When it comes to web development tools, there are a lots of them available both for free and premium, from a simple text editor which can only edit HTML, CSS, JS files to a complex one which can display hint, refactor code. Among web development tools on Mac, CodeKit stands out. It is a feature-rich tool.
If you are a CodeKit user and move from Mac to Windows, the first thing you need to do is to download CodeKit for Windows. However, the software is Mac OS exclusive. You need to find an alternative.
What are the best CodeKit alternatives on Windows?
When finding an alternative, you need to look at these features which come from CodeKit.
- Style injection
- Sass/compass support
- Style minification
- Live preview (Refresh Browsers)
- JavaScript hints
- Image optimization
- And a modern interface
Koala is a compiler with GUI for Less, Sass, Compass and CoffeeScript, to help web developers to style websites more efficiently. It supports multi-platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac. The software features multi-language support, real-time compilation, compiler options for each file, error notification, and project settings. It is truly the best free CodeKit alternative for Windows.
Prepros is the most suitable choice as it is modeled after CodeKit. The editor can compile almost all pre-processing languages like Sass, Less, Stylus, Cssnext, Jade/Pug, Markdown, Slim, Coffeescript etc. It supports Live Browser Reload, which update latest changes to web browsers immediately. The premium version of Prepros costs $29.
Visual Studio Code is an open source editor for developing in all languages. With extensions, it is one of the most powerful code editors for front-end developer. It has all of the features which make CodeKit great on Mac OS. VS Code enhances syntax highlighting and autocomplete with IntelliSense, which offers smart completions based on variable types, function definitions, and imported modules.
Brackets is also a free code editor. Besides having similar features to CodeKit, it offers two more features which will make front-end development faster and easier. The first one is Quick Edit, which open a popup to allow developers to change style within HTML files and changes are updated to both HTML and CSS files. The second one is actions, which can help developers generate a block of codes using only a several words.
There are more great editors like PHPStorm, Sublime Text, but when comparing against CodeKit, the 3 mentioned ones are the most similar.
