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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Sublime Text
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Sublime Text is a highly customizable text editing solution featuring advanced API, Goto functions, and other features, from Sublime HQ in Sydney.
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.
My CMS has a small window in which I can edit custom HTML/CSS. It can be expanded some, but not as much as I would like. It also displays all code as dark text on a white background. On a page where I am doing extensive custom coding, it is helpful to see it in a larger window and in a color-coded display so that I don't have to strain my eyes as hard. Especially when I'm trying to scan for specific elements and target issues and so that I don't have to scroll endlessly in a tiny window.
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.
In a world of free and open text editors, Sublime Text does ask for donations. You can use the product freely with only a very infrequent popup asking for donations. You can use it however long you like without paying, but it is well worth it to donate to.
People not used to the functionality may need a bit of time to get up to speed using the documentation.
An integrated terminal would be nice, but that is just a quibble. It's hard to find many cons with Sublime Text.
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 a programmers tool. As such a lot of the features and benefits are lost on a non-technical user. To get the most out of the tool you need to have a basic crash course in how it works and what it can do. The documentation and community are good, but it takes a bit of time to get up to speed.
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.
Never had to use their customer support before. There is ample documentation online so it's straightforward to find a solution to any problem you might encounter. For example, I needed to convert a string of HTML code to a properly formatted HTML file to "modify." Easy to do when there are so many users of the product who have needed to do that same thing before.
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 is more customizable and one can easily modify a lot of its features. On the contrary Visual Studio only has limited customizability features. Sublime text is also very light and not bloated as opposed to Visual Studio IDE. We also chose sublime because it has much better support for the majority of languages(especially Python) and I primarily work with python.
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).
