The best one is the one that works best for you. HTML editors vary widely in terms of features, methodology, and target audience. There is no way to recommend a single best tool for everyone. If the program gets the results you want and you understand how to use it, then it is right for you.
There are many commercial programs that work as well. Some of them are listed in our Pre-Sales FAQ.
There are also many freeware, public domain, and shareware utilities for editing web pages. We don't have any specific recommendations in that area because things tend to change very rapidly. A great place to start if you want to learn more about these programs is the About.com HTML Editors page.
Some factors to consider in choosing a program are:
- Does it offer the option to publish your pages for you via FTP, or will you need an external program for that?
- If you want to use PHP on your site, will the program make that easier or harder?
- Do you like and understand how the program works?
The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET web site is entirely maintained using vi, except for one guy who insists on using emacs. We do not recommend learning these tools to people getting started with HTML or the Unix command line, as they are both general-purpose text editors. The newer tools are purpose-built for editing HTML pages and are much easier to learn.