From years of experience and use (and a few recommendations from other people), I recommend the following tools:
IDEs/Editors
- Visual Studio Code – Windows/Linux/Mac. It might be from
- Atom – Windows/Linux/Max
- Cloud9 – Browser-based IDE. The original version was better. Now owned by Amazon AWS and they’ve made a royal mess of the licensing, usage and documentation. Still good under the covers though.
GUI Git Managers
Command-line has its place but for the complicities of Git-based source control (and being a visual person), I prefer a good GUI for Git management.
- Sourcetree – Windows/Mac
- GitHub Desktop – Windows/Mac
- Git GUI clients list for all platforms.
File Compare and Merge
Web Proxy for Debugging
- Telerik Fiddler – Windows (Beta for Max/Linux)
- Charles Proxy – Windows/Mac/Linux
- OWASP ZAP – Windows/Max/Linux (I’ve not used this, but OWASP does good work in security and have seen others recommend it)
General Development Helpers
- JSON formatter – Great for inspecting large sets of JSON (and now XML and YAML)
- RegEx Testers (enter a regex expression, test it, find out what it does):
- Can I Use – The best resource to determine what CSS and JavaScript feature the major browsers support.