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Free Web Editors for Windows

By Jennifer Kyrnin, About.com

Free HTML editors are often considered the best kind. They offer flexibility and power without an outlay of cash. But beware, if you're looking for more features and flexibility, there are many reasonably priced HTML editors available. Find the best HTML editor for you.

21. Vim

Vim is an extended version of vi. It has all the benefits of vi plus some improvements. It's not as readily available on Linux systems as vi is, but when it's available it can really help streamline your Web editing. Vim is not specifically a Web editor, but as a text editor it's one of my favorites.

22. Dynamic HTML Editor Free

The free version of Dynamic HTML Editor is a few revisions back from the paid version and it's only free for non-profits and personal use. But if that is you, and you don't want to learn more than file transfers for getting your Web pages to your host, then this program would work fine. It has some graphics editing and is easy to drag and drop the elements around on the page.

23. Cream

Cream extends Vim to make it easier to use for the average person. If you're used to using Vi or Vim but are tired of having to remember all the commands, then Cream is a great alternative. It doesn't come out of the box with a lot of HTML support, but there are add-ons you can get for both Vim and Cream to make it handle HTML editing more effectively.

24. Xeena

Xeena is a free XML editor from IBM. It can be used to edit Web pages as well as XML. You need to get an IBM account to download.

25. XStandard Lite

XStandard is an XHTML editor that is embedded into the Web page itself. This is not exactly an editor for everyone, but if you need to allow people who visit your sites the opportunity to edit XHTML and you need valid XHTML and CSS, this is a good solution. The Lite version can be used commercially for free, but doesn't include features like spell-checking, customization, and extensibility. This is a good tool for Web designers who include CMS so their clients can maintain the sites themselves.

26. MAX's HTML Beauty++

HTMLBeauty is a free text Web editor that has some interesting features. It comes with a few scripts to create things like an image slide show. And it also can view images in the image previewer so that it's easier to choose what image to load on your page.

27. Crimson Editor

Crimson is a very nice streamlined text editor. It offers a lot of features, including tabbed pages, syntax highlighting for various types of text files, line numbers, formatting options, and other coding extras. If you use a text editor for writing Web pages, I would switch to Crimson. Feature highlights: International support as well as color coded XHTML editing.

28. XML Notepad

XML Notepad is an XML editor that you can use to edit XHTML documents. XML Notepad requires .Net Framework.

29. vi

One of the best things about vi is that it is ubiquitous. If you build a Web page on Unix or Macintosh servers vi will be available for you to edit with. It can be hard to learn and doesn't offer a lot of extra features, but the fact that it's everywhere makes it very useful to know. Feature highlights: text editor, some versions have color coding.

30. HTML Notepad

HTML Notepad is a a text editor that includes highlighting for a large number of languages including things like Ruby, Python, and VBScript.
For many people the only feature they look for in an HTML editor is price. But price isn't necessarily everything. Why do you use a free editor? Or if you don't use one, why not?
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