Free HTML Editors / ASCII Text Web Editors, Download editors

Free HTML Editors / ASCII Text Web Editors

TopStyle Lite: TopStyle is a well-known Windows CSS editor that can also edit HTML code. The editor's speciality is that it allows you to create Cascading Style Sheets in a fairly simple manner - you can select the features you want from a side panel of the editor and it will generate the corresponding style sheet (you still need some CSS knowledge though - this is not a WYSIWYG editor). You can also edit HTML code with the editor. The Lite version, which is free, only allows you to create inline Cascading Style Sheets. The Pro version (not free) allows you to create external style sheets and includes built-in validators that checks your style sheets and HTML documents for correctness (among other features).
Notetab Light: This is the freeware sibling of the commercial Notetab Standard and Notetab Pro. It is a general text editor that has lots of features, including a useful "Clipbook" facility that has numerous HTML editing conveniences. Its commercial cousin Notepad Pro comes with syntax highlighting. (Note: to get Notetab Light, click the Products link.)
HAPedit (HTML ASP PHP Editor): HAPedit is useful for people who develop both dynamic and static web pages. It provides syntax highlighting for HTML, ASP, PHP, JavaScript; provides a project manager; features code completion, an SQL console, FTP manager, PHP code "compilation", integrated PHP help, brace matching, search and replace with regular expressions, statistics on your page (ie, rendered size, images, links, etc), and so on. This is a Windows program.
TSW WebCoder and WebPad: TSW WebCoder is a web editor that supports an internal preview of your page, built-in FTP client, integration with HTML Tidy (see the Free HTML Validators page), integrated validation, code libraries, CSS inspector, syntax colouring, multiple documents, etc. WebPad, the other editor available on that site, is a lighter-weight editor that features syntax highlighting, an FTP client, multiple documents, integrated HTML Tidy integration, etc. It is targeted at people who want something more than Notepad but without the frills of WebCoder.
Webniac: Webniac is a text editor for web page development. It has syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, Java, JavaScript, VBScript, PHP, SQL, Perl and XML. It includes some JavaScripts which you can use on your site, a CSS generator, facilities for constructing tables, etc.
Quanta Plus Web Development Tool: Quanta Plus is a Linux HTML editor for KDE. It contains an assortment of features such as syntax highlighting, easy configuration of toolbars, site uploading facility, the ability to update a site from CVS (with a plugin), document structure tree, etc.
Matrix Y2K Freeware HTML Editor: Matrix Y2K is a HTML editor with support for multiple languages, multiple documents, syntax highlighting, search and replace, character maps, links validator, internal preview of your page, external preview (launches browser), image file browser, table wizard, forms support and the ability for you to create a library of scripts.
HTML Builder XP Lite: HTML Builder XP Lite features syntax highlighting (for HTML, PHP, ASP, Perl, VBScript, JavaScript, etc), a meta tag wizard, HTML Tidy integration, spell checker, thesaurus, project management, table management, included DHTML scripts and JavaScripts that you can insert into your page, an FTP plugin, etc.
Bluefish: From the announcement by one of their development team: "Bluefish is a programmer's HTML editor, designed to save the experienced webmaster some keystrokes. It features a multiple file editor, multiple toolbars, custom menus, image and thumbnail dialogs, open from the web, CSS dialogs, PHP, SSI and RXML support, HTML validation and lots of wizards." I've seen a lot of good things said about this editor by other webmasters. Bluefish runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Tru64/Alpha, NetBSD, OpenBSD, HP-UX and Mac OSX.
HTML-Kit: This HTML text editor is intended for use by web developers, and comes with support for writing HTML, XML and scripts. Among its features are internal preview of your web pages (requires IE 4.x and above to be installed), integration with HTML Tidy (a HTML and CSS validation program), auto-completion of keywords, etc. HTML-Kit can be extended using plugins, and runs on Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000.
1st Page 2000: 1st Page 2000 is a very professional, fully featured HTML editor that is nonetheless free. Besides being able to create and edit your HTML files using a syntax highlighted editor, you get JavaScript wizards that enable you to create drop down combo boxes, frame killers, browser detectors, etc. It even comes with loads of JavaScripts and VBScripts (450+), CGI Scripts (20+), a colour picker, image size calculator, etc. The feature list is extremely long. This is a Win32 program (ie, Windows 95, 98 and NT).
EZPad: This HTML editor provides the usual facility to edit and create HTML files in a convenient tabbed interface. It comes with an assortment of wizards that allow you to quickly create specific HTML features like forms, tables, etc.
Arachnophilia: This editor comes with built-in FTP facility, making it possible for you to author your web page and publish it without leaving the editor. It has a spell-checker, an internal browser view mode that is able to show your HTML changes as you type, a global search and replace facility across all open documents, built-in tutorial on HTML, JavaScript, frames; etc. There are apparently two versions available - the older one runs on Windows systems, the newer one is written in Java and is apparently cross-platform.
Web-O-Rama: An editor that supports a host of features useful for HTML editing yet has an uncluttered interface. It is free for non-commercial use.

Free WYSIWYG Web Editors and Website Builders

Nvu - Complete Web Authoring System: Nvu is a WYSIWYG editor that is designed to make the creation of web sites as easy for novices as it is using commercial web editors like FrontPage and DreamWeaver. It is based on the Mozilla Composer web editor (see elsewhere on this page) and includes new features that will eventually make its way back into Mozilla Composer. This open source editor is available for Linux and Windows.
Mozilla Composer: Mozilla, the web browser, comes with a WYSIWYG web editor that allows you to quickly code web pages using a wordprocessor-like interface.
Trellian WebPAGE: Trellian WebPAGE is a free WYSIWYG web editor with a drag and drop interface, a preview screen that allows you to see your page under three common screen widths (640, 800 and 1024), built-in FTP uploader, table creation wizard, form creation tool, etc. It also has a syntax highlighting HTML editor for people who may want to switch to the HTML mode for some fine tuning.
Amaya Web Browsing and Authoring: Amaya is an open source browser and WYSIWYG web authoring environment that purports to allow its users to develop web pages without knowing anything about HTML or CSS. You can create your pages, view them, and upload them to your website using this software. It supports CSS (including CSS 2), HTML, XHTML, MathML 2.0 (which allows you to browse and write web pages containing mathematical symbols), etc. There are versions for Windows (a separate one for NT/2000/XP and 95/98/98SE/ME), Linux and Sparc Solaris.
Netscape Composer: Netscape (yes, the browser) comes with an easy WYSIWYG web editor that allows you to get started with your own web page quickly and easily. It supports the usual text and graphics and is generally adequate for the beginning webmaster. To get it, simply download the full Netscape package. Note that Netscape Composer is probably just an older version of Mozilla Composer (also listed on this page).