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adobe
brackets
JavaScript2012–2022
adobe / brackets · Archived

brackets

An open source code editor for the web, written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

37Distinct people
50Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
33KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An open source code editor for the web, written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 8:59:20 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year50 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-05-02 04:29:56 UTC to 2022-12-16 06:19:22 UTC.

0510152012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 2 submissions, 12 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 2 submissions, 1 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 3 submissions, 10 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 4 submissions, 3 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14212
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC321
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13310
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC743
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
⚠️ On September 1, 2021, Adobe will end support for Brackets. If you would like to continue using, maintaining, and improving Brackets, you may fork the project on GitHub. Through Adobe’s partnership with Microsoft, we encourage users to migrate to Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s free code editor built on open source. Welcome to Brackets! Brackets is a modern open-source code editor for HTML, CSS and JavaScript that's built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. What makes Brackets different from other web code editors? Tools shouldn't get in your way. Instead of cluttering up your coding environment with lots of panels and icons, the Quick Edit UI in Brackets puts context-specific code and tools inline. Brackets is in sync with your browser. With Live Preview, Brackets works directly with your browser to push code edits instantly and jump back and forth between your real source code and the browser view. Do it yourself. Because Brackets is open source, and built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you can help build the best code editor for the web. Brackets may have reached version 1, but we're not stopping there. We have many feature ideas on our trello board that we're anxious to add and other innovative web development workflows that we're planning to build into Brackets. So take Brackets out for a spin and let us know how we can make it your favorite editor. You can see some screenshots of Brackets on the wiki, intro videos on YouTube, and news on the Brackets blog. How to install and run Brackets Download Installers for the latest stable build for Mac, Windows and Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) can be downloaded here. Usage By default, Brackets opens a folder containing some simple "Getting Started" content. You can choose a different folder to edit using File > Open Folder. Most of Brackets should be pretty self-explanatory, but for information on how to use its unique features, like Quick Edit and Live Preview, please read How to Use Brackets. Also, see the release notes for a list of new features and known issues in each build. In addition to the core features built into Brackets, there is a large and growing community of developers building extensions that add all sorts of useful functionality. See the Brackets Extension Registry for a list of available extensions. For installation instructions, see the extensions wiki page. Need help? Having problems starting Brackets the first time, or not sure how to use Brackets? Please review Troubleshooting, which helps you to fix common problems and find extra help if needed. Helping Brackets I found a bug! If you found a repeatable bug, and troubleshooting tips didn't help, then be sure to search existing issues first. Include steps to consistently reproduce the problem, actual vs. expected results, screenshots, and your OS and Brackets version number. Disable all extensions to verify the issue is a core Brackets bug. Read more guidelines for filing good bugs. I have a new suggestion, but don't know how to program! For feature requests please first check our Trello board to see if it's already there; you can upvote it if so. If not, feel free to file it as an issue as above; we'll move it to the feature backlog for you. I want to help with the code! Awesome! There are lots of ways you can help. First read CONTRIBUTING.md, then learn how to pull the repo and hack on Brackets. The text editor inside Brackets is based on CodeMirror—thanks to Marijn for taking our pull requests, implementing feature requests and fixing bugs! See Notes on CodeMirror for info on how we're using CodeMirror. 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.) The native shell for Brackets lives in a separate repo, adobe/brackets-shell. I want to keep track of how Brackets is doing! Not sure you needed the exclamation point there, but we like your enthusiasm. What's Brackets working on next? In our feature backlog, the columns to the right (starting from "Development") list the features that we're currently working on. "Ready" shows what we'll be working on next. Watch our GitHub activity stream. Watch our Waffle Kanban board: Work items in are next. The entire development process is outlined in the Developer Guide. Contact info E-mail: admin@brackets.io Slack: Brackets on Slack (You can join by sending a mail to admin@brackets.io with the subject line slack registration request specifying the email addresses you would like to register). Developers mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/brackets-dev Twitter: @brackets Blog: http://blog.brackets.io/ IRC: #brackets on freenode Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

14 sources
>> Sourceforge looks like a sales page, listing features and downloads. >> Gitub has the contents of the source right there at the top This is a non issue (as far as I see it). Everyone that is interested in a project is not necessarily interested in submitting pull requests and contribute to code every time, all the time, right from the start. They might just want to integrate the project into their workflow to begin with. This is just as valid an assumption to make. While we are comparing projects, let us compare VLC player (a really huge beast) with something more comparable. For argument's sake let's take adobe brackets that is actually hosted on github. The proportion of people wanting to download the binary and use it would be much higher than the percentage of people interested in contributing code back to brackets. So I think that
Read the rest
people looking for Adobe Brackets would appreciate a link to the downloads page (similar to Sourceforge) rather than the pull request view... https://github.com/adobe/brackets/downloads
In Improved User Profiles
Brackets is fully extensible -- here's a getting started guide for writing extensions: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/How-to-write-extensio... The powerful thing about Brackets is that extensions (and the rest of Brackets in fact) are written in JavaScript, so basically every Brackets user has all the skills necessary to write an extension and customize their development environment. We don't have an easy way to customize key bindings yet, but it's on our backlog: https://trello.com/card/keyboard-shortcuts-stored-in-json-fo... https://trello.com/card/keyboard-shortcut-customization-inte...
In Brackets – open-source code editor built with the web for the web
The docs are a bit confusing - given the target market they should change 'Check it out' to demo or something, but there are binaries you can download for Mac and Windows, you don't have to sign up for the Adobe Cloud thing at all. It's a desktop app, and here's what it looks like: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Brackets-Screenshots A quick off-the-cuff comparison, not being familiar with all of these tools, I'm sure others will jump in and correct/clarify: CodeMirror - this is for embedding in pages only, and has no way of editing files etc, so you'd need to use a wrapper like: CodeMirrorUI - a wrapper using the API to add some editor-like functionality, but it's still not a standalone editor app. Light Table requires Java, and is focussed on Clojure (and JS?) right now, so although the ideas and interface have been borrowed from
Read the rest
in Brackets, it's not really in the same space right now, and is likely to diverge as time passes. Jsbin - this is probably the closest in feel to the Adobe offering, though it runs in a browser, not as a local app. That rules it out for me. So this is more like TextMate based on CodeMirror - it could be used as a replacement for another editor like Dreamweaver, Coda, Textmate etc, and while the focus is on html/css/js, it'd be nice to see them expand that eventually to other domains. I suspect though they'll keep it tightly focussed on html, css and js. It's worth downloading the demos here to try it out: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/downloads This looks like a really interesting new direction from Adobe, and an attempt to get back a bit of mindshare in a market where currently they are seen as a stodgy old dinosaur with products like Adobe® Dreamweaver®™. I'll certainly be keeping an eye on it as TextMate user currently, however I'd need support for other languages. Having had a little play with the download, I can say it's really not ready for primetime (only live edit of css is working right now, not even html edits), but what you can see looks really impressive, the UI is clean and works well, and if they have the language coverage of CodeMirror that would be really interesting (if not it'll still be useful, but could not replace TextMate for me for example). This might be worth a look in a few months when they have it all working properly.
In Brackets – open-source code editor built with the web for the web
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.
In Brackets: The Open Source Code Editor for the Web
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)
In Adobe Brackets: An open-source code editor for HTML/CSS/JavaScript

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