There are a wide variety of available code-based text editors that are free to use. However, the identity of the "best" is largely subjective. Some of the more notable editors, however, include TextWrangler, Smultron, and Caditor.

HTML is a text-based language, so any text editor for the Mac should work fine to produce HTML code. Some of the more popular text editors for Mac are: * TextEdit (built into Mac OS X) * BBEdit * TextWrangler * SubEthaEdit * Smultron There are many others; simply do a search for "text edit" on either VersionTracker.com or MacUpdate.com to find dozens of alternatives.

A web developer's tools of the trade, like any software engineer, can be broken into two major categories: programming tools and development environment. Developing new applications on a computer without an IDE (integrated development environment) is close to impossible, so this is always the first step in developing web-based software. The most commonly used programming languages are JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Java.