No web designer or web design class is complete without Notepad++ (my favorite tool for working on web pages). Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/files/

FEATURES:

• It’s free
• It can be loaded and run directly onto a flash drive (out of the box)
• It has color coding for your pages and supports color coding for a huge number of languages (ASP, PHP, Python, & much more)
• It allows you to open multiple windows for viewing multiple pages (Right-click and choose ‘move to another view’)
• It has FTP built right in. If you want to upload your pages to a host, and you have all the settings for FTP, you can set up a connection and work directly on the host site or work on your local folders and click the upload button.
• There’s a launch feature, it should be set up to launch pages in browser (Includes Firefox & IE out of the box)
• And, for all the hello kitty fans out there, they even have a hello kitty theme where all your code looks like the hello kitty folks styled it (little known fact there).

Warning: setting Notepad++ theme to “Hello Kitty” may cause seizures.