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Brackets, a popular code editor, has gained a loyal following among users who appreciate its reliability and versatility. It is often …
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What is Brackets?
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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What is Brackets?
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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| Mobile Application | No |
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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.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.5.
The most common users of Brackets are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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Brackets, a popular code editor, has gained a loyal following among users who appreciate its reliability and versatility. It is often chosen as a reliable alternative to other code editors offered by the company. With its lightweight design and support for multiple programming languages, Brackets proves to be a valuable tool for software code writing. Users primarily utilize Brackets for editing HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP files. The live preview feature in Brackets allows developers to quickly view the results of their web application development, saving time and effort. Additionally, Brackets' extendable and customizable nature makes it an ideal choice for developers working with JavaScript, HTML, XML, and Java.
Web designers find Brackets particularly useful for creating new web pages or sites, simplifying the management of multiple pages. The image hover info and live updating browser view features are highly appreciated as they enhance productivity in web development tasks. Moreover, Brackets is a suitable option for managing codebases of company websites and developing browser extensions. Its ability to handle XML files with a simple and user-friendly interface makes it accessible even to non-coders. CSS and HTML classes in various web applications can also be efficiently edited using Brackets. Overall, users rely on Brackets for quick and easy code editing across a range of languages including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, and MySQL.
Live Preview Feature: Many users have found the Live Preview feature extremely helpful, as it has allowed them to make real-time adjustments to their CSS and instantly see the effects on the page they are coding. This feature has been praised for its convenience and efficiency in streamlining the coding process.
File Tree Tool: The recently added file tree feature has been widely praised as a time-saving tool by users. They appreciate being able to drag and drop files without needing to minimize the program, which enhances productivity and makes organizing files much easier.
Extensibility: Users have consistently mentioned that one of their favorite features of Brackets is its ability to update the core program with extensions. These extensions range from simple ones like themes to more advanced ones that offer assistance in coding tasks such as generating Lorem Ipsum text. The availability of these extensions has greatly enhanced users' experience with Brackets, making it a versatile tool for various coding needs.
Live Preview Issues: Some users have reported that Live Preview in Brackets occasionally fails to work when they need it the most, leading to frustration and inefficiency while working on projects.
Performance and Quality Problems with Plugins: Several reviewers have mentioned that some plugins in Brackets have performance or quality issues. While this is not directly the fault of Brackets itself, it can be a drawback for users who rely heavily on extensions to enhance their coding experience.
Slow Opening and Rendering of Larger Files: According to user feedback, Brackets can sometimes be slow to open and render larger files compared to similar applications. This can cause delays and hinder productivity for those working with complex projects or extensive code bases.
Users highly recommend Brackets for its simplicity and ease of use. They mention that it is a good text editor for web development projects, especially for beginners. Users suggest trying Brackets even if you already use another editor.
The interface of Brackets is clean and customizable, with an excellent dark theme. Users appreciate the live preview feature, which is beneficial for front-end web development using HTML/CSS. Additionally, users recommend checking out the free extensions available for Brackets.
However, some users note that Brackets may not be suitable for more advanced tasks or server-side work. Overall, users highly recommend Brackets for its simplicity, ease of use, and affordability.
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(1-4 of 4)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
This product is used by developers to develop applications using a wide variety of programming languages and syntax. The program is used by a limited number of developers and is not used outside of the technology department (to my knowledge). It addresses the needs of developers by providing an extendable, customizable, and rich editor for use with Javascript, HTML, XML, and Java.
- Javascript auto minification
- Code auto-completion
- Extensibility (custom add-ons) is easy to configure. Many are available for code beautification, formatting, syntax checking.
- Can be a little slow to open and render larger files at times relative to a similar application running on the same computer.
- Some plugins have performance or quality issues (not the fault of Brackets per se, but with the ecosystem of extensions).
- Color schemes, styling ease of use could be improved. For example, provide out-of-the-box schemes like "high-contrast, night-time, bold."
- Since this is an open-source tool, the ROI is very high. Anything it produces has a huge return on such a small investment of time learning to use the tool.
- The amount of convenient open-source plugins have improved productivity (minification, formatting, beautification).
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is superior to Brackets. Brackets are superior to Eclipse. I chose Brackets before Visual Studio code was available and have not decided to change for my web view development.
August 05, 2019
HTML should go into Brackets
Brackets is the workhorse for developing HTML and CSS projects. There is a lot of overlap in the world of text editors, and we actually use several, as they are useful for different things. The niche Brackets fills, it fills nicely, with a few specific conveniences. The specific features that make it such a time-saver are the image hover info and the live updating browser view.
- Image hover info. If you hover your mouse over an image link in the code, you get specific file information that is useful for the HTML, image size and dimensions, etc. ...as well as a preview.
- Live browser preview. You can open your working files in a browser and all saved changes are automatically updated. It doesn't seem like a big deal to go over to the browser and refresh, but once you get used to it, it is a pain when missing in other browsers.
- Brackets is still fairly small in the text editor arena, but there is already a rich ecosystem of plugins and customizations.
- It is actually fairly easy to create your own custom themes.
- Multiple cursors!! It is amazing to be able to insert multiple cursors and type the same thing in multiple places.
- As it is a javascript based program it can have some performance issues, especially with larger files (too large and it can't even open them).
- Themes are limited to the editor area, but it would be nice to be able to customize the file-tree and gutter areas.
- And the smallest quibble of all, make the open files area resizable. It's a little annoying to have to scroll up and down when you have plenty of screen space to see all the open files.
- As it is free and open source, it has been nothing but a benefit.
- It is a small and niche tool, but I use it daily and would miss it greatly if I didn't have it anymore.
- As the program is very simple it takes little to no explanation to get a new user up to speed.
- Sublime Text and Atom
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 sure there were third-party plugins to match it, but I never got the chance to dig into it.
Sublime Text is actually my other daily work horse and it compliments Brackets well. It is a compiled, native application. As such I can open the massive csv files (millions of rows) that Brackets just can't. They won't replace each other and they work well together.
Sublime Text is actually my other daily work horse and it compliments Brackets well. It is a compiled, native application. As such I can open the massive csv files (millions of rows) that Brackets just can't. They won't replace each other and they work well together.
December 18, 2018
Best for web developers, OK for everyone else
Brackets is used by me in my role managing my company website's codebase as well as some other websites that I run. I also use it for development of browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. It is a very web-focused text editor that has a good number of useful plugins to extend functionality.
- A clean simple UI with an excellent dark theme
- There are plenty of customization options and extensibility via plugins
- It is pretty fast and very smart when working with front-end website files
- The live preview mode is a nice feature when coding as part of a presentation
- The implementation of code-completion feels natural and effortless
- It has some readability issues with the fonts being too small on my personal laptop.
- It isn't as powerful as some new competitors.
- Brackets is free, so the ROI is really time-based. Brackets has saved me time in my web development over using a more simple text editor.
- Notepad++
- Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Brackets is kind of in the middle ground between Notepad++ and Visual Studio Code. It is a little smarter than Notepad++ (though both have a good collection of plugins) but a little slower and not quite as smart as Visual Studio Code. Brackets really favors the web developer, so it beat VS Code in some of the extensions. For example, I use an extension that compiles my Stylus code to CSS automatically. This is really slick and I don't have to think about it. The other two editors don't have similar plugins (though they could be created).
December 18, 2018
Brackets contains all your coding needs in one simple editor
While not used by the company as a whole, there are pockets of us that use this free code editor. I intially was using another product which was offered by the company, but eventually was removed as an offering. In speaking with another more experienced coder, he had suggested using Brackets. I downloaded the editor and have never looked back. When anyone comes to me for advice on editors to use, I let them know what is out there, but always guide them to Brackets.
- 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.
- Since Brackets is an open source software, it is always improving. So if you feel it is lacking something, shortly thereafter it almost always appears in the next software release.
- While using extensions are at your own risk, I have sometimes found an extension that caused a problem. It was easily resolved by deleting the software and then reinstalling.
- Live Preview sometimes doesn't work for me. While most of the time it does, it almost always seems to not work when I need it to work the most.
- As there is no cost to this open source software, the value you get from using it is immeciate.
- One way to give back, is to become a contributor to the software. They offer suggestions on whays to contribute like writing extenisons.
There are many different brands of code editors available. Sublime text, Notepad ++ and Coda come to mind. While they all pretty much offer the same core features, each has their own little intricacies, which usually means you pick the one which you personally like and become comfortable with. But one of the things I like about Brackets is it is supported by Adobe. Adobe has quite a few Creative Cloud applications geared towards internet/intranet development and maintenance. Yet, they are behind this simple but powerful tool. And when you have such a big mainstream company like Adobe behind a product, you develop a trust for that product. I actually have used a combination of the three products mentioned a few moments ago, and when someone recommended using Brackets, I decided to stay with it and delete the others. I’ve yet to regret that decision and I have never looked back.