1. Visual Editors

1.1. Bluefish

Bluefish is a robust (and free) visual editor with a fairly impressive list features.

If you don’t want to shell out money for an expensive (and clunky) editor like Dreamweaver, Bluefish is your next best bet.

It’s a fast, lightweight editor that supports XHTML, CSS, Ruby, Shell, and everything in between.

So your functionality is there, and where a more bloated program would freeze with hundreds (or thousands) of web pages open, Bluefish stays responsive, even on lower-end computers.

You’ll find all of the standard developer tools you need, but that’s where Bluefish stops – there aren’t any fancy bells or whistles.

For example, if you collaborate with others, Bluefish doesn’t provide any in-program way to communicate like Dreamweaver does.

But it does support FTP and other types of file protocols.

Another downside is the lack of the WYSIWG editor, but if you’re a skilled developer, that’s a feature you might not need.

Bluefish is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.