Bluefish.

I bit the bullet and bought the Jetbrains Ultimate bundle because I develop in lots of different languages. It includes WebStorm and it is a joy to use. It helps where necessary and doesn’t get in my way…

vim

Depends on context, but

• Notepad++
• Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Code
• Double Commander “quick”-editor
• vim
• micro
• Firefox dev tools (console, dom edit)

When I write HTML, I don’t use IDE features but accept them in Visual Studio.

usually, calibre’s ebook editor, but that’s cause most of my html writing and editing is to make epubs.

Notepad++

I use Vim, but I don’t really write pure HTML. I write Markdown and convert it into HTML as needed.

Markdown covers 95% of my HTML use cases, and I embed pure HTML into the Markdown for the last 5%.

My Markdown tools (mostly command line utilities such as Pandoc) handle HTML inside Markdown quite nicely. A few need a special “hey, there’s HTML in here, pass it through unchanged” command line flag, if I recall correctly.

In a few advanced cases I’ll use a variant of Jinja2 template syntax, and convert that into HTML - often with some converted Markdown mixed into it at build time.

vscode with the built-in Emmet support.

Emmet isn’t intimidating, unless you don’t know CSS, in which case it is extremely intimidating.

a+b:
<a href=""></a><b></b>

a>b:
<a href=""><b></b></a>

a*2:
<a href=""></a><a href=""></a>

div.yeet:
<div class="yeet"></div>

A combination:
a>b+i*2.dollah:
<a href=""><b></b><i class="dollah"></i><i class="dollah"></i></a>

That’s 99% of what you need to know to get started with Emmet.

Anyway, I used to write 100% hand-written HTML, but switched to using Hugo because: Go’s built-in Templating language I knew from working with K8S, build-times are sub-second, and I can write a page in either Markdown or HTML, whichever I need (or even mix in some HTML in the Markdown!)

Because of hugo I don’t need to mess around with repeating parts (like the nav menu).

Only downsides:

• it strips the comments, which I would’ve loved to leave in for people to read
• the formatting is my favorite, so I format with prettier before committing

I use git submodules to have the public/ folder be my Github Pages host repo, so I can just muck about locally, while I do a rebuild (which changes the files in the submodule). Only after a commit, I’ll effectively publish the website.

Check out the website (mostly for the HTML - the articles are… meh): Thaumatorium.com (no trackers, so no Cookiewall nonsense either :D)

Thr nice thing about Emmet is you can use what you know and slowly add on to it. I don’t really use the CSS shortcuts. It’s really useful for writing HTML that requires a lot of elements.

my hands

The following isn’t any professional advice or anything, I am writing HTML manually for my hobby blog code. I don’t have much experience with HTML outside occasionally reading it.

I write a bit by hand, to layout my blog page, which is using HTMX. Generally I use RustRover since that actually gives details for attributes and such along with autocomplete. And apparently yesterday it asked if I wanted to enable HTMX support, which was even more intriguing. The main articles are however converted from markdown to HTML.

I do want a better way to design with preview of my page but I think it’s a long shot to find something that does HTMX at the same time. Especially since that often means having segregated pieces of HTML mixed into one document at page loading.

.

I just write everything in vim, including raw html.

Not sure what your use case is, but if it’s a static website you’d probably want a static site generator so you can write in markdown and then also include raw html for things that markdown can’t represent.

A keyboard.

Kate

Hands