Brackets is a free and open source text editor developed at Adobe under the MIT license, featuring inline editing, live preview, and a wide range of extensions.
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Vim
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Vim is an open source configurable text editor.
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Pricing
Brackets
Vim
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Pricing Offerings
Brackets
Vim
Free Trial
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No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Community Pulse
Brackets
Vim
Considered Both Products
Brackets
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Chose Brackets
Atom is very similar to Brackets as it is a javascript based editor. I haven't used it as much, I tried it briefly when I was having an annoying bug in Brackets. It has a very rich ecosystem of plugins. Some of my learned behaviors and tools from Brackets were missing. I'm …
It is hard to compare Vim to many other packages in the developer's stack of tools. It mainly does one thing, edit text, and does it better than anything else. For instance, you can't really compare it to Visual Studio Code because VS actually has a Vim plug-in so you can …
Brackets can handle most text editing problems, at least if you have a file small enough that it opens. But with so many free and open-source editors out there, it is easy to have multiple tools that fit specific niches. If you are editing HTML and CSS, get Brackets.
Vim does the job of being a good text editor well and is not attempting to solve other jobs as well. The relative ease with which it can be modified and extended makes it a good candidate for being a full IDE, but most of our users continue to use Vim as a second tool, for quick edits of a single file, or when remoting into a box, while keeping a full IDE for the day to day work.
The Live Preview feature is extremely helpful. You can make tweaks to your CSS and then see how it affects the pge you're coding.
The recently added file tree feature is really a time saver. You can move files with a drop and drag feature without ever minimizing the program.
One of my favorite features is the ability to update the core program with extensions. Some of the extensions are simple, like adding themes, while others are a offer a little more assistance like creating Lorem Ipsum text for you.
Vim is incredibly light-weight with little to no dependencies and is almost guaranteed to exist on any GNU/Linux server that you have. You won't have to worry about managing package dependencies to get it on any system that currently doesn't have it. It won't ever hog resources or be the bottleneck in your coding/editing process.
Vim is highly configurable. I would say extensible, but really, it's the configuration and plugin capability that I want to highlight. It can function and look like anything you want - that's why it's so popular even with coders who want to optimize it for everything from C/C++ coding to Python coding. Syntax highlighting, code linting etc are all supported. But for just text editing and viewing, you can make it look exactly like you want - and then because of its highly portable nature, if you use Vim on another system, you can just grab the configuration file and voila! you've got it looking exactly like you had set up in seconds!
Vim promotes productivity. Really, this is a no-brainer. with all it's shortcuts, and ability to map keys to functions, it really makes viewing, editing, selecting, tweaking, text files highly efficient.
It has some esoteric functions that are really useful. So this point is something that I find is underrated. Often times, when transferring files between different Operating Systems, or even moving files using different protocols (saying you're using SFTP to get a file from one spot to another, or then you're storing it on NFS and then moving it locally, etc), you'll get weird issues with the file that may not show up unless you can spot the glyphs visually - that's where Vim comes in. It has the ability to show the corrupted portions of a file in a visual way so you can easily see which portions of the file are messed up
While the benefits of having a terminal UI mostly outweigh the downsides, it would be nice to have mouse hover and drop-down features like in VSCode. Projects like Neovim and CoC help with this, but there's a long way to go.
Since it is so customizable, the user needs to maintain his or her development setup over time and make sure all the plugins work well together. This can be more challenging if many plugins and customizations are used.
Once you learn Vim well, any text entry field that doesn't use Vim keybindings will feel broken.
As far as usability, text editors are about as simple as you can get in the GUI world. The little features that make Brackets unique are intuitive enough that you don't really need a manual to find them and come to rely on them. If anybody knows enough about coding and markup enough to be looking for different editors, they will be up to speed before the download finishes.
I don't consider the steep learning curve to be a hinderance on the overall usability. I would rate this a ten, but to be honest a lot of people do get hung up at the beginning and just abandon it. However, for people who have made the moderate effort to get over the hump, nothing can be more usable.
Brackets has a very extensive support site. Everything is organized nicely for easy navigation. If you can't find an answer you can easily file an issue with them and they will be quick to respond. What's cool is you can also message them on Slack, if you request an invite first. Slack is a very popular program right now so it's great having that integration.
There is no commercial support for Vim. Thus, it will not get a mark beyond 5. However, community support is very good. You can easily find solutions for most of the problems in the community.
Brackets can be considered as the barebones version of a more complex piece of software like Dreamweaver. We selected Brackets due to the simplicity of the UI and the ease of use. In our case we do not need all the additional tools and gadgets that other, more complex software packages offer. We need something that's quick, easy, uncluttered and focuses specifically on our needs, which are seeing code and editing code. In this case no frills and complex UIs are required.
Vim's keybindings are a lot more complex than Notepad++. With that, comes a whole bunch of capability that Notepad++ just can't match. Emacs is comparable, in terms of capabilities--because Vim is built into so many unix systems, I chose to learn it instead of Emacs. Knowing both probably isn't a bad idea, but there's enough to learn in either camp to keep you busy
ROI is great. The version of the tool we are using is free so not a whole of lot “investment” went into it. And the work we can accomplish with it more than makes up for the “cost.”
The ease of use makes it simple for anyone new to the tool to start using it and contributing to the project.
