Free HTML and WYSIWYG Editors

I received a question from Kevin_28 in our chat room at live.besttechie.net asking about free HTML/WYSIWYG editors. There are a number of decent free editors that can be found online.

I typically recommend NVU, KompoZer, and Mozilla Seamonkey on the WYSIWYG side of things and PSPad, HTML-Kit, and Notetab Light on the Text/HTML editors side.

NVU is a WYSIWYG editor that is designed to make creating a web sites as easy for beginner web designers as it is if they were using a commercial product such as DreamWeaver. It is based on the Mozilla Composer web editor and includes new features that will eventually make its way back into Mozilla Composer.  NVU is open source and has Windows and Linux Versions.

KompoZer is a WYSIWYG web editor that allows you to build websites with ease. It is essentially an updated version of NVU with bug fixes.

Seamonkey is the web browser suite from Mozilla, which comes with a WYSIWYG web editor that allows you to quickly code web pages using a wordprocessor-like interface.

PSPad is a full featured text editor that you can use to edit HTML, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, C, etc. It even has built-in functionality allowing you to edit binary files. There is project support, the ability to directly edit files via FTP on your server, a macro recorder, search and replace in files, text comparison (differences between two files with the differences highlighted in colour), syntax highlighting, spell checking, and internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla.

HTML-Kit is intended for use by web developers, and comes with support for writing HTML, XML and scripts. Among its features are internal preview of your web pages, integration with HTML Tidy (a HTML and CSS validation program), and auto-completion of keywords.

NoteTab Light is the freeware version of the commercial NoteTab Standard and Pro. It is a general text editor that has a number of handy of features, including a useful “Clipbook” function that has numerous HTML editing abilities.