It was three years ago when Adobe has started to create its free open source text editor dubbed as Brackets. Since then, the company has been very busy adding new features to the text editor, aiming to help Brackets gain a world class status. The latest release, its 45th to be exact, is described as a big milestone for the Brackets project and the company's way of announcing to the world that Brackets is ready.
Brackets is an open source text editor that is created with web technologies and is aimed at Web designers and developers. Available for Linux, Mac and Windows, its prominent features include Live Preview for easy switching between source code and browser view when making quick edits, inline editors in some specific codeworks sans additional tabs or pop-ups, and preprocessor support. Users also have the option to download and use extensions such as JSHint and Git integration. These would help to increase functionality in the workflow.
"If you haven't looked at Brackets in a while, now is a great time to see the awesome stuff we've been working on," says Brackets in a blog post.
Brackets also has the capacity to collapse results from Quick Edit, allowing users to hide those results coming from files that are not intended to be edited. One example would be the generated CSS files when the user is working with SCSS or LESS files.
The program allows visual tools to blend into the text editor making designing in codes a whole lot easier. The latest additions include theme support, split view, multiple cursors and more. Moreover, it comes with Extract for Brackets in a preview version. This feature is a new Creative Cloud service that expedites the method of gathering design-related information such as gradients, fonts and colors from a Photoshop file and then turns it into CSS.
"We're excited about how this will improve the process of moving from design to development and speed up workflow," adds Brackets.
Users can opt to go to the Brackets Extension Registry and download the standalone extension version of Extract for Brackets. They can also get it with Brackets 1.0 in bundled form which they can download from brackets.io.
While the project is considered as a major milestone, the core team admits that it still has a long way to go in becoming the perfect code editor. They added that the next Brackets release is scheduled in 3 to 4 weeks. Some of the things that the team plans to be working on include adding more visual inline editors, making SVG editing more powerful, and enhancing the preprocessor support.
