Lesson 2 of 30

HTML Editors

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You write HTML in a text editor. Any plain text editor works, but some editors make learning much easier because they colour the tags, complete your code, and show mistakes early.

Option 1: Notepad (Windows)

Notepad comes free with Windows. Open it, type your HTML, then save the file with Save As and choose the file type All Files. Name it index.html. Then double-click the file — it opens in your browser. Notepad is simple, but it has no colour coding and no hints, so it is slow for real work.

Option 2: VS Code (recommended)

Visual Studio Code is free, from Microsoft, and it is the editor most developers use. It colours your tags, closes them automatically, and shows errors as you type. Install it from code.visualstudio.com, open a folder, create a file called index.html, and start typing. VS Code even suggests tag names as you type them.

Other good editors

Notepad++ — free, light, and fast on Windows.
Sublime Text — fast and clean, free to try.
Brackets — built for web design, with a live preview.

Whichever editor you choose, remember two things: save the file with the .html extension, and refresh the browser after every change to see the result.

Tip: In VS Code, type ! and press Tab — it writes a full basic HTML page for you in one second.

Example

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
</head>
<body>

<h1>Welcome</h1>
<p>I wrote this page in my editor.</p>

</body>
</html>

Output

Output — how it looks in the browser

Try it yourself: copy the code above into a file named test.html, open it in your browser, and change the text to see what happens. That is how you learn — by changing things and watching the result.

HTML Introduction HTML Basic