5 popular online code editors

5 popular online code editors
Posted on Thursday August, 5 2010 | 1 Comment

A little setup ... the other day I was working remotely on a computer that wasn't mine and I needed to edit some php files.  They didn't have any good IDE's installed on the computer and so I went in search of a good online code editor.  Here is what I came up with.

Amy Editor

Amy Editor is a really nice online IDE that is designed to look like your working on a Mac.  It has tons of features, including online corroboration and support for a ton of syntax's.  At the time of this article a few of the features weren't really working, so hopefully they get them straightened out soon.

phpanywhere

phpanywhere only works with PHP, but it is really nice editor.  It has all of things you are looking for in a good PHP editor, like syntax highlighting,  line numbers, support for projects and also a really impressive ftp file editor.

CodeRun

Coderun has some nice benefits, like not having to signup for an account and the ability to just preview / run your code right away.  It  reminds me a lot of Visual Studios, which doesn't give me that happy feeling all over, but maybe that's a bonus for you.  Seems like it has a lot of support for ASP type stuff, which I am not into so I can't really give a good review of that.

Kodingen

Where to start with this site?  The first thing I would do is watch their demo video, which is really helpful and shows you how powerful this app really is.

The site has a pretty crazy design , which can be good and bad, it really just depends on your preferences and whether you like it or not.  You can work on things as a guest, but the real features are only available if you signup for an account.  They have one click installers for a lot of popular applications which is nice.  You get your own preview / demo url and they have a very powerful ftp tool.

Bespin

"Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment on how to build an extensible Web code editor using HTML 5 technology."

HTML 5 is cool, but right now it's not supported in a lot of browsers.  Eventually this will change and i'm sure a lot more apps like Bespin will appear.

My closing thoughts are this.  Really if it's possible, you should carry around ubuntu on a thumb drive and then you don't have to worry about messing with any of these.  If that's not an option, these are nice alternatives that are simple and quick solutions to being stuck without your favorite editor.