Brackets (text editor)

Brackets
DeveloperAdobe
Release4 November 2014; 11 years ago (2014-11-04)
Final release
2.2.1 Edit this on Wikidata / 22 March 2023; 3 years ago (22 March 2023)
Preview release
2.1.0-prerelease Edit this on Wikidata / 9 May 2022
Written inJavaScript, HTML, CSS
Operating systemmacOS, Windows and Linux
SuccessorPhoenix Code
Size~75 MB
Available in38 languages
TypeSource code editor
LicenseMIT
Websiteopensource.adobe.com/brackets.io/
Repository

Brackets is a discontinued free and open-source source code editor focused on web development. It was created by Adobe, is written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and is licensed under the MIT License. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. Its best-known features were Live Preview, which pushes edits to a browser as the user types, and Quick Edit, which opens related code inline.

Adobe released Brackets 1.0 on November 4, 2014, and ended support for it on September 1, 2021, recommending that users move to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. A community fork released updates until 2023. A separate successor, Phoenix Code, was announced by Brackets contributors in 2021 and now occupies the brackets.io domain.

History

Development

Adobe announced Brackets in June 2012 as an open-source project, having opened its GitHub repositories to outside contributions in May. Its source code is released under the Expat variant of the MIT License, with Adobe as the copyright holder. The desktop application runs inside a shell built on top of the Chromium Embedded Framework. Adobe also released a commercial distribution of Brackets, Edge Code, as a preview within Creative Cloud and part of its Edge tools. In November 2014, Adobe stopped developing Edge Code, moving its efforts to Brackets.

Version 1.0, released on November 4, 2014, added custom keyboard shortcuts, the ability to collapse Quick Edit results, and more accurate JavaScript code hints. Alongside it, Adobe released a preview of Extract for Brackets, an extension that pulled colors, fonts, measurements and other design information out of PSD files and generated CSS from them. Adobe discontinued the extension on June 28, 2016, citing low usage, and pointed users to the Extract panel in Dreamweaver CC.

In January 2015, Layers reported that Brackets was the 16th most popular project on GitHub, had more than 240 community contributors and averaged about 100,000 downloads per release, and that its users had written more than 400 extensions in the previous 18 months.

End of Adobe support

Adobe ended support for Brackets on September 1, 2021. Citing its partnership with Microsoft, it recommended that users migrate to Visual Studio Code, and invited anyone who wanted to keep developing Brackets to fork it. The final Adobe release was version 1.14.2, published in April 2020, and Adobe's GitHub repository has since been archived.

Community continuation

A community fork, Brackets Continued, was set up to keep the editor maintained. Its most recent release, version 2.2.1, came out on March 22, 2023.

Brackets contributors announced a second project, Phoenix Code, on August 30, 2021. Developed by the company core.ai, Phoenix Code presents itself as the successor to Brackets. It keeps Brackets's Live Preview and web-development focus on a rewritten codebase, and adds a browser-based edition. By 2026, the brackets.io domain served Phoenix Code's website.

Features

Brackets was aimed at front-end developers and web designers. It was optimized for HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and for related languages such as Sass, LESS and CoffeeScript.

Live Preview

Live Preview updating a page in the browser as the code is edited

Live Preview opens the current page in a separate instance of Google Chrome and pushes changes to it as the user types, without reloading the page. When the cursor is on an HTML element or a CSS rule, the matching elements are highlighted in the browser. For live HTML editing, Brackets serves the project from its own built-in server, which injects the annotations it uses to map the source code to the page in the browser. Live Preview can also load pages from the user's own local server, for example to run PHP, but then only CSS changes update live. Other files reload when saved, and highlighting works only from CSS files.

Live Preview had several limitations. It worked only with desktop Chrome, opening Chrome's developer tools ended the live connection, only one HTML file could be previewed at a time, and updates paused while the HTML was syntactically invalid. An experimental multi-browser mode lifted some of these restrictions.

Quick Edit and Quick Docs

Quick Edit opens related code in an inline editor within the current file instead of a separate panel or tab. From a tag, class or ID in an HTML file, it shows every matching CSS, LESS and SCSS rule in the project. From a JavaScript function name, it shows the function's body, even when the function is defined in another file. On a color value, it opens a color picker, and on a CSS timing function, a graphical curve editor. A related feature, Quick Docs, shows documentation for the CSS property under the cursor from Web Platform Docs.

Other features

Brackets can split the editor vertically or horizontally to show two files at once. It provides code hints for HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and its code completion was praised as fast. Early versions checked JavaScript with JSLint each time a file was saved; later versions used ESLint. The Theseus extension added a JavaScript debugger that could set breakpoints, step through code and inspect the values of variables in real time, including in pages open in Live Preview.

Because Brackets is built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, web developers can extend it with the same languages. Extensions and color themes are installed through a built-in Extension Manager, which draws on an online extension registry.

Reception

Reviewing Brackets for SitePoint in April 2014, before version 1.0, Lukas White called Live Preview "incredibly useful" and described Quick Edit as a "killer feature", though one "some way off from its full potential". He found code completion "really fast". He criticized JSLint running only when a file was saved, which could make the editor "feel a little unresponsive", and wrote that developers working mainly in Ruby, Python or PHP "might be better served looking elsewhere".

When Adobe ended support in 2021, It's FOSS questioned its recommendation of Visual Studio Code, noting that Microsoft's builds of the editor are not distributed under a free license, and suggested VSCodium instead.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Stewart, Ryan. "Brackets 1.0 and Extract for Brackets (Preview) Now Available". Brackets Blog. Adobe. Archived from the original on 8 February 2015. Retrieved 15 November 2014.
  2. ↑ "Brackets 2.2.1 release". 22 March 2023. Retrieved 24 September 2023.
  3. ↑ "2.1.1 Pre-Release". 9 May 2022. Retrieved 20 September 2022.
  4. ↑ github.com/adobe/brackets/blob/master/src/nls/README.md
  5. 1 2 3 Lehman, Adam (June 25, 2012). "Brackets: The Open Source Code Editor for the Web". Brackets Blog. Adobe. Archived from the original on January 5, 2013.
  6. 1 2 3 Ghoshal, Abhimanyu (November 5, 2014). "Adobe launches Brackets v1.0, an open-source text editor for Web designers". The Next Web. Retrieved 2026-09-24.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 White, Lukas (April 18, 2014). "A Review of the Brackets Editor". SitePoint. Archived from the original on December 31, 2014. Retrieved 2026-09-24.
  8. 1 2 3 Weber, Harrison (November 4, 2014). "Adobe launches its open source text editor Brackets out of beta, releases CSS extraction tool". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2026-09-24.
  9. 1 2 "Brackets – A modern, open source code editor that understands web design". Adobe. Retrieved 2026-09-24.
  10. 1 2 "Release 2.2.1". Brackets.io community. March 22, 2023. Retrieved 2026-09-24 – via GitHub.
  11. 1 2 "Project Phoenix: Brackets next generations". August 30, 2021. Retrieved 2026-09-24 – via GitHub.
  12. 1 2 "Phoenix Code | Free Open Source Code Editor with Live Preview". Retrieved 2026-09-24.
  13. ↑ "LICENSE". Adobe. Retrieved 2026-09-25 – via GitHub.
  14. ↑ "brackets-shell". Adobe. Retrieved 2026-09-24 – via GitHub.
  15. ↑ Stewart, Ryan (November 11, 2014). "Returning to our roots: Edge Code is now Brackets". Adobe Edge Code CC Team Blog. Adobe. Archived from the original on November 13, 2014.
  16. ↑ "Update about Extract for Brackets (Preview)". Brackets Blog. Adobe. April 14, 2016. Archived from the original on October 5, 2016.
  17. ↑ LaFontaine, David (January 16, 2015). "Adobe Dips Its Toes into the Open-Source Software Waters with Brackets 1.0". Layers. Retrieved 2026-09-24.
  18. 1 2 3 Das, Ankush (September 9, 2021). "Adobe Kills Brackets Code Editor & Suggests Using Visual Studio Code". It's FOSS. Retrieved 2026-09-24.
  19. ↑ "Releases · adobe/brackets". Adobe. Retrieved 2026-09-24 – via GitHub.
  20. ↑ "adobe/brackets". Adobe. Retrieved 2026-09-24 – via GitHub.
  21. ↑ Abraham, Charly P (March 4, 2026). "Brackets Editor in 2026: Phoenix Code Picks Up Where It Left Off". Phoenix Code Docs. core.ai. Retrieved 2026-09-24.
  22. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "How to Use Brackets". Adobe. Retrieved 2026-09-24 – via GitHub.
  23. ↑ "Theseus JavaScript Debugger for Chrome and NodeJS". Brackets Blog. August 28, 2013. Archived from the original on May 14, 2014. Retrieved May 14, 2014.