What is the best editor for web development?

Emacs can do it all. :D

I have been very impressed by Sublime Text 2 (http://www.sublimetext.com/2). Use it as my primary editor ever since I discovered it.

I think geany is a pretty popular choice if you're not going to use a terminal based editor. It's pretty flexible and I use it for Python.

I use NetBeans. It's smart about markup, style (css, scss, less by plugins) scripting javascript, ruby, php, python via plugins, and it generally works for me. I fall back to GEdit and Notepad++ sometimes.

With the right plugins vim can be very nice for web coding, the zencoding plugin for vim is very nice. I keep all of my vim setup on github, take a look: https://github.com/safetytrick/strick-dotfiles

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2981

"Zen coding keys

let g:user_zen_expandabbr_key = '<c-e>'

let g:use_zen_complete_tag = 1

I usually go with an Eclipse variant.. Eclipse PDT and Aptana have worked out well for me. Currently using Aptana now. But really, anything that makes you more productive is good I think. Getting into IDE holy wars is pointless. Nobody wins and everyone ends up feeling the other person is retarded :)

Try emacs or vim, and stick with it for a month, learn a key combination each day. It's painful, but it pays off.

-- An emacs user.

I use vim in a dropdown console with my browser open full screen.

GEdit is a pretty decent choice on Linux.