I first started coding in 1998. I got some free web space from Tripod and GeoCities and went to work making a web page. I found out that first day or so that if you knew what to type, you could make the background color of the web page green! For a very long time, I didn’t have the funds to actually own tools to do web programming, so I concentrated on learning what to type rather that what to use.
I downloaded every free coding tool I could find. There are quite a few now, but back then they weren’t that great. There were visual tools like Netscape Composer, but I found that they created sloppy code and were much less precise than I wanted. So mostly, I either used Notepad or tools like it. Yes, I used Windows for many years. When I do an article on Microsoft, you’ll know how I feel now.
And just a few weeks ago on a Windows server, I had to resort to Notepad instead of installing a big application, and it worked fine. Daily I use tools like pico for Linux and Mac OS X (sorry- I hate vi).
So- know the code and you can, and should, use anything available. It’s not the tool- it’s your brain.