At this time I am just starting out. Learning HTML using notepad on my PC. Is there a cheap app or software I could use aside from notepad on my PC?
Another vote for Visual Studio Code. Great functionality, good syntax highlighting (for me working in ES6 and JSX at least) and fairly extensible with freely available packages. Otherwise Sublime Text Editor is also worth a look.
Well.. just use Hashnode Search... Everyone here will probably just tell you again how good their favorite editor is, so you end up with too many choices anyway.
Since people already started to do exactly that, let me add my favorite editor. Kate. It has syntax highlighting and basic auto-complete. That's all you will need in the beginning, until you decide to go for an IDE :)
As far as IDEs are concerned, I personally use Atom. It's free. You can do a google search for the most popular packages for Atom and you can get a decent list of useful packages to install to increase productivity. If you are using Github, you might find Atom especially helpful.
Other free options include:
Adobe Brackets - my personal choice and it is a free code editor which is really user friendly and perfect for beginners. Simplicity is what I love about Adobe Brackets and if you want add more functionality, you can install extensions and customize it by their wide range of themes. It has auto-complete feature and live preview. The space it will took in you hard disk is reasonable but it will not eat more than 1GB of your hard drive.
Same thing with Atom editor but the thing is, it tends to get slower and performance wise, Atom might only be second in my choice but it is true that it is more popular than Adobe Brackets. Atom has Git and Github integration as well. Sublime is the third (never tried it yet) and last is Visual Studio Code.
Marco Alka
Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor
Kleo Petrov
Professional human being for 29 years
What you need is a text editor. Most of them are free. I would suggest to take a look at Visual Studio Code. It's a free, open-sourced text editor, made by Microsoft. It provides a great arsenal of features out of the box like:
The editor runs on every major platform and is updated on a montly bases. Make yourself a favor and don't use notepad for programming. You are a plethora of tools available, every one better than notepad.
If you don't like Visual Studio Code, you can take a look at Sublime Text (paid, with unlimited trial period), Atom (another great text editor), Brackets (not that popular, but still better than Notepad).