We have evaluated over 20 free HTML editors for Macintosh against over 40 different criteria relevant to professional web designers and developers. The following applications are the best free HTML editors for Macintosh, both WYSIWYG and text editors, rated from best to worst. Each editor listed will have a score, percentage, and a link to more information.
Adobe Experience Design CC, or Adobe XD for short, is still in “Preview” and offering a free public preview on Mac OS X for anyone with an Adobe ID. XD is focused around two tabs: Design, and Prototype. The Design tab features simple vector and text tools, and is used for creating your design. Best Web Design Software (Review) 1. TemplateToaster ($49) – Best Web Design Software. TemplateToaster web design software is one of its kind and creating a buzz in the web design market with its high-end website design and immensely powerful yet easy to use drag and drop style editor.
Best Value: Komodo EditWhat We Like
Yes, Google also provides tools for web designers. However, Google Web Designer works more like Adobe Dreamweaver. It is not a pure HTML editor, but a combined WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) and text editor. The 10 Best Free HTML Editors for the Mac Finding the right HTML editor for the Mac doesn't mean spending a lot. If you write Java and web pages this is a great tool. Download NetBeans. But if you’re a designer by nature you might not like it. Unlike visual WYSIWYG web design tools, the text interface makes for much cleaner code. Bluefish has an excellent search function, allowing you to find text across multiple projects. Platform: Web browser; Price: $29 (standard) / $49 (professional) / $59 (business) per person per month Protoshare is an online tool with a focus on collaboration and sharing. It includes a library of drag-and-drop elements, a sitemap, and the ability to use custom CSS and insert your own elements.
What We Don't Like
Komodo Edit is hands down the best free XML editor available. It includes a lot of great features for HTML and CSS development. Plus, if that isn't enough, you can get extensions for it to add on languages or other helpful features (like special characters).
Komodo Edit is not the best HTML editor out there, but it is great for the price, especially if you build in XML. I use Komodo Edit every day for my work in XML, and I use it a lot for basic HTML editing as well. This is one editor I'd be lost without.
There are two versions of Komodo: Komodo Edit and Komodo IDE.
Best for JavaScript Developers: Aptana StudioWhat We Like
What We Don't Like
Aptana Studio offers an interesting take on website development. Instead of focusing on HTML, Aptana focuses on the JavaScript and other elements that allow you to create rich internet applications.
One thing I really like is the outline view that makes it really easy to visualize the document object model (DOM). This makes for easier CSS and JavaScript development.
If you are a developer creating web applications, Aptana Studio is a good choice.
A Full Featured Java IDE: NetBeansWhat We Like
What We Don't Like
NetBeans IDE is a Java IDE that can help you build robust web applications. Like most IDEs, it has a steep learning curve because they don’t often work in the same way that web editors do. But once you get used to it you’ll be hooked.
One nice feature is the version control included in the IDE which is really useful for people working in large development environments. If you write Java and web pages this is a great tool.
Best for LAMP Developers: BluefishWhat We Like
What We Don't Like
Bluefish is a full-featured web editor for Linux. There are also native executables for Windows and Macintosh. There is code-sensitive spell check, autocomplete of many different languages (HTML, PHP, CSS, etc.), snippets, project management, and auto-save.
It is primarily a code editor, not specifically a web editor. This means that it has a lot of flexibility for web developers writing in more than just HTML, but if you’re a designer by nature you might not like it as much.
A Powerful Multi-Language IDE: EclipseWhat We Like
What We Don't Like
Eclipse is a complex, Open Source development environment that is perfect for people who do a lot of coding on a variety of platforms and with different languages.
Eclipse is structured as plug-ins, so if you need to edit something just find the appropriate plug-in and go.
If you are creating complex web applications, Eclipse has a lot of features to help make your application easier to build. There are Java, JavaScript, and PHP plugins, as well as a plugin for mobile developers.
A Swiss Army Knife IDE from Mozilla: SeaMonkeyWhat We Like
What We Don't Like
SeaMonkey is the Mozilla project all-in-one internet application suite. It includes a web browser, email and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and Composer, the web page editor.
One of the nice things about using SeaMonkey is that the browser is built-in, so testing is a breeze. Plus it's a free WYSIWYG editor with an embedded FTP client to publish your web pages.
A Basic HTML Writer: AmayaWhat We Like
What We Don't Like
Amaya is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web editor and web browser. It validates the HTML as you build your page and displays your Web documents in a tree structure, which is useful for learning to understand the DOM.
Amaya has a lot of features that most web designers won’t ever use, but if you want to be certain that your pages follow the W3C standards, this is a great editor to use.
Straightforward and Stable: BBEdit 12What We LikeDownload Tools For Mac
What We Don't Like
BBEdit is a paid program that has a set of free capabilities (the same capabilities that the now-defunct TextWranger had. While Bare Bones Software, the makers of BBEdit do offer a paid version, you may find the free version does everything you need. You can review a feature comparison here.
Note
If you're using TextWrangler, it is not compatible with macOS 10.13 (High Sierra). However, the free (and paid) version of BBEdit is.
Today's Best Tech Deals
Picked by Macworld's Editors
Top Deals On Great Products
Picked by Techconnect's Editors
A crowded slate of Mac apps aim to make building a full-featured, modern website drag-and-drop simple. Many even support one of the most crucial new web trends: responsive design, which can automatically switch up your layout to look good on a widescreen monitor, a tiny smartphone, or anything in between.
While no single program currently offers all the power, flexibility, and simplicity I’d hoped for, I did find two particularly strong contenders that at least came within shouting distance of that ideal.
Top choice for complete beginners: Blocs
If you have no idea how to start building a site, start with Blocs (). At $70, it’s $10 cheaper than most of the other programs in this roundup. And thanks to its extensive library of well-crafted chunks of code, it makes assembling an impressively slick site almost as simple as snapping together a pile of Lego blocks.
Even before you begin, Blocs has done the hard work for you, building snippets of sample code that you can mix, match, customize, and stack. Just pick a clearly color-coded section of your design—header, body, or footer—and choose a chunk of layout to add, whether it’s a fancy screen-filling photo, a few columns of text, or a swath of smaller icons or images. Once it’s in place, you can tweak the template to suit your needs. At every turn, Blocs tries to sweat the small stuff so you don’t have to, including a navigation menu that’ll automatically update as you add new pages to your site.
Spartan but clear thumbnails help you choose which chunk to add next, and accurately represent what you’re getting. While you’re limited largely to that ready-made collection, Blocs offers a wide enough selection of appealing elements to build an appealing site. And since all the code’s prebuilt, every site you make in Blocs has responsive design support baked in, without any extra effort on your part. The sample site I built looked great on big and small computer screens, good on my iPad, and decent enough on my iPhone 5S.
Blocs’ balance between a sparse selection and effective results also applies to its feature set, including a limited but appealing roster of fonts, and its extremely basic control over text styling and padding. That deliberate simplicity helps keep new users from getting overwhelmed, and further flattens out the already gentle learning curve.
Blocs’ stark, dark design departs from Mac conventions, and some aspects take a little time to learn. Instead of bringing up contextual menus, right-clicking brings up a palette of individual page elements you can add to the existing code. Placing objects on the page can occasionally feel a tad squirrely, though it’s easy to undo mistakes or move a misplaced item.
Blocs is a work in progress, and its creator’s laid out an ambitious, intriguing slate of potential upgrades. For now, Blocs sets modest goals, but carries them out impressively well.
Top choice for everyone else: EverWeb
If you know just enough HTML and CSS to get yourself in trouble, trust EverWeb () to keep you out of it. It’s more flexible and freeform than Blocs’ do-it-for-me simplicity, and it’s full of thoughtful tricks to help users get around the program’s own limitations.
When creating a site, you can choose from an extensive slate of great-looking, up-to-date templates, or start from scratch. Like Pages, EverWeb lets you draw text and image boxes or other shapes directly onto your page, then position and style them as you wish. I liked the program’s clean design and well-crafted interface. It lacks a grid or guides to keep your page tidy, but EverWeb will automatically or manually align elements by their edges or centers. The layout engine sometimes had trouble accurately aligning full-width elements, but otherwise proved fun and responsive.
EverWeb offers more options for CSS styling than Blocs; it won’t give you precise control of every element, but it provides enough choices to make a nice-looking site. Top-notch prebuilt widgets, including image sliders, image galleries, navigation menus, and more, are easy to edit and customize, and they yield great results. I was particularly impressed with the PayPal widget, which lets you build a full-featured online store with minimal time and effort—an ability most rivals either don’t offer or charge extra for.
Rather than supporting responsive design, EverWeb provides mobile versions of many templates, and builds in an easy way to redirect mobile users to those pages from their desktop counterparts. That solution gobbles extra server space and bandwidth, but can also be less hassle than trying to reconfigure the same design to fit different-sized screens. Other clever workarounds let you expand EverWeb’s font roster with your own picks, a feature found in too few of its competitors.
The code EverWeb produced was somewhat messy in the version I tested, though by the time you read this, an update promising sleeker results may be available. Still, I enjoyed EverWeb’s terrific balance between friendly design and a robust feature set.
Top contendersMacaw
Macaw () talks a big game but doesn’t entirely deliver. Aimed at high-end pros, it offers more power and flexibility than any other program here. However, it’s also the most intimidating and frustrating app of the bunch, in part because it feels only half-finished.
Macaw excels at its finer points. You can tweak nearly every CSS style attribute via well-designed palettes, and build custom style classes to apply to any element on your page. Smart scripting support lets you drag in existing variables and color swatches as you write your code. And only Macaw offers pixel-precise control over responsive design, letting you set breakpoints at multiple screen widths, then rearrange your design to best fit each one.
But while it gets the little things right, Macaw seems to struggle with the big ones. I found layout exasperating, as if the program were always fighting me. The help files are sometimes confusing and often incomplete—bad news for a program as dense as this one. You can only add to its limited list of fonts by paying for a subscription to Adobe Typekit. And rather than focusing on fixing these gaps in the existing version, Macaw’s creators seem instead to be working on its new sibling, Macaw Scarlet, which promises even more sophisticated features.
RapidWeaver
If you just want to pour your content into a limited set of sharp-looking templates, with responsive design already built in, RapidWeaver () will work great. This powerfully extensible program can do far more than that, too‑but you’ll have to pay a good deal extra to unlock its full potential.
RapidWeaver’s by far the best choice here for building a blog or a podcast, with excellent, easy support for adding new entries and episodes. But I didn’t like how it forced me to flip back and forth between the raw content on my pages and a full preview of how they’d look online.
If you want to branch out beyond its small slate of templates, keep your wallet handy. The app’s online market of powerful plugins offers tons of new capabilities and professionally designed themes. But their considerable cost could quickly add up to more than you paid for RapidWeaver itself.
The rest of the packSandvox
Sandvox () loses points for its limited customization and big but outdated selection of designs. However, it’s delightfully easy to use, including a super-simple integrated hosting service that seems fairly priced for what it offers. And changing the whole look of your site is as easy as choosing a new template. I think Sandvox would make a great choice for teachers and students, or for parents who want to help their kids build a fun, basic site.
Sparkle
Sparkle () is a perfectly respectable app that unfortunately gets outshined by EverWeb, which feels like Sparkle’s very similar-looking but ultimately superior cousin. I give Sparkle kudos for at least trying to make it easy to add third-party web fonts, even if the execution’s a little clunky. Its preset page sizes for responsive design also work better in concept than reality. Sparkle could become a real gem, but it needs more polish first.
Freeway Express
Living up to its name, Freeway Express () is free. And if you endure its labyrinthine help files, you can build some nifty things relatively quickly. But its cluttered interface can prove frustrating, and it renders pages with such sorely outdated techniques—years behind every other app here–that you’re probably better off avoiding it. A paid pro version offers a much more power and sophistication, but also costs a whopping $150.
Bottom line
Text editors are cheap or free, as are resources to teach yourself HTML, CSS, and jQuery—all more intuitive than they sound, even for non-geniuses. But that education demands dedication, time, and persistence, especially since today’s cutting-edge code quickly becomes tomorrow’s cobweb-covered embarrassment.
If you’d rather opt out of that Red Queen’s race, you’ll at least have a few good choices, whether you pick Blocs’ sleek simplicity or EverWeb’s user-friendly flexibility. I suspect Mac users will have even better, more complete options for building websites in a year or two. But for now, those two are the best of the bunch.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.
Best Web Design Software For Mac 2017
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |