) community driven plugins. You can tailor it as an IDE from A like Ansible over P like powershell to Z like ZIL.
In my opinion, vscode is the best editor since the invention of sliced bread… 😉
Thanks – I know VScode since I used it to code in Nodejs – I do confirm it is great !
However the boundary nowadays between IDEs and text editors is increasingly blurred –
For some languages, it is probably an IDE but sometimes on some other platform it just feels like a text editor….
It is strange to see software being reviewed as “best” etc and yet only one tooklit (GTK) is considered for picking the options. There are tons of “best of the best” code editors written in QT which are completely ignored.
This GTK-centric trend is quite insane and inexplicable.
But do they allow you to control whether tabs should be expanded as spaces? IIRC, “gedit” does not — a fatal flaw, as far as I am concerned.