Best Code Editors for Linux
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Compare the Top Code Editors for Linux as of January 2026
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This a list of Code Editors for Linux. Use the filters on the left to add additional filters for products that have integrations with Linux. View the products that work with Linux in the table below.
What are Code Editors for Linux?
Code editors are software tools that allow developers to write, edit, and debug source code for programming and web development. These editors provide essential features like syntax highlighting, code completion, auto-indentation, and error detection to enhance productivity and reduce coding errors. Many code editors also offer integrations with version control systems (like Git), debuggers, and build tools, allowing developers to manage their code and workflows efficiently. While some code editors are lightweight and focused solely on text editing, others offer extensive features and customization options through plugins and extensions. By providing a streamlined environment for coding, code editors are essential for software development, web development, and scripting tasks. Compare and read user reviews of the best Code Editors for Linux currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Windsurf Editor
Windsurf
The Windsurf Editor is a free AI-powered IDE and AI coding assistant that accelerates development by providing intelligent code generation and agents in over 70 programming languages and more than 40 IDEs, including VSCode, JetBrains, and Jupyter Notebooks. With Windsurf, developers can write code faster, eliminate repetitive tasks, and stay in the flow state—whether they're working with Python, JavaScript, C++, or any other language. Built on billions of lines of open-source code, Windsurf Editor understands and anticipates your coding needs, offering multiline suggestions, automated unit tests, and even natural language explanations for complex functions. It’s perfect for streamlining code writing, reducing boilerplate, and cutting down the time spent on documentation searches. Trusted by individual developers and Fortune 500 companies alike, Windsurf Editor is your go-to solution for boosting productivity and writing better code. Try Windsurf for free today!Starting Price: Free -
2
Visual Studio Code
Microsoft
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is Microsoft’s open-source AI code editor designed to make coding faster, smarter, and more collaborative. It supports thousands of extensions and nearly every programming language, offering developers a lightweight yet powerful environment for writing, testing, and debugging code. With AI-powered features like GitHub Copilot, Next Edit Suggestions, and Agent Mode, VS Code helps you code with precision, automate complex tasks, and streamline development workflows. It integrates seamlessly with cloud services, remote repositories, and tools like Git, Docker, and Azure. The editor is fully customizable, allowing you to personalize your layout, color themes, and keyboard shortcuts. Whether coding locally or in the browser, VS Code delivers a complete development experience for individuals and teams alike.Starting Price: Free -
3
Sublime Text
Sublime HQ
A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. Use Goto Anything to open files with only a few keystrokes, and instantly jump to symbols, lines or words. Make ten changes at the same time, not one change ten times. Multiple selections allow you to interactively change many lines at once, rename variables with ease, and manipulate files faster than ever. The Command Palette holds infrequently used functionality, like sorting, changing the syntax and changing the indentation settings. With just a few keystrokes, you can search for what you want, without ever having to navigate through the menus or remember obscure key bindings. Sublime Text has a powerful, Python API that allows plugins to augment built-in functionality. Package Control can be installed via the command palette, providing simple access to thousands of packages built by the community.Starting Price: $80 one-time fee -
4
Apache NetBeans
Apache Software Foundation
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.Starting Price: Free -
5
Atom
GitHub
Atom is a hackable text editor for the 21st century, built on Electron, and based on everything we love about our favorite editors. We designed it to be deeply customizable, but still approachable using the default configuration. A text editor is at the core of a developer’s toolbox, but it doesn't usually work alone. Work with Git and GitHub directly from Atom with the GitHub package. Create new branches, stage and commit, push and pull, resolve merge conflicts, view pull requests and more—all from within your editor. The GitHub package is already bundled with Atom, so you're ready to go! Atom works across operating systems. Use it on OS X, Windows, or Linux. Search for and install new packages or create your own right from Atom. Atom helps you write code faster with a smart and flexible autocomplete. Easily browse and open a single file, a whole project, or multiple projects in one window.Starting Price: Free -
6
Visual Studio
Microsoft
Microsoft Visual Studio is the industry-leading integrated development environment (IDE) for building modern applications across desktop, mobile, cloud, and web. It empowers developers to write, refactor, debug, test, and deploy software faster with intelligent assistance powered by GitHub Copilot and AI-driven workflows. With Agent Mode, developers can automate repetitive coding tasks, optimize performance, and receive contextual help directly in the IDE. The suite includes Visual Studio 2022, the comprehensive IDE for .NET and C++ development on Windows, and Visual Studio Code, the lightweight, cross-platform editor supporting JavaScript, Python, and dozens of other languages. Visual Studio integrates seamlessly with Azure, GitHub, and CI/CD pipelines, enabling teams to collaborate and ship code efficiently. Trusted by millions worldwide, Visual Studio provides the tools and intelligence developers need to build reliable, scalable, and secure applications from concept to release.Starting Price: $45/user/month -
7
Komodo IDE
ActiveState Software
Code faster with the IDE for today’s web languages – Python, PHP, Perl, Golang, Ruby and more. -
8
Overleaf
Overleaf (Writelatex Limited)
There's nothing complicated or difficult for you to install, and you can start using LaTeX right now, even if you've never seen it before. Overleaf comes with a complete, ready to go LaTeX environment which runs on our servers. With Overleaf you get the same LaTeX set-up wherever you go. By working with your colleagues and students on Overleaf, you know that you're not going to hit any version inconsistencies or package conflicts. -
9
Geany
Geany
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. -
10
Neovim
Neovim
API is first-class, discoverable, versioned, documented. MessagePack structured communication enables extensions in any language. Remote plugins run as co-processes, safely and asynchronously. GUIs, IDEs, web browsers can, embed Neovim as an editor or script host. Works the same everywhere, one build-type, one command. Modern terminal features such as cursor styling, focus events, bracketed paste. Built-in terminal emulator and strong defaults. Fully compatible with Vim's editing model and Vimscript v1. Start with :help nvim-from-vim if you already use Vim. The current stable release version is 0.5 (RSS). See the roadmap for progress and plans. With 30% less source-code than Vim, the vision of Neovim is to enable new applications without compromising Vim's traditional roles. Lua is built-in, but Vimscript is supported with the most advanced Vimscript engine in the world (featuring an AST-producing parser). -
11
UltraEdit
IDM Computer Solutions
For almost 3 decades, UltraEdit has been the go-to text editor for 2+ million users and many Fortune 100/500/1000 enterprise customers. Renowned for its power and performance in handling and processing huge files and data, UltraEdit is also a highly configurable and fully themed code editor with support for nearly any source language or syntax. Often called the "Swiss army knife" of text editors, UltraEdit is a powerful tool for users in a wide range of responsibilities and industries. From programming and project management to large file manipulation, from data sorting and column/block editing to remote (FTP/SFTP) file operations, from advanced file searching and text data reformatting, there's almost no problem that UltraEdit can't solve in the world of text editing. UltraEdit is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and is supported by a professional development team and customer service staff located in the USA. -
12
Zed
Zed Industries
Zed is a next-generation code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI. Written from scratch in Rust to efficiently leverage multiple CPU cores and your GPU. Integrate upcoming LLMs into your workflow to generate, transform, and analyze code. Chat with teammates, write notes together, and share your screen and project. Multibuffers compose excerpts from across the codebase in one editable surface. Evaluate code inline via Jupyter runtimes and collaboratively edit notebooks. Support for many languages via Tree-sitter, WebAssembly, and the Language Server Protocol. Fast native terminal tightly integrates with Zed's language-aware task runner and AI capabilities. First-class modal editing via Vim bindings, including features like text objects and marks. Zed is built by a global community of thousands of developers. Boost your Zed experience by choosing from hundreds of extensions that broaden language support, offer different themes, and more.Starting Price: Free -
13
Lapce
Lapdev
Lapce is a cutting-edge, open-source code editor focused on delivering a fast and responsive experience, particularly for developers working with large projects or complex codebases. Written in Rust, Lapce leverages the performance advantages of native development to provide a smooth editing experience with minimal lag. It features a clean, modern interface and advanced functionality such as multi-caret editing, split views, and integrated terminal support. With built-in support for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), Lapce offers precise autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and code navigation across various programming languages, enhancing productivity. Its extensibility, support for plugins, and focus on performance make Lapce ideal for developers looking for a lightweight yet powerful editor that balances simplicity with capability, appealing to both beginners and seasoned professionals.Starting Price: Free -
14
SlickEdit
SlickEdit
A true cross-platform, multi-language code editor, with support for over 60 languages on 9 platforms. Build or compile your project, then double-click on an error message in the Build window to jump to that location. Errors and warnings are marked with an icon in the left margin. In addition, the overview bar, positioned alongside the vertical scrollbar, marks the position of errors and warnings relative to the current scroll position in the document. To quickly scroll a marked location into view, you can drag the scrollbar slider to the mark, or click on the mark itself. SlickEdit's integrated debugging provides a convenient and easy to use front-end for many debuggers. Set breakpoints, step, inspect the stack, view variables/members - all the features you expect from a debugger. SlickEdit supports debugging for: GNU C/C++, Java, WinDbg, Clang C/C++ LLDB, Google Go, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, XCode, Scala, C# using Mono, Visual Basic using Mono, and Android JVM/NDK.Starting Price: $99.95 -
15
Boost Note
Boost Note
Boost Note is a powerful, lightspeed collaborative workspace for developer teams. Built to empower developers productivity with the most solid note taking experience for developers. Not just a GitHub flavored markdown. Put diagrams with Charts.js, Mermaid, and PlantUML in documents to maximize visibility. Choose from keymaps like Vim, over 150 themes, and more to create your own Markdown editor. Manage your documents programmatically. Grab an authentication token and access Boost Note's APIs via simple HTTP requests. Automate your documentation work with over 2,000 external tool integrations via Zapier. Collaborate with your colleagues and share information your way. Have all your teams in one shared workspace. Write documents as a team with Boost Note's realtime editing. Check revision history of a doc. You can easily roll back to one of the previous versions in one click. Keep your important data safe through granula access control based on workspace.Starting Price: $3 per member per month -
16
UEStudio
UltraEdit
UEStudio is built upon the world's best text editor, UltraEdit, and delivers additional features for teams and developers – like deep Git integration. You can clone, checkout, update, commit, push/pull, and more directly from within UEStudio to manage your Git repositories. As a Git editor, UEStudio combines the world's best text editor and the power of Git all within a single application. Edit and update your source files, then commit them with the stroke of a hotkey or the click of a mouse. You can easily merge branches in UEStudio's Git branch manager (or in the Git shell if that's your style). Quickly review and resolve them with UltraCompare's merge tool support so you can be on your way. UEStudio parses your project and source files to provide you with intelligent, automatic source code completion.Starting Price: $89.95 per year -
17
Kakoune
Kakoune
Kakoune is a highly efficient, modal text editor that focuses on real-time feedback and powerful, intuitive multi-selection capabilities. Inspired by Vim but offering its own distinct approach to modal editing, Kakoune prioritizes a selection-based workflow that makes text manipulation feel natural and fluid. Instead of commands operating on cursors, commands operate on selections, allowing users to edit and navigate with precision and speed. Kakoune features robust multi-caret editing, context-aware autocompletion, and extensive language support, with performance optimized for working with large files and complex codebases. Designed to be scriptable and extendable with shell commands, Kakoune integrates smoothly with UNIX tools, giving users flexibility in customization. Known for its responsiveness and adaptability, Kakoune is ideal for developers who prefer a keyboard-driven interface and appreciate real-time, immediate feedback in their editing workflow.Starting Price: Free -
18
Code::Blocks
Code::Blocks
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.Starting Price: Free -
19
Void Editor
Void Editor
Void is an open source AI code editor and Cursor alternative built as a fork of VS Code, enabling developers to write code with advanced AI assistance while retaining full control over their data. It supports seamless integration with any large language model, such as DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, connecting directly without routing through a private backend. Core features include tab‑triggered autocomplete, inline quick edit, and a versatile AI chat interface offering normal chat, a restricted gather mode for read/search-only tasks, and an agent mode that automates file and folder operations, terminal commands, and MCP tool access. Void delivers high‑performance operations, including fast apply on files with thousands of lines, alongside checkpoint management for model updates, native tool execution, and lint error detection. Developers can transfer all themes, keybindings, and settings from VS Code in one click and host models locally or via the cloud.Starting Price: Free -
20
Eclipse Theia
Eclipse Foundation
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.Starting Price: $0 -
21
JetBrains Fleet
JetBrains
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. -
22
PromptIDE
xAI
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.Starting Price: Free -
23
CodeLite
CodeLite
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.Starting Price: Free -
24
Firepad
Firepad
Firepad is an open source real-time collaborative text editor. It provides true collaborative editing, complete with intelligent operational transform-based merging and conflict resolution. Firepad can render documents using the CodeMirror, Ace, or Monaco editors, and its operational transform code borrows from ot.js. Behind the scenes, Firepad uses the Firebase Realtime Database for cloud data storage and synchronization. You can build any application that requires collaborative editing of text documents. Firepad supports both rich text and code editing out-of-the-box, and it's easy to extend for other use cases. Firepad was built by Michael Lehenbauer and the team at Firebase. There are many other features that could be added, please star Firepad on GitHub and send over a pull request when you have things to contribute! You can build any application that requires collaborative editing of text documents. -
25
Spacemacs
Spacemacs
A community-driven Emacs distribution. The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs and Vim! Spacemacs is a new way to experience Emacs, a sophisticated and polished set-up focused on ergonomics, mnemonics and consistency. Key bindings are organized using mnemonic prefixes like b for buffer, p for project, s for search, h for help etc. Innovative real-time display of available key bindings. Simple query system to quickly find available layers, packages and more. Similar functionalities have the same key binding everywhere thanks to a clearly defined set of conventions. Community-driven configuration provides curated packages tuned by power users and bugs are fixed quickly. -
26
Eclipse PHP
Eclipse Foundation
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. -
27
Light Table
Light Table
Connects you to your creation with instant feedback and showing data values flow through your code. Easily customizable from keybinds to extensions to be completely tailored to your specific project. Try new ideas quickly and easily. Ask questions about your software, to give you a more profound understanding of your code. Embed anything you want, from graphs to games to running visualizations. Everything from eval and debugging to a fuzzy finder for files and commands to fit seamlessly into your workflow. An elegant, lightweight, beautifully designed layout so your IDE is no longer cluttered. No more printing to the console in order to view your results. Simply evaluate your code and the results will be displayed inline. Developer tools should be open source. Every bit of Light Table's code is available to the community because none of us are as smart as all of us. -
28
jEdit
jEdit
jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it. While jEdit beats many expensive development tools for features and ease of use, it is released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Hundreds of macros and plugins available. Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the "plugin manager" feature. Supports a large number of character encodings including UTF8 and Unicode. Highly configurable and customizable. Every other feature, both basic and advanced, you would expect to find in a text editor. -
29
gedit
The GNOME Project
gedit is the text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. The first goal of gedit is to be easy to use, with a simple interface by default. More advanced features are available by enabling plugins. A flexible plugin system which can be used to dynamically add new advanced features. -
30
CudaText
CudaText
CudaText is a cross-platform text editor, written in Object Pascal. It is open source project and can be used free of charge, even for business. It starts quite fast on Linux on CPU Intel Core i3 3GHz. It is extensible by Python add-ons, plugins, linters, code tree parsers, external tools. Syntax parser is feature-rich, from EControl engine. Syntax highlight for lot of languages (270+ lexers). Code tree structure of functions/classes/etc, if lexer allows it. Code folding, multi-carets and multi-selections. Find/Replace with regular expressions. Configs in JSON format. Including lexer-specific configs. Tabbed UI, with a split view to primary/secondary, and a split window to 2/3/4/6 groups of tabs. Command palette, with fuzzy matching, minimap, and micromap. Shows unprinted whitespace and offers support for many encodings. Customizable hotkeys. Binary/Hex viewer for files of unlimited size (can show 10 Gb logs).
