Top 3 Code Editors For the iPad

We keep hearing about how people can do everything they would need to do on a desktop on an iPad now. Heck, Damon Albarn even composed the a new Gorillaz Album on an iPad.

But what about developers? Can you code on an iPad? Several developer-centric text editing apps have been released, but most fall a little short of what developers need to actually get their jobs done. We’ve narrowed the list of available code editors down to the three most useful.

Do use one of these for your development work? Is there a better editor that we didn’t mention?

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Textastic

Textastic ($4.99) is quickly becoming a developers’ favorite for coding on the iPad. It supports syntax editing for several languages, but has no internal means for handling FTP. However, you can always just use FTP On The Go.

Joshua Ellis, the developer behind Stikki and Dbasr, recently tweeted “Textastic + FTP On The Go = best code editing solution for iPad so far. Almost as good as TextWrangler on the desktop.”

You can find the official Textastic site here.

Gusto

Gusto ($6.99) was one of the first code editors of the iPad. It features Coda-like project thumbnails, tabbed editing and a built-in FTP client. One downside is that it doesn’t support syntax editing, but that’s promised in a future version. The official site is here.

CodeToGo

CodeToGo ($2.99) doesn’t have syntax editing or built-in FTP support, but it does have one feature other code editors don’t: the ability to test your code via the ideone.com API. CodeToGo can’t execute code locally, so an Internet connection is required to check your code. The official site is here.

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