There is nothing worse than spending 2 hours trying to figure out why your program isn’t working only to realize that you missed a closing bracket. They are highly customizable and offer many features that will make your life easier. You can think of code editors as specialized web development tools. Saving only the text allows other programs, like Ruby’s interpreter, to read and execute the file as code. In contrast, plain text editors, such as VSCode and Sublime, don’t save any additional information.

These files also contain information on how to display the text on the screen and data on how to display graphics embedded into the document. A document created with these rich text editors has more than just text embedded in the file. Rich text editors, such as Microsoft Word and Libre-Office Writer, are great for writing a paper, but the features that make them good at creating nicely formatted documents make them unsuitable for writing code. A good text editor can help you write better code with real-time code checking, syntax highlighting, and automatic formatting. A text editor is by far the most used developer tool regardless of what type of developer you are.

Download visual studio code for mac.