If you're looking for a text editor for your iPad that also doubles as an FTP client and a Dropbox client, look no further. The best one you could find is Textastic, a £6.99 ($9.99) app which not only does all of the above, but also includes features such as syntax highlighting. Let's start with a look at some of the best features it has.

FTP/Dropbox

Built right into Textastic is an FTP client, so you can upload and download files to and from your web server and edit them in the same app. The initial connection to an FTP server can be a bit sluggish, but once you're connected, navigating through folders is quite fast. You can then choose files to download and they'll be stored on your iPad for offline editing.

Screenshot of Textastic's FTP screen. A list of local files is on the left, with a list of remote files on the right. Files can be transferred both ways.

If you don't use FTP, you can also sync files to and from a Dropbox account. And unlike a lot of Dropbox text editor apps, it's not just plain text files. Any file that Textastic supports can be synced with Dropbox. It's also possible to create and delete folders in your Dropbox, as well.

Syntax Highlighting

One of the most important features in a code editor is syntax highlighting, and Textastic doesn't disappoint. I haven't counted exactly, but around 80 file extensions are supported and come with proper highlighting. That includes not only really commonplace filetypes like CSS, HTML, C and Java, but also some rather obscure ones like Fortran, Prolog, Scala and Verilog. There are so many others with support that I've never even heard of most of them.

A screenshot of a CSS file being edited in Textastic. The text is highlighted in blues and purples to show the CSS syntax.

Extended Keyboard

One of the other big selling points of the app is the extended keyboard. There's an extra row of keys above the standard keyboard which offers common programming symbols, like brackets, slashes and semi-colons, most of which are buried two levels deep in the standard keyboard. It makes coding much faster than having to switch to the symbol view on the keyboard every few characters.

Textastic's extended keyboard, which has an extra row above the regular keys with symbols such as brackets, braces, quotes and HTML tag symbols.

There's one feature I'd like to see in the app that hasn't been put in, and that's automatic completion for brackets. Especially in CSS, I like to put the opening and closing brackets on separate lines, such as:

a:hover {
    color: #4bb14b;
}

It would be nice if after I typed the first bracket, the second was added on the next line for me, rather than having to type it myself.

Other than that one feature, though, the app seems to have everything I'd be looking for in an iPad code editor. I highly recommend Textastic if you're looking for this kind of app.