I have been working with HTML and web design and development on and off over the last 15 years, some serious projects and others not so much. Starting with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors such as Netscape Composer, FrontPage, I quickly became frustrated with the formatting of the code and especially in the early days of FrontPage the extra bloated code be generated. For a while I reverted to just using notepad for creating and editing my web code. With the introduction of CSS I had a new excitement and got back into web development. In the early days of CSS application and browser compatibility was key and Microsoft was certainly not the answer lagging behind heavily. It was around this time I was able to purchase Macromedia Studio 4.0 which included Dreamweaver (Uni pricing) and found that using the split view or just code view in Dreamweaver I was happy to abandon notepad in favor of a real editor again.
Now it is a few (okay, a lot) of years later and I still from time to time find myself coding a site from the ground up or editing/adapting existing sites. Today my editor of choice is Brackets. I was originally introduced to Brackets via Adobe Creative Cloud which published Adobe Edge Code CC. Edge Code was based off of the community project Brackets which is sponsored by Adobe. As of Nov. 2014 Adobe stopped development of Edge Code and gave a boost to Brackets. During this time and prior I used both Edge Code and Brackets with Brackets always having a bit of an advantage. Thus the decision by Adobe was of no surprise to me.
Brackets “is a lightweight code editor for web developers and designers working with HTML, CSS & JavaScript” and lightweight, simple, and to the point it is.
For more information and to download Brackets visit: http://brackets.io/