2012-06-28

Brakets, the code editor

I've been doing a lot of HTML/JS/CSS development in the last year and most of this work has been done in Eclipse. Now Eclipse is good for this type of development, but with many 3rd party JavaScript libraries out there, it is hard to find good support for these libraries in IDEs.

So I am always trying to find a better HTML/JS/CSS code editor, having used Dreamweaver, Sublime Text and WebStorm over the past year, and now we have Brackets.

Brackets is an HTML/JS/CSS code editor, developed, interestingly enough in HTML/JS/CSS :) And it's goal is to be an editor focused on HTML/JS/CSS development. Right now, the currently available download could be considered beta 1 (or perhaps not even that) and offers very little. It does have two interesting features however. First, it connects with your browser, so as you edit your file(s) and the browser will auto-refresh to show you what your changes look like. Secondly, if you highlight say a Javascript function call or a CSS class and hit CTRL+E, you will get what's called "Quick Editing". Quick Editing, allows the related piece of code from another file to appear in an overlay in the current file so you can make changes right away and save them. Saves you the hassle of having to go open a file and look for related piece of code.

Apart from that, Brackets doesn't offer much, for now. There is no code auto-completion of any kind, as this editor is still in its infancy. And hopefully at some point, it will have 3rd party library support as well. You can actually recommend features or vote for exiting ones here. But it will be growing from week to week, so I recommend, checking it out from time to time, or even contributing to the project if you can!