The two most important tool-oriented decisions that need to be considered are, not surprisingly, centered around creating, editing, and managing the code through the development life cycle.
Development tools
Integrated Development Environment (IDE) options
It's certainly possible to write and edit code without using a full-blown Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Ultimately, anything that can read and write text files of arbitrary types or with arbitrary file extensions is technically usable. Many IDEs, though, provide additional, development-centric capabilities that can save time and effort—sometimes a lot of time and effort. The trade-off is, generally, that the more features and functionality that any...