Sublime Text and Atom seem to be the light-weight kings of coding. Atom is free, Sublime nags you to purchase.
However, they’re text editors, as opposed to full-fledged IDEs.
Both require a bunch of add-in packages to get features up to par with full-scale IDEs, and are really great at customization, if you are very particular about how you code, and which of the various helper features you use for your projects.
More recently, Visual Studio Code (also based on the Electron shell that was built at first for Atom), has really taken off. It’s fast and well-endowed with polished features. Essentially, the difference between VSC, Atom and Sublime are marginal, in my opinion.
They all try to do the exact same things for you. Their community-provided packages / addons give you things like snippets, themes, automations, intellisense to some extent, linters, custom panels with all kinds of toys like an in-editor browser, slack chats, build and unit test views etc…
Webstorm is very popular and offers a lot of the above out of the box, but quite heavy-weight and perhaps a bit much if you’re still learning. Same for things like Eclipse-based editors (Nodeclipse, anyone?) and what have you.
Personally, I am an avid Atom user, having been with it since the day they open-sourced it. It allows me to use only those features I really need, and add toys as and when I want them. Most of the time, the only stuff I need is proper syntax highlighting with themes, automatic indentation and closing of tags and curly braces, and that’s about it. Especially while still learning!
P.S.:
I forgot Notepad++, which is probably the fastest among all of the above. It feels too much like Notepad to me, personally. But it’s eye-popping fast compared to Atom or Sublime and gets the basic text editing job done. Just don’t expect any major IDE features, although it does have a small plugin ecosystem.
