Komodo Edit is a free text editor for dynamic programming languages which was created by ActiveState. This program is a descendant from commercial Komodo IDE program and, consequently, it has a lot of its predecessor’s functions, such as support of wide variety of languages and platforms. This project is also actively supported. So even if you work for web application development company, this tool will come handy for you.

Bluefish is text editor close to the WYSIWYG editors in its interface. This software has been created for Adobe Dreamweaver users who are used to copypasting code but don’t use Preview button. Its main advantages are code insertion for Apache configuration files, C, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and others, flexible syntax highlighting, file explorer, table creation and other functions which are necessary for happy programming. The only thing to bear in mind is that the latest Bluefish version was release back in 2006 so it’s hard to expect something new from its creators.

Geany is a combination of text editor and IDE for GNOME which supports not only web development but other aspects of development as well. It supports code collapsing, variable menu, compiler, built-in terminal and a lot of other small useful features. Geany is actively supported and if you don’t use this tool already, you should take note of it.

gEdit is a standard text editor for Gnome and is available in Ubuntu from “Applications – Standard – Text editor”. Although not so powerful as other text editors, it has great functions and some really cool plugins. Among the gEdit peculiarities are print support, syntax highlighting (using gtksourceview2), file explorer, spelling check, and others. It’s a simple tool that can be used for any web development project.

Surely, this is not the full list of useful software for web development (I’m sure I’ve heard about Eclipse, for example, which is another great tool). But using the apps described in the article will make your development process much easier. So choose your weapons.