

Brackets: The Open Source Code Editor for the Web - omarrr
http://blog.brackets.io/2012/06/25/brackets-open-source-code-editor/

======
patrickaljord
This looks pretty awesome, I was about to suggest you put it on kickstarter
but then realized it's already backed by adobe which is pretty cool. Could you
tell us how involved Adobe is in this project and what their goals are? Do you
plan to make it usable directly from the browser using the file system API? Do
you plan to support other languages such as ruby and python? Also you kind of
sound like Abed from Community :)

~~~
bsimpson
The only browser to implement the File System API right now is Chrome, and it
obfuscates the actual files it saves on your hard drive. I don't know that we
yet have a browser-based API that lets you arbitrarily access the user's disk.

~~~
charliesome
> _I don't know that we yet have a browser-based API that lets you arbitrarily
> access the user's disk._

I'd say that's a good thing.

~~~
SquareWheel
Well, if there is a proper permission system to go with it I don't think
that's a bad thing. We want web apps to become as powerful as desktop apps,
don't we?

~~~
densh
When it comes down to end users permission systems never work. Let's take
Android as example. It allows you to view fine-grained permission list for
each application which you are going to install -- that's good, right? For end
users -- not so much. They click "OK" just to remove all this useless
information and install their application right away.

~~~
grogs
I think it's true that the Android permission system is not very good; an
application with zero permissions can read everything on the SD card. However,
I'd like to think this is just a weakness in Android, rather than proof that
permissioning system for end-users don't work.

Are there any other recent examples of poor permissioning?

Maybe the fact that programmers are typically more considerate about this, but
it has no "real" benefit to end users, leads to the whole design/workflow not
getting much attention.

~~~
shawabawa3
The problem is that no matter what the app and what permissions it asks for,
99% of users will consent without thinking.

------
DeepDuh
Looks great, game changing in fact. It seems to be quite inline with Brent
Victor's vision (<http://vimeo.com/36579366>). One thing I'd like to see
stolen from his demo: Once you have direct visual feedback on what you're
doing, it makes a lot of sense to have widgets for your style definitions,
e.g. scales with handlebars and color pickers popping up when the cursor is
over values with corresponding type. It's a great thing that this project is
both funded and open source. Quite unexpected from Adobe tbh.

------
giulivo
I just wanted to give this a try, but the "single" part not written in HTML,
CSS and Javascript (the native shell it runs from) has not been ported to
Linux yet.

~~~
munchor
Yeah, when I saw "Built with HTML ...", I thought "Cool, it's cross-platform".

Well, maybe not really, since I can't use it on Linux...

~~~
jasonsanjose
There's 2 ways we can get to a Brackets running on Linux. The first option is
to add a linux target to the new CEF3 based brackets-shell app. We still need
the shell app to get native file system access. We've also experimented with
running nodejs on the client side and getting file access over WebSockets.
Brackets is then hosted on a nodejs HTTP server and run inside of Chrome
instead of CEF3. This solution works, but we haven't pushed this much further
than a prototype yet.

~~~
taterbase
Do you have a repo with this prototype? I would really like to see this
possibility pan out. I think using node to interface with file system is the
most feasible and portable at this point.

------
wetherbeei
Looks useful for static pages, but a lot of the shiny features wouldn't work
for any site designed using a template library (which is any dynamic site).

~~~
rorrr
Spot on. Any sufficiently complex website won't benefit from this. How would
your code editor know which CSS (or even beter, Sass) files apply to which
pages? No way.

~~~
bazzargh
I'm hoping sourcemaps come to the rescue. We already have this for JS, but the
support isn't deep enough. We need support for sourcemaps for templates and
css (and even sprites!).

There's some thought been given to multi-level sourcemaps, which are needed
for template->js->minified->concatenated... type mappings - see
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U1RGAehQwRypUTovF1KRlpiO...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U1RGAehQwRypUTovF1KRlpiOFze0b-_2gc6fAH0KY0k/edit)

Also there's something on the feature roadmap for firefox to cover css
sourcemaps. Not much info, but its a start:
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/Features/CSSSourceMap>

If you tried to apply the same thinking to everything in the UI, you'd hit
sprites soon enough. It'd be interesting to have enough info that given an
(x,y) in an image we can say what the source files were. This is the kind of
thing where the http header in that sourcemaps v3 proposal would apply.

~~~
jasonsanjose
+1. We (the core team) have discussed using sourcemaps to support the same
"live" browser workflows with preprocessors.

------
kennywinker
"Hey, this is pretty cool!" ... "Wait... Adobe!?!" - The Internet

~~~
swdunlop
I thought exactly the same thing.. I was totally on board and excited until I
saw, duhnduhnduhnn... "github.com/adobe/brackets"

Then I fled. And a lot of other people probably will, too -- Adobe has a lot
of things to make up for with the kind of people who could actually make a
meaningful contribution.

~~~
pcl
I'd say that launching an MIT-licensed project hosted in an environment that
trivializes forking should go a long way to allay the fears of the majority of
those kinds of people. On top of all of that, this is a line-of-business
application for them -- it seems fair to assume that a web IDE is something in
which Adobe will plan to maintain its investment.

------
jamesflorentino
Looks good but this wouldn't fit into the modern-day front-end developer
workflow. I'm talking about companies who use pre-processors like SASS, LESS,
Stylus, CoffeeScript, Jade, HAML, etc.

As for live code-editing feature, you can already do a lot of these stuff in
Chrome's developer tool.

Note: I'm a Vim user. Which I personally think is still the best text/code
editor in the world.

------
utku_karatas2
I suppose we'll be seeing more Codemirror based editors wrapped in Webkit in
the future. Well at least one more I'm sure, because I've been implementing
one too. You couldn't believe how fast one can actually churn a cross platform
mediocrish editor given all the great quality tooling (QTWebkit, Bootstrap,
Codemirror).

------
overcyn
The kinetic typography is too jumpy. Its hard to follow and becomes
distracting.

~~~
risratorn
The just listen, it's paraphrasing the guy word for word so I stopped reading
after a couple of seconds and focussed on the actualy live screencast parts :)

------
james33
Where have you been all my life? Oh right, it still doesn't fully exist yet,
but I'm excited to contribute because being a purely JS dev I could see this
saving me loads of time and frustration.

------
arunoda
This is amazing - The best HTML5 editor I've ever seen - I just forked this
and surely gonna send pull requests. Kudos for adobe and the team :)

------
james33
Opening the app's codebase by default is brilliant, really lowers the barrier
to entry for anyone on the fence about contributing.

------
edwinyzh
Great!

Quote from The Brackets blog post "There are a lot of text editors out there,
but not too many care exclusively about web developers" -- This is exactly why
I'm building LIVEditor (<http://liveditor.com>)

------
webjunkie
If you find the CSS live preview stuff cool, check out
<http://cssrefresh.frebsite.nl/> It's awesome. Even with complicated, nested
templates and CSS stuff.

------
Karunamon
Very cool app. I've been looking for a web-compatible code editor/pseudo-IDE
for a long time. This one looks like it may actually go places.

------
Ygg2
I've tried Brackets on Windows but changing HTML doesn't reflect on the page.
Have they implemented that yet or is it for CSS only?

~~~
jasonsanjose
Yes, CSS only for now. HTML is coming. Here's the story on our backlog
<https://trello.com/c/ZAlXxZue>

------
pyrogyn
There is also Eclipse Orion to look at for an open source web-based code
editor. It's in beta, still, but it has definite promise.

------
Vitaly
a js scriptable modern editor is a project I wanted to build myself, if only I
already had nuff time and money ;) no someone did it for me - how cool is
that!

Now we only need to figure out one thing - way to make it _properly_ support
vim bindings ;)

------
stratos2
looks cool, i suppose it could work for some stuff. but not for dyanamic
octopus web code.

------
comex
"We can also apply the same ideas to JavaScript development. Smash the Quick
Edit key on a function call and Brackets opens an inline editor with the
JavaScript function body ready for edit. Instead of managing documents,
developers can dive in and out of their code with ease."

What, not a single mention of Light Table?

~~~
Groxx
What, not a single mention of Code Bubbles?

~~~
Groxx
What, not a single mention of Smalltalk?

~~~
Groxx
What, not a single mention of the real world? You know, where if you hit
something with a hammer, it's hit with a hammer, and it applies the hammer hit
to the _real thing_ instead of you having to close the browser window to hit
the real thing again after simulating the hammer hit?

</oft-repeated comment thread>

------
meeech
+! for them having 'starter bugs'. searched to see its not new, but first i've
seen it.

------
cnp
This is a great effort, but it really seems like a ripoff of SublimeText,
design-wise.

------
cnp
I do have to say, though, that after seeing the video I'm pretty sold

------
pjmlp
blah, another web IDE thingy.

------
ilaksh
"Because it’s built in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, if you use Brackets, you have
the skills necessary to customize, extend and contribute to it. Easy to fork
and with a flexible and open license, it truly is your editor. In fact, when
you first open Brackets you’ll be looking right at the Brackets source code.
On the team, we use Brackets to develop Brackets in this weird inception-
style-yin-and-yang type of thing."

My thing is like that too, especially the inception thing, but its better for
a lot of reasons because its more than just an editor and is designed to be
easily extended with plugins/components.

<https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog>

<https://vimeo.com/43784316>

Anyway so good try Adobe, but if Adobe really wants to do the right thing,
support the open web, and build a really useful tool, they should scrap
Brackets, fork my project, and start promoting that. LOL sorry dickish thing
for me to say but true.

~~~
brntn
Judging by the git repo, brackets has been in development significantly longer
than your project. It also seems much more complete already.

And your project doesn't seem to be designed as an IDE, but rather a blogging
engine with a strange focus on code editing. How exactly are the projects
similar?

~~~
Stef_
After looking at the video on Vimeo it reminds more of Dave Winer's OPML
Editor (<http://home.opml.org/>)

~~~
ilaksh
Thanks for looking at the video. One thing I should mention is that I have
spent a day or so on the UI since then so it looks a lot more modern at the
moment.

Anyway, I don't see how my project is related to OPML Editor really.. then
again its not really easy to see the details of what that does from the web
site.

But anyway my thing is about GUI controls that include the front and back end
code and plugins to install them. GUI controls/widgets are an old and obvious
and proven concept. The separation between front and back end coding, CSS and
some other things that have happened with web development were practical
approaches for awhile, but now with the web as platform, they are obviously a
bit of a regression. There is just a very strong tradition now, a whole
generation of CSSers and RESTers that just can't think any other way and
unfortunately sometimes don't even talk to each other.

Widgets and plugins are a no-brainer.

So basically what we have confirmed is that I have more useful software
development knowledge than the entire web team at Adobe.

