Adobe Brackets: An open-source code editor for HTML/CSS/JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript

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63 pointsryanstewart25 comments

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)

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?

Adobe does lots of open source.... most of Flash is.

Well there's also PhoneGap (Apache Cordova), jQuery we contribute too and as well as Webkit now. On the enterprise side CQ/Day is built off Apache Jackrabbit which Adobe engineers contribute.

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.

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Adam Lehman Brackets Product Manager

Thanks for your thoughtful and helpful reply. :)

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

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.

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.

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

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/

"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.)"

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

Would be interested to see a demo or screenshots also!

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

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")

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?

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.

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)

Well, right now, the team is not really trying to market it, since it is super early / bleeding edge.

The design is also in its early stages, and changes quite often.

Ill see if we can get some current screenshots up, or even some of the design docs for what the team is aiming for. (there are also some posted below).

Update :

The team just added a page with some screenshots: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Brackets-Screenshots

(full disclosure : i work for adobe)

bleh, another web thingy editor.

Demo?

"built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript."

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

What does Java have to do with anything?

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

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