

Adobe Brackets: An open-source code editor for HTML/CSS/JavaScript - ryanstewart
https://github.com/adobe/brackets

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ricardobeat
It doesn't run in the browser at the moment, the actual app can be downloaded
here: <https://github.com/adobe/brackets-app>

(you'll have to download the brackets repo too and put it inside the
`brackets` folder)

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follower
While it's obviously early days, what I find most interesting about this is
that it's (a) Adobe, (b) Open Source and (c) developing in the open.

Does anyone know more about how this came to be/what the plans are for the
future?

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adrocknaphobia
The history of the project is quite simple. We wanted to see if it was
possible to build a high quality code editor for web development in
JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The idea being two fold. The engineers working on
Brackets would experience the day-to-day development pains of building for the
web so they would be in a better position to innovate new solutions. The other
benefit is that most open source tools are out of the reach of their target
audiences. If you have the skills to use Brackets, you have the skills to
build Brackets.

Our original prototype ran completely in the browser using node.js for file
i/o. So why did we take it out of the browser and focus on the desktop first?
While we believe the future of development is heading towards the cloud, we
found that many people are still looking for traditional desktop tools. By
starting on he desktop and then supplementing with a cloud-based version, we
hope to help transition developers to this new model, without asking them to
give up what know and love.

Of course, it's not just about the cloud. Because we're developing on the open
web platform, we can go wherever that platforms goes. While it's not our
immediate focus we hope to build a version of Brackets optimized for tablets
as well as an embedded version that could run inside existing web application.

Adobe has committed some of its best engineering talent to the project for the
foreseeable future. If you check the activity on the repo, you'll see it's not
a part-time side project. We have a long way to go before we would declare
1.0, but we think we can get there for the desktop version within the year.

I invite everyone to join our mailing list
(<http://groups.google.com/group/brackets-dev>) or pop in to Freenode IRC
channel #brackets to chat w/ the development team.

\---

Adam Lehman Brackets Product Manager

~~~
follower
Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful reply. :)

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vamega
It doesn't work on Linux. The brackets-app only has code for windows and mac.

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tzs
It's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript running on top of CEF. CEF works on Linux, so
it should be pretty easy for someone to get Bracket running on Linux.

~~~
drivebyacct2
For those who don't know, CEF is apparently this:
<http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/>

I had just wondered last week if something nice like this existed.

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tar
This is Win/Mac only. There does not seem to be a Linux version.

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doodyhead
I don't think the world needs another desktop editor, but it'll be interesting
to see where it goes with web-based editing with Adobe behind it.

Ace seems to be a better alternative for now and is entirely JS-based:

<http://ace.ajax.org/>

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jmitcheson
"Although Brackets is built in HTML/CSS/JS, it currently runs as a desktop
application in a thin native shell, so that it can access your local files.
(If you just try to open the index.html file in a browser, it won't work
yet.)"

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micheljansen
Was impressed until I had to download 125(!) MB of Desktop app to be able to
run it.

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RoryH
Would be interested to see a demo or screenshots also!

~~~
samirahmed
Certainly agree.

Not even a link to a static project description page (as far as I could tell)

I couldn't find a single picture with a quick browse through. (I know this is
superficial) but no screenshot/screencast/videos is bad marketing and doesn't
get me as excited about a project

~~~
toni
Here is a quick screenshot[1] from the main window. It's still far away from
being really useful, but as an experiment, it looks decent.

I personally recommend Eclipse Orion[2], it's not as stylish as Brackets but
is fully functional and you can even import repositories from github.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/7Wa6p.png>

[2] <http://www.eclipse.org/orion/getstarted.php> (choose "Download and
Install Orion on your localhost")

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drivebyacct2
I tried to compare CodeMirror, Ace and Orion a while back. Orion... well, it
certainly feels like it's made by the Eclipse team. The splash page is flashy,
but Orion itself looks and feels terribly clunky.

I think Ace (part of Cloud9) looks nicer and as far as I could tell, did
everything Orion does. It also will import Git repos. Did you find anything
that Orion does particularly well or better than besides Git repos?

~~~
toni
I agree that Cloud9 looks very stylish compared to Orion. One thing i like
about Orion is comment and code folding features. I also liked how easy it was
to just download and run Orion, as opposed to "building" cloud9 with all the
dependancies and such.

But yeah, if you appreciate beauty, certainly going with cloud9 is the obvious
choice.

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drivebyacct2
Cloud9's repo includes pre-built binaries, I've never built cloud9 personally.
And both Ace and CodeMirror support code-folding.

I don't mean to nitpick, I'm working on something similar to these (with some
important differences) and I would like to pick the "best" core editor. Like I
said, is there anything else that Orion does better? I don't care about
appearance, they're basically all customizable to an extent that they can be
made it look identical. And for the most part, they all seem to support the
same features (obviously CodeMirror is missing things like Git repos because
it's only the browser-side of things)

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pjmlp
bleh, another web thingy editor.

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bprater
Demo?

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DavidAbrams
"built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript."

Why is that good? Eclipse is built in Java, and it's janky.

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chc
What does Java have to do with anything?

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drivebyacct2
Looks like the editor is based on CodeMirror from a brief peak at the source.

