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.
N/A
UltraEdit
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
UltraEdit is a text editor from IDM Computer Solutions headquartered in Hamilton.
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.
Overall, a great tool for handling large files. Code formatting is very nice and customizable making it very easy to write scripts or SQL or any other language. It is easy to navigate and it remembers files and keeps them in context when shut down and relaunched. My analysts and programmers all use this editor every day.
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.
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.
As a program UltraEdit comes ready to use out of the box and requires very little setup for it to be extremely useful. It's flexibility among a wide array of tasks and files makes it a go-to for all our troubleshooting and data viewing needs. Timely updates and great support.
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.
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.
I have evaluated Notepad++ as an alternative to UltraEdit. In some cases, such as loading time, Notepad++ is a superior product. However, in terms of editing existing macros, and editing very large text files UltraEdit is a much better product.
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).
