The best free and open source IDE for Linux user

Nowadays people are turning toward programming and they are successfully building great applications. Linux an open source operating system is used worldwide on many desktops, servers and mobile devices. The main reason Linux is much loved is because it provides great security and stability, less expensive than other software's, protects privacy and user control over their own hardware.

Linux is everywhere and it has great benefits for programmers in Linux. If you love Linux programming you can really have a good career in system administration and learning Linux can sure shot land you with good job title in market.

As we all know that Programming is all about typing and typing. And our programmers constantly keep on searching and worrying about text editors to help them in their coding. At this point, knowing some of Best IDE's comes in handy, to save your time and mental efforts. Many programmers learn to code by using a text editor, but in time they move towards using an IDE as it makes the art of coding efficient and quicker. To provide a sharpness into the quality of software which are available, for Linux.

Here is the list of all powerful IDE for Linux -

18. JED

JED is a popular Linux text editor that uses the S-Lang library. This cross-platform tool is available for a variety of other platforms as well, including Unix, VMS, OS/2, BeOS, Windows, OpenVMS, etc. The major plus point of using JED Linux editor is its lightweight nature that makes sure that you can use it with ease on hardware with limited resources. The popular features of JED editor are color syntax highlighting, code folding, emulation of editors like Emacs, different programming modes, editing TeX files, rectangular cut/paste, etc.

17. Light Table

Light Table is another modern looking, underrated yet feature-rich open source code editor which is more of an IDE than a mere text editor. There are numerous extensions available to enhance their capabilities. Inline evaluation is what you would love in it. You have to use it to believe how useful Light Table actually is. It's the next generation code editor.

16. BlueGriffon

BlueGriffon is an open source HTML editor powered by Gecko, which is Firefox's rendering engine. It has a simple interface and most usual features needed to create web pages that are compliant with W3C web standards.

15. Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that aims to deliver more powerful performance and extend the capabilities of de-facto Unix editor ‘Vi.’ It’s a highly configurable text editor that’s built to serve the needs of a developer. It’s designed to be used both as a command line interface and as a standalone application in a GUI. It’s one of the most powerful text editors around. Its main highlights are automatic commands, digraph input, split screen, session screen, tab expansion, syntax coloring, and tag system. Vim is written in C and Vim script.

14. Emacs

Emacs is a Unix based text editor tool which is used by programmers, engineers, students, and system administrators. It allows you to add, modify, delete, insert, words, letters, lines, and other units of text.

13. nano

nano is a user-friendly text editor that’s widely used on Unix-like operating systems. nano emulates the Pico text editor and comes loaded with additional functionality. It runs in a familiar command line interface. Its major highlights include Autoconf support, case sensitive search function, auto indentation, interactive search and replacement, tab completion, soft text wrapping, etc. It’s written in the C programming language.

12. NetBeans

NetBeans is an open-source code editor tool for developing with Java, PHP, C++, and other programming languages. With this editor, code analyzers, and converters. It allows you to upgrade your applications to use new Java 8 language constructs.

11. VS Code editor

Visual Studio Code is developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It has support for debugging, embedded Git control and GitHub, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring. Visual Studio Code is based on Electron, a framework which is used to deploy Node.js applications for the desktop running on the Blink layout engine. VS code is highly customizable, allowing users to change the theme, keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and install extensions that add additional functionality. The source code is free and open source and released under the permissive MIT License.

10. Geany

Geany is a lightweight IDE and it supports all major languages. It was designed specifically to provide a fast and small IDE, and it needs only the GTK2 libraries to remain independent from Desktop Environments. It has all basic features such as, auto-indent, syntax highlighting and auto-complete code or snippets etc. Geany is a clean and provides larger space to work in. So if you want a lightweight and pretty basic IDE for your development then go with Geany.

9. zend Studio

Developers of PHP use Zend for faster coding, resolving issues easily and to integrate freely inside the cloud. It has power pack of tools such as Zend Studio, PHP Unit and Composer which forms one stop shop for mobile app developers and PHP developers.

8. CodeLite

CodeLite is a free, open-source, cross-platform IDE for the C, C++, PHP, and Node.js programming languages. To comply with CodeLite's open source spirit, the program itself is compiled and debugged using only free tools for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, though CodeLite can execute any third-party compiler or tool that has a command-line interface.

7. Gedit

Gedit is an IDE that comes pre-installed with the Gnome Linux dekstop environment. It is a very simple and small IDE but it can be customized to fit your working environment by installing plugins and configuring existing settings. Gedit does not provide the easiest way to install plugins but you can download the plugins and then install them manually.

6. KATE

It's the text editors that comes pre-installed with KDE desktop environment. KATE is a lightweight and fast text editors and it can open multiple files simultaneously. KATE is simple yet powerful IDE. It supports great number of languages and auto-detect the language sets the indentation for document automatically. Programmer can split window to work with multiple documents simultaneously. KATE has embedded terminal, SQL plugin, Find & replace, session support, syntax highlighting, smart comment and uncomment handling, bracket matching, KATE takes backup automatically so in case of crash or unexpected shutdown your work don't get lost.

5. Bluefish Editor

It is a free and open source development project targeted towards web developers and programmers. If you are a web developer then Bluefish editor can be a good choice. It supports many advanced features such as auto-completion of tags, auto-indentation, powerful search & replace, support of integration of external programs such as make, lint, weblint etc.

4. Brackets

Brackets is the IDE developed by Adobe developers. It is the IDE for you if you're a web designer. There are several awesome features in Brackets that make it stand out. Brackets supports plugins to extend functionalities and installing plugins is really easy. Beside all the basic features such as auto-indentation, auto-completion and code highlighting, Brackets has advanced features that really help you while you're editing web pages and working with CSS, and some of which features are Inline editing, Editor splitting, plugins and many more.

3. Eclipse

Free, open-source editor made for heavy Java development. It is more advanced and robust. Eclipse is mostly written in Java and it is primarily used for developing Java applications. But, the language support can be extended by installing plugins. So with plugins support Eclipse becomes one of the best IDEs to develop programs in C, C++, COBOL, Fortan, Haskell, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Python, R, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Scheme and many more.

2. Atom

Atom is the IDE developed by Github and it is completely hackable which means you can customize it as you want. It supports large number of programming languages by default like php, javascript, HTML, CSS, Sass, Less, Python, C, C++, Coffeescript, etc. and you can extends it's languages supported by install plugin.

1. Sublime Text

The one that wins the list is obviously, Sublime Text. The lightest of all and feature rich IDE used by professional programmers. Besides all the basic features, Sublime has the most powerful features that let programmers do coding really fast. Sublime has so many powerful features like code highlighting, auto-indent, auto-completion and all basic features, Sublime has all of them packed. Sublime Text contains 22 different visual themes, with the option to download additional themes and configure custom themes via third-party plugin. Sublime Text is the popular replacements and main competitors - Atom, BBEdit, TextMate, Notepad++, Emacs, vim, Brackets, Visual Studio Code, and others.