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

• DiffCompare
• BeyondCompare
• WinMerge

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):
  • regex101.com
  • regexr.com
• Can I Use – The best resource to determine what CSS and JavaScript feature the major browsers support.