4 Best Modern Open Source Code Editors For Linux

Looking for best programming editors in Linux? If you ask the old school Linux users, their answer would be Vi, Vim, Emacs, Nano etc. But I am not talking about them. I am going to talk about new age, cutting edge, great looking, sleek and yet powerful, feature rich best open source code editors for Linux that would enhance your programming experience.

Best modern Open Source editors for Linux

I use Ubuntu as my main desktop and hence I have provided installation instructions for Ubuntu based distributions. But this doesn’t make this list as best text editors for Ubuntu because the list is apt for any Linux distribution. Just to add, the list is not in any particular priority order.

Brackets

Brackets is an open source code editor from Adobe. Brackets focuses exclusively on the needs of web designers with built in support for HTML, CSS and Java Script. It’s light weight and yet powerful. It provides you with inline editing and live preview. There are plenty of plugins available to further enhance your experience with Brackets.

To install Brackets in Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distributions such as Linux Mint, you can use this unofficial PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/brackets
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install brackets

For other Linux distributions, you can get the source code as well as binaries for Linux, OS X and Windows on its website.

Download Brackets Source Code and Binaries

Atom

Atom is another modern and sleek looking open source editor for programmers. Atom is developed by Github and promoted as a “hackable text editor for the 21st century”. The looks of Atom resembles a lot like Sublime Text editor, a hugely popular but closed source text editors among programmers.

Atom has recently released .deb and .rpm packages so that one can easily install Atom in Debian and Fedora based Linux distributions. Of course, its source code is available as well.

Download Atom .deb Download Atom .rpm Get Atom source code

Lime Text

So you like Sublime Text editor but you are not comfortable with the fact that it is not open source. No worries. We have an open source clone of Sublime Text, called Lime Text. It is built on Go, HTML and QT. The reason behind cloning of Sublime Text is that there are numerous bugs in Sublime Text 2 and Sublime Text 3 is in beta since forever. There are no transparency in its development, on whether the bugs are being fixed or not.

So open source lovers, rejoice and get the source code of Lime Text from the link below:

Get Lime Text Source Code

Light Table

Flaunted as “the next generation code editor”, Light Table is another modern looking, feature rich open source editor which is more of an IDE than a mere text editor. There are numerous extensions available to enhance its capabilities. Inline evaluation is what you would love in it. You have to use it to believe how useful Light Table actually is.

Install Light Table in Ubuntu Linux

What’s your pick?

No, we are not limited to just four code editors in Linux. The list was about modern editors for programmers. Of course, you have plenty of other options such as Notepad++ alternative Notepadqq or SciTE and many more. So, among these four, which one is your favorite code editor for Linux?