In this post I want to share with you 7 completely free applications which can help you tremendously in web development.

Editor

And the first topic in our list is obviously the editor because you can't code without editor. And the most popular and completely free editor nowadays is VSCode. If you are using some other editor like maybe Atom, Sublime or whatever you prefer this is not the right choice.

Yes, it might be suitable for your needs but actually you might want to look on VSCode because first of all it is completely free, it is working on all operational systems and it has lots of plugins and support of modern things. For example TypeScript support you are getting out of the box without installing any additional libraries.

Also this editor is really fast if you compare it for example with Atom.

This is the editor that I would recommend to anybody

IDE

But sometimes people ask me "Ok but this is not really an IDE and I want a really powerful IDE for JavaScript and web development". And actually in this case I can't recommend for you a free solution but Webstorm or any tool from IntelliJ IDEA family will suit your needs.

As you can see here it is Webstorm which is actually the most popular IDE that you can find for web development. And it has lots of cool feature inside like auto complete, auto import, scanning your projects and wise renaming of all your files that you need.

So, nowadays I don’t see any point to look on other editors at all. You either need to use VSCode if you want something free and if you want a fully functional IDE then just pick Webstorm.

Working with API

The next in our list is an API tool and doesn't matter if you are a frontend or a backend programmer you must work with API. And actually the most popular and completely free tool is Postman.

And when I say "completely free" it means that I use it for general purposes. And yes there are paid tiers inside Postman and the other programs that I will mention here but even a free version is completely suitable for everyday needs.

So, first of all Postman will work on every operational system. You can type some URL and make any requests that you want for example GET, POST, PUT. You can provide some headers, body, different params and after hitting send you get a result. But it is not all, you also have here history of your requests, collections and it is really comfortable to work with Postman. This is why this is a tool that I am using in all my courses and actually during working every single day.

If you for some reason don’t want to use Postman there is another really popular solution to work with API. And it is called Insomnia.

As you can see here it is really similar you can do exactly the same stuff like you are doing with Postman. You can do your requests to any host with different methods. So which tool you should choose from these two? Actually this is just a personal preference. I prefer to use Postman because it is more popular. But all features that you will need exist in both of them.

Git

The next in our list is a tool to work with GIT. And if you for some reason don't want to use GIT from the console and I can totally understand that especially when you are a beginner then I highly recommend you to look on the Source Tree.

And actually from all applications to work with GIT I would say that this is the best one. You can use commands like pull, push, you can create branches, merge files, you see your list of previous commits and their descriptions, you can search, create new commit and much much more. This is fully functional graphical UI for GIT and I can highly recommend you to work with it because it is also working in all operational systems. And it is completely free.

Terminal

The next in our list is terminal. And if you are a web developer you would use your terminal to start your web server, to work with database or maybe just to write code inside. And here I have 2 possibilities for you.

First of all here we have an iTerm which is the solution suitable for macOS. This is the most popular solution to use there.

But if you are using Windows I also have a solution for you. Because actually default terminal inside Windows is complete mess. This is why here I have C mder for you, this is exactly what you need in Windows, because it will make your terminal super similar to linux or macOS.

Design

If you are doing some project sometimes you might need to create a design or at least a mockup of your page to see what you are doing. And actually for this I used Sketch application quite a long time. But nowadays I am using Figma.

Why is that? Because first of all it has a free tier, secondly it is super similar to Sketch but it is completely online tool. You can create different designs with it, collaborate with other people, share templates and do really different stuff there. And again this is not a free tool, they have here paid subscription but there is also a free tier. And actually if you don't have a huge project then free tier is completely suitable for you.

CSS

If we are talking about writing CSS I didn't use Bootstrap, Material or maybe Semantic UI really long long time because nowadays I use only Tailwind CSS.

And if you don't know what is this I highly recommend you to look at it. The idea is that you write HTML and you just use and combine helpers from this library. As you can see here in the example this is how your code will look like. You simply just write HTML like classes, states, paddings, heights, widths and much much more.

And actually I created my full website where I am selling my courses completely with Tailwind CSS.

So, if you want to implement your CSS really fast, take a look on TailwindCSS.

Testing

And the last application in our list is the tool for E2E testing. If you don’t know what is E2E testing, this is when we are testing what user did on our web site. For example user clicked on the button or user filled this register form. So, we are not writing unit test and we are not testing our code, but we are testing some behavior of the user.

And as you can see here the most popular solution is Cypress. You can easily start to test your web page and you can see your tests and every single thing, that is happening there. It is really easy to write tests with Cypress and debug it later. This is why I highly recommend if you want to test your applications look on the Cypress tool.

And also if you want to know how to become a senior developer I highly recommend you to check my 5 tips in this post.