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Developing webpages outside of Khan Academy

We provide an in-browser coding editor for you here on Khan Academy to make it easy for you to try out HTML, get immediate feedback, and share your work.
However, our coding editor doesn't let you try everything—both for security reasons and because it's hard to host a full-featured editor in such a small space!
Once you learn HTML/CSS here, you will likely want to start developing webpages in a more full-featured editor outside of Khan Academy, which would add features like multiple files, file search, and custom plugins. In any editor that you use, make sure you save your file with a filename that ends in ".html"— that's the file extension that is used for all HTML pages to make sure that both editors and browsers know what they are.

Online editors

One option is to use an online editor, similar to ours but with additional features. You might want to use an online editor if you have a computer that doesn't let you download apps or you want to use the same editor across multiple computers. Popular online editors are JSBin, Repl.it, Glitch, and CodePen. If you're on a ChromeBook, you can install a Chrome web app like Caret or Zed. Here's a video of me editing a webpage in Cloud9:
Khan Academy video wrapper
Editing a webpage in an online editorSee video transcript

Desktop editors

Another option is to use a desktop editor. An app is downloaded to your computer and saves the files to your hard drive. There are lots of desktop editors for you to pick from, depending on what OS and price you're looking for. Some popular desktop editors are Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text, Adobe Brackets, and Notepad++ (for Windows). Here's a video of me editing a webpage in Sublime Text:
Khan Academy video wrapper
Editing webpages in a desktop editorSee video transcript

Command-line editors

A third option is to use a command-line editor. If you're not already familiar with the command line, you probably don't want to go down this route since you'll also need to learn a lot about the command line first. On the other hand, if you love typing and navigating with your keyboard instead of your mouse, you might find you love command-line tools. Two popular command-line editors are Emacs and Vim, and they are often already installed on Unix-based systems like Macs and Linux. Here's a video of me editing a webpage in Vim:
Khan Academy video wrapper
Editing a webpage from a command line editorSee video transcript

Picking an editor

Which one should you pick? Well, you're welcome to just keep using the Khan Academy HTML/CSS editor for now. Eventually though, you'll want to get comfortable with at least one other editor. You might want to try out a couple different free options and see which one you like the most. You can also ask around to see what friends and colleagues use. It's often helpful to use whichever tool is most popular with your peers because then you can ask them for help.
For example, here's a graph of what my Khan Academy colleagues use. Some of them don't write HTML/CSS, so their favorite editor might not be a good choice for you.
Bar chart of editor preference—VSCode, Sublime, Emacs, VIM, in that order.
Last surveyed in June 2018, editor preferences are very subject to change.
If you're reading this and already use a different editor to develop webpages, you can share what you're using and why you like it in the Tips below. If you have any favorite editor plugins or browser development tools, share those too. Sharing is caring. 😊

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