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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Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Microsoft offers Visual Studio Code, a text editor that supports code editing, debugging, IntelliSense syntax highlighting, and other features.
When I'm designing a specific page, I can line up all the folders and files in the left File Tree panel. This keeps me organized and able to find things as I need them. Once I'm organized, I'm ready to start coding. Brackets allows you to control quite a bit of your environment, which contributes to your efficiency at coding in an effort free environment. One of the standard features of the color coding of tags really makes a difference. As I'm reviewing the code, generally I can quickly notice a missing </> or some other typo. Plus the color coding often helps you quickly find a particular line you need. And speaking of color, when you hover over a hexadecimal value in the code, a box pops up showing you the color of that code. This is particularly helpful when you have multiple colors and you want to make sure that your CSS is spot on.
If your Source Control Software is Team Foundation Server then skip Visual Studio Code. If you're using GitHub and are creating small projects Visual Studio Code is the way to go. If you need to create a large, enterprise-level application, Visual Studio Code makes it easier to set up interactions between related projects (client & server). If you're interested in getting back to the old way of using the command line to create projects and you know what to enter in the console window then Visual Studio Code is great. Visual Studio Code is a better choice if you don't know the console commands and prefer to make selections from a menu.
Editing CSS classes are done particularly well. It’s very simple and straightforward. Brackets will throw errors while editing so you know where you may have made a wrong turn. Very helpful
The simple UI is refreshing. Often times code editors throw too much on the screen. Brackets keeps it simple and it’s appreciated!
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.
Unlike for most languages I have used, Ruby and Rails support available for Code users isn't great. The most popular Ruby extension is unofficial, and leaves much to desire. As an example, code navigation even with language server Solargraph installed isn't as good as IntelliJ's RubyMine.
Even there is quite good support for a language or a framework, it is almost never as good as a dedicated IDE for it. In terms of the sheer number of features available, IntelliJ IDEs handily beat Code.
Microsoft has close-sourced some of the extensions it develops for Code itself, e.g. Pylance for Python, and that has not been perceived as a good move for open-source.
Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.
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.
Looking at our current implementation, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is perfect for writing code and performing debug operations. Integration with SVN repository is easy and changes can be tracked effectively. Microsoft Visual Studio Code supports developers to write code productively using syntax check and easy customization. Microsoft Visual Studio Code also provides support for IntelliSense which prompts suggestions for code completion. It is easy to step through code using interactive debugger to inspect the root cause of error quickly.
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.
Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting, Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.
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.
All the previously listed are incredible development environments that perfectly fulfill this function, but [Microsoft] Visual Studio Code goes one step ahead by providing flexibility, customization and adaptability to development environments with its own methodology, for all this productivity. of the work team is greatly increased helping to achieve the objectives set in the organization.
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.
I was able to use this to augment the lackluster web development editor used by Eclipse. I use Brackets for the view, Eclipse for the server logic and server plugin.
The amount of convenient open-source plugins have improved productivity (minification, formatting, beautification).
