Best Code Editors for Windows

IntelliJ IDEA is a JetBrains IDE for professional development in Java and Kotlin. It unlocks productive development and helps you write high-quality code with ease. Built to get the job done, it provides all of the essential tools and cutting-edge technology support you need. With a smooth, comfortable workflow and a strong focus on privacy and security, it lets you code with confidence and pleasure.

Apache NetBeans is a versatile, open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used for developing applications across a wide range of programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, PHP, HTML5, and C/C++. Known for its modular architecture, NetBeans provides robust tools and features that cater to the needs of developers working on desktop, mobile, and web applications. It includes intelligent code editing, debugging, and profiling capabilities, along with a built-in visual GUI builder for designing Java-based user interfaces. NetBeans also offers support for version control systems like Git, SVN, and Mercurial, facilitating seamless team collaboration. As an Apache Software Foundation project, NetBeans benefits from an active community that continuously improves and expands its functionality, making it a reliable and flexible choice for developers across various domains.

The AI-first Code Editor. Cursor is a next-generation AI-powered code editor designed to accelerate software development with powerful, real-time code assistance. The platform integrates seamlessly with your development workflow, offering advanced features such as natural language code editing, auto-completion, and context-aware suggestions. Cursor predicts your next move and adapts to your coding style, making it an indispensable tool for developers. It also supports a wide range of extensions and themes, ensuring familiarity while introducing cutting-edge AI capabilities. Designed to boost productivity, Cursor simplifies debugging and enhances coding efficiency, empowering developers to work smarter, not harder.

Geany is a powerful, stable and lightweight programmer's text editor that provides tons of useful features without bogging down your workflow. It runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS is translated into over 40 languages, and has built-in support for more than 50 programming languages. One the primary reasons for Geany's existence is that there is a need for a decent, GUI, lightweight, cross-platform, flexible and powerful IDE/editor. Many editors meet one or more of these requirements but fall short on others. Using the GPL v2 license, Geany assures that not only can you customize and hack it, but that everyone benefits from changes the community makes. Many parts of Geany are heavily customizable like color themes (Geany Themes) or adding new filetypes. Furthermore, Geany provides many settings to let you adjust it to your needs and preferences. Many supported filetypes including popular programming languages like C, Java, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, etc.

When you start developing with PHP, you face the problem of deciding which IDE to choose. Most companies sell their IDE's for high prices ($100-$500). We, on the other hand, offer a multifunctional portable IDE absolutely FREE with all these standard features: PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript highlighting; advanced PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript autocomplete; a powerful PHP debugger; context and dynamic Help; a code validator; a SQL manager and much more. CodeLobster IDE streamlines and simplifies the PHP development process. You don't need to keep in mind the names of functions, arguments, tags or their attributes we've implemented all these for you with autocomplete features for PHP, HTML, JavaScript and even CSS. And you can always get necessary help information by pressing F1 or using the special Help control. An internal free PHP Debugger allows you to validate your code locally.

Code::Blocks is a free, open-source, cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) primarily designed for C, C++, and Fortran development. Known for its lightweight design and modular structure, Code::Blocks offers a highly customizable interface with support for multiple compilers, including GCC, Clang, and Microsoft Visual C++. It features an intuitive, user-friendly interface with essential tools like syntax highlighting, code folding, auto-completion, and a robust debugging environment with breakpoints, variable inspection, and call stack tracing. Code::Blocks is highly extensible through plugins, enabling developers to add features like version control, scripting support, and custom build tools. Its lightweight nature, flexibility, and cross-platform compatibility make it a popular choice for students, educators, and developers working on small to medium-sized C/C++ projects.

Eclipse Theia is an extensible platform to develop multi-language Cloud & Desktop IDEs with state-of-the-art web technologies. Not sure whether you need a web or desktop version or both? With Theia you can develop one IDE and run it in browsers or native desktop application from a single source. The Theia project is hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation, and is developed by a diverse community. Unlike other "open-source" projects, projects hosted at an Open-Source Foundation are protected against single-vendor decisions against the interest of the diverse community. Theia is designed in a modular way to allow extenders and adopters customizing and extending every aspect of it. Composing a custom IDE-like product is as easy as listing all needed extensions in a package.json file. Adding new functionality by implementing your own extensions is easy, too and provides all the flexibility you need.

Built from scratch, based on 20 years of experience developing IDEs. JetBrains Fleet uses the IntelliJ code-processing engine, with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI. We built Fleet to be a fast and lightweight text editor for when you need to quickly browse and edit your code. It starts up in an instant so you can begin working immediately, and it can easily transform into an IDE, with the IntelliJ code-processing engine running separately from the editor itself. Fleet inherits the things that developers love the most from IntelliJ-based IDEs – project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick-fixes. Fleet’s architecture is designed to support a range of configurations and workflows. You can simply run Fleet just on your machine, or move some of the processes elsewhere – for example by locating the code processing in the cloud.

The xAI PromptIDE is an integrated development environment for prompt engineering and interpretability research. It accelerates prompt engineering through an SDK that allows implementing complex prompting techniques and rich analytics that visualize the network's outputs. We use it heavily in our continuous development of Grok. We developed the PromptIDE to give transparent access to Grok-1, the model that powers Grok, to engineers and researchers in the community. The IDE is designed to empower users and help them explore the capabilities of our large language models (LLMs) at pace. At the heart of the IDE is a Python code editor that - combined with a new SDK - allows implementing complex prompting techniques. While executing prompts in the IDE, users see helpful analytics such as the precise tokenization, sampling probabilities, alternative tokens, and aggregated attention masks. The IDE also offers quality of life features. It automatically saves all prompts.

CodeLite is a free, open-source, cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed primarily for C, C++, PHP, and JavaScript development. It offers a lightweight and highly customizable environment with support for multiple compilers, including GCC, Clang, and Microsoft Visual C++. CodeLite features an intuitive code editor with syntax highlighting, auto-completion, and code refactoring capabilities. It also includes an integrated debugger with support for GDB, making it easy to set breakpoints, inspect variables, and trace call stacks. Additionally, CodeLite supports Node.js and TypeScript development, making it a versatile choice for both desktop and web-based applications. Its flexibility, cross-platform compatibility (Windows, macOS, and Linux), and integration with popular version control systems like Git and Subversion make it a go-to IDE for developers seeking a lightweight alternative to more resource-intensive environments.

The PHP IDE project delivers a PHP Integrated Development Environment framework for the Eclipse platform. This project encompasses the development components necessary to develop PHP-based web applications and facilitates extensibility. It leverages the existing web tools project in providing developers with PHP capabilities. The essential starting point for PHP developers, including a PHP language support, a Git client, XML Editor and Mylyn, terminal. The experience of developing PHP application with PDT can be extended with a large variety of plugins created by the Eclipse ecosystem. Syntax highlighting, syntax validation, content assistance, code navigation, PHP debugging (Zend Debugger / Xdebug), PHP Profiling (Zend Debugger / Xdebug), PHPUnit, code formatted, refactoring, code templates, remote projects, and the whole power of the Eclipse Ecosystem.

The leading open-source AI code assistant. You can connect any models and any context to create custom autocomplete and chat experiences inside the IDE Remain in flow while coding by removing the barriers that block productivity when building software. Accelerate development with a plug-and-play system that makes it easy to get started and integrates with your entire stack. Become a leader in AI by setting up your code assistant to evolve as new capabilities emerge. Continue autocompletes single lines or entire sections of code in any programming language as you type. Attach code or other context to ask questions about functions, files, the entire codebase, and more. Highlight code sections and press a keyboard shortcut to rewrite code from natural language.

Supermaven lets you write code 2x faster with AI. Chat with GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4, and other leading models. Use hotkeys to quickly view diffs, apply changes, start conversations, and switch models. Easily attach recently edited files to your messages - Supermaven Chat links the model's code responses back to your original code to show diffs and apply changes. Fix errors by automatically uploading your code together with compiler diagnostic messages in a single click.