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HTML should go into Brackets
August 05, 2019

HTML should go into Brackets

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with 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.
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.
This is an open source project and as such it has a support structure similar to many other products in this arena. The documentation is actually very well done and you can find information on most of the features or issues you come across. All the bug reporting and tracking happens through github. It can be slow to get solutions to bugs sometimes. I had one that took a while to get fixed. But it is refreshing to be able to keep track of not only the bugs you report but all the bugs under investigation for the entire project.
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.
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.