Artfully run by a one-man development team, the secret to Sublime’s success lies in the program’s vast array of keyboard shortcuts—such as the ability to perform simultaneous editing (making the same interactive changes to multiple selected areas) as well as quick navigation to files, symbols, and lines. And when you’re spending 8+ hours with your editor each day, those precious few seconds saved for each process really do add up.

Sublime Text

By abstracting a lot of the functionality usually left for developers to solve on their own, jQuery allowed more generous scope for creating animations, adding plug-ins, or even just navigating documents, than its predecessor, Javascript.And it’s clearly successful—jQuery was by far the most popular JavaScript library in existence in 2015, with installation on 65% of the top 10 million highest-traffic sites on the web at the time.

jQuery

Web dev tools that save time are your best friend, and one of the first things you’ll learn about code is that it needs to be DRY (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”). The second thing you’ll probably learn is that CSS is usually not very DRY.Enter the world of the CSS preprocessor, a tool that will help you write maintainable, future-proof code, all while reducing the amount of CSS you have to write (keeping it DRY).Perhaps most popular among them is Sass, an eight-year-old open-source project which pretty much defined the genre of modern CSS preprocessors.

CSS preprocessors: Sass

Wouldn’t it be great if you could edit your HTML and CSS in real-time, or debug your JavaScript, all while viewing a thorough performance analysis of your website?Google’s built-in Chrome Developer Tools let you do just that. Bundled and available in both Chrome and Safari, they allow developers access into the internals of their web application. On top of this, a palette of network tools can help optimize your loading flows, while a timeline gives you a deeper understanding of what the browser is doing at any given moment.

Chrome Developer Tools

Despite being around since 2012, the ever-increasing of people learning programming means that 2022 is going to be another bumper year for this tool beloved by the frontend community. There is almost no better way of showcasing your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets, and as a result their embeds are an increasingly common sight across coding resources online.

CodePen

HTML is usually the cornerstone of any front-end developer’s toolbox, but it has what many perceive to be a serious flaw: it wasn’t designed to manage dynamic views.This is where AngularJS, an open-source web framework, comes in. Developed by Google, AngularJS lets you extend your application’s HTML syntax, resulting in a more expressive, readable, and quick to develop an environment that could otherwise not have been built with HTML alone.

AngularJS

It’s every developer’s worst nightmare—you’re working on a new project feature and you screw up. Enter version control systems (VCS)–and more specifically, GitHub.By rolling out your project with the service, you can view any changes you’ve made or even go back to your previous state (making pesky mistakes a thing of the past).  The repository hosting service also boasts a rich open-source development community (making collaboration between teams as easy as pie), as well as providing several other components such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.

GitHub

Thinking about becoming a coder? Our guide to the best and most important frontend web development tools is exactly what you need right now.