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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. 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.

22. Microsoft XML Notepad

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

23. 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.

24. Alleycode

Alleycode is a free Web editor that focuses on search engine optimization. There are a lot of built-in features and links to the Alleycode Web site so that you can check your site ranking, optimize your meta data, and otherwise improve your search rankings. While I don't recommend sites that "guarantee" top-level ranking like Alleycode does, that doesn't mean that their Web editor isn't any good.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. PageBreeze Free HTML Editor

PageBreeze Free HTML editor is a WYSIWYG editor that makes it easy to edit your Web pages. You can switch between WYSIWYG and source mode to check your HTML. And because it's made by FormBreeze.com you get the form integration right in the software so that your forms will work without any scripting or mailto issues.

29. SciTE

SciTE is a source code editing program for Windows. I wouldn't recommend using it for Web editing, but if you need to make quick changes to your HTML, this program will do the job.

30. Netscape Composer

Netscape Composer is a simple little Web page editor that comes included with Netscape. There isn't a lot to recommend it other than that it's free and is built-in to your Web browser. Feature highlights: WYSIWYG XHTML editing.

What's your favorite free Windows HTML editor?

There are so many options for free Windows Web editors that it's impossible to find and list them all. Is your favorite editor not on this list? (Don't forget, there's a second page...) Why is your favorite free editor your favorite? What makes it better than all the rest?

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