From time to time we get asked for recommendations on what editor or IDE to use for studying and practice.

Editors & IDEs 

For these courses and personal experimentation you do not need anything special. Any simple code editor that you already have on your workstation will do fine. NotePad (Win), NotePad++(Win) or TextEdit (Mac).

However Do Not use a Document editor such as WordPad or MSWord or gDocs etc. These have a bad habit of adding special (hidden) formatting information in the file which will really mess things up.

Each instructor has a favorite editor.  If you are just starting out try the one that the instructor recommends as it will both give you exposure to different tools, and may make following the lessons easier.  When you move into a commercial environment, you may need to change to whatever IDE the team uses, so it would be wise to experiment with different tools and be relaxed about what tool you use.  

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If you plan to spend any time in IT then you should invest a bit of time in learning to use a range of good editors and IDEs.  Here are some free and very functional ones you could experiment with:

• NotePad++ (Win)
• BBEdit (Mac) (was TextWrangler)
• PyCharm Community IDE (both)
• Atom IDE (both)
• SubLime IDE (both)
• VIM (both)
• vsCode (both)

IDE =  Integrated Development Environment

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