Free HTML Editors / ASCII Text Web Editors
NoteTab Light This is the freeware sibling of the commercial Standard and Pro versions. It is a general text editor that has lots of features, including a useful "Clipbook" facility that has numerous HTML editing conveniences. Its commercial cousin NoteTab Pro comes with syntax highlighting.
HAPedit (HTML ASP PHP Editor)is useful for people who develop both dynamic and static web pages. It provides syntax highlighting for HTML, ASP, PHP, JavaScript; provides a project manager; features code completion, an SQL console, FTP manager, PHP code "compilation", integrated PHP help, brace matching, search and replace with regular expressions, statistics on your page (ie, rendered size, images, links, etc), and so on. This is a Windows program.
Arachnophilia This editor comes with built-in FTP facility, making it possible for you to author your web page and publish it without leaving the editor. It has a spell-checker, an internal browser view mode that is able to show your HTML changes as you type, a global search and replace facility across all open documents, built-in tutorial on HTML, JavaScript, frames; etc. There are two versions available—the older one runs on Windows systems, the newer one is written in Java and is apparently cross-platform.
HTML-Kit is a full-featured free editor for HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other text files. 400+ plugins are available for it, including HTML Tidy for creating standards-compliant web pages. HTML-Kit has received 95% thumbs up on Download.com user reviews with millions of downloads. {personal favorite}
PSPad is a full-featured text editor that you can use to edit HTML, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, C, etc. It even has built-in facilities allowing you to edit binary files. There is project support, the ability to directly edit files via FTP on your server, a macro recorder, search and replace in files, text comparison (differences between two files with the differences highlighted in colour), syntax highlighting, spell checking, internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla, integrated HTML TIDY (for validating HTML code and fixing them), code explorer for Pascal, HTML, PHP, XML (etc), matched bracket highlighting, etc.
Notepad++ is a source code text editor with syntax highlighting (C, C++, Java, C#, HTML, PHP, JavaScript, ASP, SQL, Objective-C, etc), multiple document handling using tabs, auto-completion of keywords (customizable), regular expressions in the search and replace function, macro recording and playback, brace and indent highlighting, collapsing and expanding of sections of code (to zoom in and out of pieces of code such as to provide an outline overview of your text/code), etc.
EditPad Lite is a general-purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, yet offer all the functionality you expect from a basic text editor. EditPad Lite works with Windows NT4, 98, 2000, ME, XP and Vista.
Free WYSIWTG (Drag and Drop Style) Editors
CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor is a Drag-and-Drop Editor with built-in FTP for Windows designed to help HTML, XML and script authors to edit, format, lookup help,validate, preview and publish Web pages. Extendable spell checker with multiple main and user dictionaries. Quickly preview pages in multiple external browsers. Validate documents using the graphical user interface for W3C's HTML Tidy and view automatically corrected code in the output window for side-by-side comparison.
Trellian WebPAGE is a free WYSIWYG web editor with a drag and drop interface, a preview screen that allows you to see your page under three common screen widths, built-in FTP uploader, table creation wizard, form creation tool, etc. It also has a syntax highlighting HTML editor for people who may want to switch to the HTML mode for some fine tuning.
Free Website design software This WYSIWYG web editor and site builder (click the "Downloads" page on their site to get it) features drag and drop website layouts, site management tools, a built-in FTP facility to publish (upload) your web pages, a photo gallery, a form builder, rollover images, support for Flash and Quicktime, an e-commerce tool, etc.
KompoZer Free is a WYSIWYG web editor that allows you to build websites in an easy way, using a visual interface. It is essentially an updated version of Nvu with bug fixes. You can learn how to create a website using KompoZer with thesitewizard.com's tutorial.
SeaMonkey Composer Free, the web browser suite from Mozilla, comes with a WYSIWYG web editor that allows you to quickly code web pages using a wordprocessor-like interface. For more information, please read the detailed review of the Mozilla Composer on thesitewizard.com. You can also find a comprehensive tutorial on How to Design and Publish Your Website with Mozilla Composer there.
Custom Design Help
Free DHTML Menu Builder 2.1 Create cool interactive sliding menus easily! Create professional-looking DHTML (Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language) menus for your Website, without writing a single line of code. (No HTML knowledge required.)
Magical-Mouse-over-Button Generator No additional equipment needed. The Magical Mouse-over Button Generator is a web page design wizard that automatically creates PNG, JPG, and GIF image files for captioned buttons along with sample HTML; and optional javascript code to pop up different images as your mouse passes over or clicks each button. All without ever using a paint program.
Big John Design Web Design and Consulting. Do you need quick help with your broken site? Maybe you want a fantastic new site with the latest bleeding edge CSS/JS layout tricks? Something in between? *Has some Great Tips*
Free HTML and CSS Validators
CSE HTML Validator Lite In addition to checking HTML syntax, can also check spelling and check CSS (the pro version will make the CSS corrections). Quickly change all tags and attributes to lowercase and automatically place quotation marks around all attribute values. Quickly change all the headers and/or footers of every page of your web site when you design your pages using the template tool. Strip HTML tags from HTML documents, leaving only the text.
Validator-Lite is a simple but rigorously-correct validator for HTML, XHTML, and other DTD-based XML languages. Its basic purpose is to offer a bare-bones GUI for users who find "raw" OpenSP tools such as nsgmls difficult or confusing. It is a lighter-weight tool than the webserver-based validators, and by installing everything locally it runs faster, and works when you're offline.
W3C Org CSS and HTML and XHTML Validators
CSSCheck is primarily a CSS1 checker. Many CSS2 properties are supported, but new CSS2 selectors will generate errors. Web Design Groups.
HTML Validator that is a Mozilla extension based on HTML Tidy and OpenSP. Both algorithms are embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending HTML to a third party server. HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla.
Listamatic CSS help in creating any kind of list you might want to use.
Free Find—Replace (download is on the right) This program allows you to find a particular piece of literal text in a set of files and replace it with another piece of text. A backup copy of the changed file is made, as well as a log for the last replacement made. You can specify that the match must be of an entire word, whether the search be case sensitive, and a few other criteria. (It's not regular expression based though, so the criteria you can specify is somewhat limited.) This is a Windows program.
Search and Replace FREE This program allows you to search and replace literal text or blocks of text in files matching a particular filter. It also has the ability to replace text begining with a particular string and ending with another string with a different text. It requires you to have installed the Microsoft .NET framework, and thus to be running Windows.
Office Software
OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
OpenOffice.org Portable FREE is a complete office suite—including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database— packaged as a portable app, so you can take all your documents and everything you need to work with them wherever you go on a USB drive.
NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.
Creators
Tomahawk The freeware version may not have all the bells and whistles of the full version of Tomahawk Gold but it is still one of the most advanced word processing/pdf creation software packages available for the Windows platform. "Major Geeks"
Photobie Design Studio (free—works with Vista) can create/edit high-quality GIF animations. Photobie Design Studio can also generate high quality PDF files and integrates most useful features which are essential for you to finish daily editing work within one environment.
Cute PDF Create professional-quality PDF files from almost any printable document. FREE for personal, commercial, gov or edu use. Now 64-bit Windows Vista compatible.
The pdf995 suite of products, Pdf995, PdfEdit995, and Signature995, is a complete solution for your document publishing needs. It provides ease of use, flexibility in format, and industry-standard security and all at no cost.
Readers
Foxit Reader is a free reader for PDF (eBook) documents. You can view and print PDF documents with it. Try foxit reader 2.5mb and experience no problems and/or updates required every few months. Free, of course
Editors
Foxit PDF Editor Version 2.1 is just released! The first and still the only REAL editor for PDF files, it allows you to easily and efficiently change contents in any existing PDF files. Allows you to fill out a PDF form electronically, even when it says it is non-fillable, and you can make changes and consolidate several PDF report files into a single PDF document.
Converters
doPDF is a free PDF converter for both personal and commercial use. Using doPDF you can create PDF files by selecting the "Print" command from virtually any application. With one click you can convert your Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents or your e-mails and favorite web sites to PDF files.
