My web developer tools in 2026
In February 2016 I published a post on my blog called "The essential apps." It was the first installment of a section I called Apps Of The Month, and in it I lined up everything that felt essential to, and I quote, "start your computing life one step ahead": Discord, then in early access, which I introduced as the replacement for TeamSpeak, Skype, Brackets, Adobe's editor with its Live Preview, Notepad++, the Piriform suite with CCleaner and Defraggler, and even Netflix, Waze and Runtastic. Ten years later, I reread that list before writing this one. The verdict is brutal, and fairly instructive.
What 2016 recommended, and what is left of it
Let's start with the dead. Brackets, the editor I championed for its live preview, was discontinued by Adobe on 1 September 2021, with a message telling everyone to move to VS Code. Skype, which I described as "that giant of communication" installed by default with Windows 10, was shut down by Microsoft in May 2025 in favour of Teams. CCleaner still exists, but Piriform was bought by Avast in 2017, and that same year a compromised build of CCleaner was used to push malware to millions of users. As for Defraggler, the spread of SSDs made its whole point moot: you do not defragment an SSD.
There are survivors too. Discord long outgrew the gaming crowd I aimed it at. VLC still plays everything, for free. Notepad++ carries on, unbothered. Waze still runs under Google's flag. But the picture is clear: in ten years, half of my "essential" list has vanished or changed hands. That gives you pause when you are about to write a new one.
The editor
In 2016 I wrote my HTML in Brackets and opened everything else in Notepad++. In 2026 my main editor is PhpStorm. A full JetBrains IDE that understands the whole project rather than the open file: code navigation, safe refactorings, continuous inspection, all in service of PHP projects that have to last. The irony is not lost on me: Brackets, the modern editor from a major software company, is dead, while the paid IDE nobody found exciting went the distance. And a single typeface everywhere, JetBrains Mono, the one from the IDE: crisp at small sizes, with ligatures that stay discreet.
The machine
A funny detail from the 2016 post: I noted "since I own neither Linux nor a Mac" before talking about Windows Media Player. Ten years later, I have stayed loyal to Windows, now version 11, but with WSL: a real Linux built into the system, where the projects live. The comfort of Windows day to day, and a development environment aligned with the production servers, which removes a whole category of deployment surprises.
The rest of the desk: a mechanical keyboard and two screens, the code on one, the site in progress and the logs on the other.
Around the code
I will not redo the list of technologies here, my stack and tools page already covers that, with the reasons behind each choice. This post is the rest: the tools that surround the code.
GitHub hosts everything, and continuous integration runs on every commit, not when I remember to. Docker guarantees the same environment everywhere, from my machine to production. For the site's images, everything goes through an Imagick pipeline, never GD, which shifts colours and mislabels some AVIF files. And for visit statistics, a self-hosted, cookie-free analytics setup, the same one running on this site: useful numbers, with no consent banner to justify.
Design, admin, photo
An independent developer does not live only in the editor, and that is where the 2016 list, aimed at the general public, no longer helps me at all.
For mockups and visual work, I have stayed with the Adobe suite: Illustrator for vectors and brand identities, Photoshop for the rest. It is the direct continuation of my years in graphic design, and my Illustrator tricks from 2016 still serve me.
For developing RAW files on the photography side: Lightroom Classic. A single catalogue, years of versioned edits, and a natural bridge to Photoshop when an image asks for more.
For quotes, invoices and freelance accounting: Accountable. A Belgian app built for the self-employed, which tracks VAT and deadlines without me having to maintain a spreadsheet.
For browsing and testing: Chrome, Firefox and Edge. The trio is enough to check that a site behaves the same from one browser to the next before it ships.
And the question everyone asks in 2026, the AI one: Claude Code runs here every day, as a pair programmer, for code generation and refactoring. Not to write in my place, but to type faster what I have already decided. I will come back to it in a dedicated post.
What ten years of tools taught me
Rereading the 2016 post left me with a simple rule: apps come and go, formats and habits stay. Brackets is dead, but the HTML I wrote in it opens everywhere. Skype is dead, my contacts followed. My projects, though, live in Git, plain text that will follow me onto any machine for the next ten years.
So my selection criterion has changed. In 2016 I chased the novelty of the month. In 2026 I pick proven tools and keep them for a long time. Fewer apps, better mastered. The technologies themselves, with the reasons behind each choice, live on my stack and tools page, and unlike the 2016 list, that one I keep up to date.
