An offline (desktop) editor opens a folder on your disk, runs your build tools in an integrated terminal and works without a network connection. The market has consolidated sharply. In the 2019 Stack Overflow survey Visual Studio Code 550 led with 50.7% and Atom still had 13.3%; GitHub 29 archived Atom on December 15, 2022, and by 2025 VS Code was used by three quarters of developers, while AI-first editors such as Cursor 3,457 had entered the top ten.
The six editors below cover almost every front-end workflow. Visual Studio 6 (the Windows .NET IDE) and IntelliJ IDEA 856 rank high in the survey because of back-end work; for web projects JetBrains packages the same engine as WebStorm 856 .
| Editor | Licence and price | Platforms | Best at |
|---|---|---|---|
| VS Code | Free; MIT-licensed core | Windows, macOS, Linux, web | Extensions for every language |
| Sublime Text 4 13,285 | $99 personal, 3 years of updates | Windows, macOS, Linux | Speed on huge files |
| Notepad++ 8.9 7,614 | Free, GPL | Windows only | Quick edits, tiny footprint |
| WebStorm | Free non-commercial; paid for work | Windows, macOS, Linux | Deep refactoring out of the box |
| Vim 9.2 13,171 / Neovim 0.12 64,913 | Free, open source | Everywhere, including servers | Keyboard-only editing over SSH |
| Zed 1.0 17,780 | Free; Pro $10/month for AI | macOS, Linux, Windows | GPU-rendered speed, live collaboration |
VS Code (built on Electron 20,509 ) is the default choice and the one this book assumes; Setting Up VS Code configures it. Sublime Text is a native C++ application that opens multi-gigabyte log files instantly; you may evaluate it free, but continued use needs a licence. Notepad++ wraps the Scintilla 111,077 editing component in a small Windows program, handy for a quick fix on a machine where you cannot install much. WebStorm is a full IDE: it indexes the whole project, so renaming a React 7,897 component updates imports, JSX usages and tests together. It has been free for non-commercial use since October 2024, although that licence cannot opt out of anonymous usage statistics.
Vim (1991) descends from the 1976 vi and is installed on nearly every Linux server, so learning i, Esc, :w and :q saves you the day you must edit a config file over SSH. Its author Bram Moolenaar died in 2023; the community released Vim 9.2 in February 2026. Neovim is a Lua-scriptable fork whose 0.12 release (March 2026) added a built-in plugin manager and richer built-in LSP support. Zed comes from the creators of Atom, is written in Rust and draws its interface on the GPU. It reached 1.0 in April 2026 and runs external coding agents such as Claude Code 2,500 and Codex 126,827 through the open Agent Client Protocol.