I turned up a couple of interesting pages when I was trying to figure out if, as a wannabe front-end designer, I needed to get up to speed on Photoshop (short answer: yes, yes I do).

An answer by user SLaks at Programmers.StackExchange.com pointed out:

Large sites are developed with text editors, not visual designers.
Depending on the backend technology, people probably use Visual Studio or Eclipse.

Graphics are done in Photoshop.

Dreamweaver is not used.

But are Eclipse or Visual Studio still the go-to text editors for front-end design?

James Lutley is a front-end designer living in England. Last year, he posted a long article, My 2012 front-end web development workflow. His text editor of choice is Sublime Text 2. Among other tools, James is partial to SASS / Compass, Git / GitHub, and Markdown. One of his selections from 2012, Adobe’s Shadow, seems to be on the threshold of a major relaunch as Adobe Edge Inspect.

In 10 Front-end developer tools you can’t live without, WebDesignerMag asks, 

Ever wondered what the pros use in their day-to-day workflows?

Why, yes I was, as a matter of fact. WebDesignerMag also points to Sublime Text as their first choice for serious text editing. They also mention WebStorm and RubyMine, IDEs for Javascript and Ruby from JetBrains.

Besides text editors, the article discusses five different Javascript frameworks — backbonejs.org, emberjs.com, angularjs.org, knockoutjs.com, and meteor.com.