Adobe will end support for Brackets on September 1, 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Adobe will end support for Brackets on September 1, 2021

github.com

43 pointspestkranker59 comments

Not shocked at all. It’s hard to keep up with the pace of innovation in this space especially with a competitor as skilled as Microsoft in this arena. A text editor from Adobe never really made sense to me.

I am also surprised that Atom is still kicking and hasn’t done something similar

Was a great UI out of the box though I admit.

It did make sense. Adobe creates authoring tools and the web is a target platform. Think of Dreamweaver.

They also had HomeSite (originally by Allaire, then bought by Macromedia), which is also a text editor. However, it seems that they abandoned it right after acquisition of Macromedia.

originally by Allaire

Originally by Nick Bradbury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite

Yes, ColdFusion was the Allaire brothers. J.J. now does RStudio.

Ah the memories.

Homesite was great. Early versions of it were small enough you could carry it around on a 1.44mb floppy.

More like used to. There is like what, a single app for prototyping which is more on the mobile side. and the rest (Dreamweaver and co) have not been significantly updated for years. There is absolutely nothing left of the Macromedia era. Creating and fostering creative communities is something Adobe completely failed at. Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks had a vibrant ecosystem of plugins which was their strength.

As for their creative products, Photoshop and In Design are still king in the industry, because formats, but for how long? People in video editing are moving to Final Cut Pro, Da Vinci Resolve and co because of the lack of significant improvements in After Effects or Premiere.

I so appreciate your call out of the loss of the Macromedia ecosystem. The tools they created not only revolutionized the web but in terms of the “creators experience” we have yet to see the parallel of Flash. It makes me sad to think that rather than let the stronger parts of the Macromedia dna infuse Adobe, it seems like Adobe forced Macromedia fit into its larger, which in certain areas has been an as yet unreplaceable loss for creatives.

> …in terms of the “creators experience” we have yet to see the parallel of Flash…

Flash Professional lives! It has a different name and targets multiple standards-based formats (HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, Flash/Adobe AIR, SVG) now: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

Um....not really. It’s barely a shell of what it was.

Flash is no longer supported by browsers. Air is not supported by Adobe. Canvas and Web Gl maybe.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2019/05/30/the-future-of-a...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3403345/where-do-brows...

Over time, I've come to think that the golden age of Flash existed because the Internet itself had not yet become fragmented across app stores, social media and mobile/desktop viewports.

In the golden age of Flash, designers only had one viewport to build for. It was easier to bring attention to them too, as FB and Twitter were relatively new and didn't explicitly favor content created on their own platform (posts + videos).

With the exponential increase in user-generated content (Snaps, YT videos, blogspam, Instagram), there's pretty much no oxygen left for creators that are building things "just because".

Not gonna lie, I got by on Dreamweaver as an amateur web dev in the early 2000s. Made me some money while I was in college studying to be something else other than being a programmer.

Those GUI web layout tools were good. It made it so simple to make a webpage.

I made a site for a car workshop in Netscape Composer for like 20USD that they hosted on the ISP homesites you used to get. A friend made one for his dad's carpentry. We knew nothing about the web or programming.

The web has degenerated as a practical tool for the common man. It is programmer and SaaS lock-in nowadays.

>The web has degenerated as a practical tool for the common man. It is programmer and SaaS lock-in nowadays.

That's not really true. I can still use Notepad to create an HTML only document (remember learning HTML?), and host it on any site, and everyone can still view it on any platform. Don't even need Dreamweaver to slice an image up to do a layout in a table. Don't even need 100s of KBs of JS libraries to download to display it.

Just ignore the hype of whatever JS library is the fad darling, and go with what you know. The end user of the website probably won't care. Only other techwheenies on the internet will chide you for using such an antiquated method, and make fun of you for not being part of the cool kids.

I rather liked Dreamweaver for static sites that needed to be user-modifiable without some complicated backend. You could establish templates with clear descriptions of the content and turn it over to the end-user relativily easily. Now, I have no idea - I wouldn’t want to try and explain markdown to a church secretary.

>It’s hard to keep up with the pace of innovation in this space especially with a competitor as skilled as Microsoft in this arena.

In hindsight yes, but even a few years ago the 'lightweight IDE/Text Editor' scene was wide open with no clear winner. You had products like Sublime Text, TextMate (mac), Atom, Brackets, and a bunch of other ones competing for mindshare.

Brackets killer feature was beginner friendliness. You can type some HTML, CSS, and Javascript and you can watch it render live right there in front of you, without having to open a browser window. The very first time I sat down to try to learn some code, I tested sublime text and brackets and went with brackets because I didn't really know how to structure a development workflow. Its kind of similar to Thonny for python in that regard.

  IDEs, Editors come and go. 
  Programming language become hot and cold.
  Only thing guaranteed in life is Vim and Emacs.

And if Vim and Emacs are guaranteed, C is implicitly guaranteed.

*nix.

And lisp :-).

VisualStudio Code is really taking over, at least in terms of the commercial world. I wonder if GitHub’s Atom is next.

I tried both and VS Code is a clear winner. I think Microsoft is keeping Atom around as a "consolation prize" to the people they acquired.

Given Microsoft's ownership of Github, I suspect it's inevitable. If anything, I'm surprised that it hasn't already happened.

There is no point in killing something which is already dead.

You will only get bad press. Much easier to let it rot.

There's plenty of point. Rotted projects are bad press.

That sounds like something you wish is true, not a reality. I can't think of a project left to rot that got notable bad press, but I can think of tons of cancelled ones that left sour tastes in people's mouths. From a brand perspective, rot is 100% the right call.

Google AppEngine (python variant) has been rotting forever. It's still stuck on Python 2 and has received no API improvements.

1. That doesn't mean killing it is worse, and I'd go as far as to say this case is objectively better to let rot. Imagine the outrage and brand stink that would create for Google, who is already known for killing things liberally, in a product space that is focused on longterm reliability. By letting it rot, people who deployed and are just leaving on autopilot don't have to do anything, and GCP offers lots of alternatives that can use Python 3.

2. Bad product management / development speed seems to be the case here, not rot or killing, as it seems it's actually not stuck on Python 2 anymore, or for long [1]

3. Even if neither of the two things above were true, I have seen no bad press on GCP due to this, and I'm a heavy GCP user, though just not in this niche. I've used Python cloud functions as well as GAE though.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python3

That is typical Microsoft though, they won't shutdown the plug, but will stop talking about it, you won't see any references anywhere and eventually everyone moves away.

Since VS Code is open-source under an MIT license, it's hard to complain! I'm glad to be using a single editor for almost all my coding, customized just the way I like.

VS Code is not as open source as you might think. A lot of critical functionality is in plugins that aren't FOSS, such as the Python plugin and the Remote plugins (Container, SSH, etc.). I think you're also not able to (or not supposed to? unsure) access the official plugin directory with an open source build.

I definitely appreciate that the core is open source, but using the open source version is less fun than it sounds. You really want to use the freeware proprietary VS Code to get a good experience.

If we're going to be using a proprietary text editor anyways, then I wish Sublime Text and its community were still as active as they used to be.

I still use Sublime Text to this day because it's far and away the fastest option among these usuals, and I do most everything else in a terminal. VSCode is turning into the Chrome of free IDEs and I really don't like that direction at all.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I'm missing in Sublime, anyway.

Unfortunately more and more of Microsoft's VS Code extensions are going closed source.

I use to love brackets, especially with the responsive plugin. That made responsive development so easy. But then visual studio code came along and I stopped using it apart from for the responsive work. When the responsive plugin no longer worked I stopped using brackets all together.

I still love brackets. I don't use any fancy plugins or even live preview. All I care about is speed and good search. What are my options?

Sublime Text?

thanks, bookmarked.

Sorry to be that guy, but vim might fit your needs well if you're ok with working in a terminal

I'm afraid I'm a nano guy. Though, I have never given vim a chance so maybe I should spend an evening with it.

Maybe Nova if you’re on a Mac.

Thanks, but it looks like Nova does too many things to my liking.

I’m not the target market, but if the first time I’m reading about a product is when it’s being discontinued, perhaps there were marketing and/or product/market fit issues.

I think they were right on the target market. It used to be a, perhaps, top five editor, especially for people doing front-end development. VS Code just came in and changed everything.

I'm a pretty happy VSCode user but I do find it pretty heavy and startup is pretty slow, even on my M1 Mac.

I used to love Sublime Text but it looks like it hasn't received much dev input recently, although it is perfectly serviceable. The TypeScript experience is still a way off VSCode's though and it would be nice to get an Apple Silicon build.

Does anyone have any recommendations for modern text editors? I use a bit of Vim from time-to-time but would struggle to make it my main editor.

Tempted to give https://nova.app/ a try.

> I used to love Sublime Text but it looks like it hasn't received much dev input recently

I think the devs are putting their effort into ST4 while unfortunately letting 3 somewhat languish. The same thing happened with the 2 -> 3 transition; 2 sat around without getting any updates for a long while, and then 3 was released.

I am a core Brackets user and have been since day 1, as a designer/animator that frequently needs to write code. I suspect that I'll continue to use it without support as it is, or possibly shift back to Sublime.

I have always preferred Brackets as a simple visual editor that I can add/write small extensions as needed, without complicating the UI or process flow.

I've tried many IDEs, used dreamweaver and BBEdit for years, tried to embrace VIM and EMACs, and found that even VSCode is more than I need.

Maybe something like codeshare.io is the future of my market, taking hints from Figma?

Brackets was the first text editor I used. I remember being in grade 11 computer science class and wowing my friends with the live-reloading feature for HTML sites. Good times

The live reload was so nice. Just click the icon and go, out of the box. It was also so fast it frequently made me forget I was typing in the html file and not on some content page directly.

On the subject of ending/killing products, Adobe shouldn't have abandoned Fireworks. If they had no use for it, they should just have donated it to an open source foundation like they did with Flex. It was an awesome tool and easy to work with...

such a strange juxtaposition -- on Github (was "open source central"), Adobe (commercial since day 0) announces BasicToolProduct is "over" ..

Please note, corporate discontinuation of software products is exactly why FOSS is not optional!

Brackets is released under the MIT license

aha - so is it a call for FOSS community participation ? Is it worth packaging in Debian or other?

> If you would like to continue using, maintaining, and improving Brackets, you may fork the project on GitHub.

https://blog.brackets.io/brackets-eol-notice/

There's also a blog post about it: https://blog.brackets.io/brackets-eol-notice/

I completely forgot about Brackets, despite having spent too many night shifts in it. And yet I’m kinda sad to see it go.

What a joy it was to use back then.

I still think Sublime text is the best out there

Reply on news.ycombinator.com