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Will Brackets and Atom give Sublime serious competition?


Joss
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Adobe have announced the end of the Edge Code project and are reversing back into their Brackets project.

http://blogs.adobe.com/edgecode/returning-to-our-roots-edge-code-is-now-brackets/

Atom (Github) have now launched a windows version of Atom in alpha and a more useful install with Chocolatey

https://atom.io/

These are two very well supported and functional products that look like they are hot on the heals of Sublime Text, which as a more mature product has a much slower dev cycle. (No new stable for months and months and the last dev in October).

This is an interesting market place - code editors which are more than just text editors, but are not the full on IDEs of Exlipse and Netbeans.

So, will people be looking to the new kids on the block or stick with the old faithful?

Brackets and Atom seem far more web orientated. Brackets particularly with its rather sweet live preview mode and inline editing of a separate CSS file. Very useful for prototyping.

Atom, of course, is neatly welded onto Github making that process much smoother.

Both are developed with a lot of HTML, JavaScript and CSS which should make creating extensions easier. (Would Anyone want to make a PW API "hint" plugin for Brackets? Interesting thought....). Brackets boasts that "Brackets is made with Brackets..."

All three systems look pretty similar, but have subtle differences. I have not installed Atom, so I will avoid comment, but it seems to be getting a lot of fans. I have only had the briefest of looks at Brackets, but as a photoshop user, the adobe extract extension, allowing html extraction of a photoshop original will certainly have some people interested.

I think I am agnostic, partly through laziness, partly because I already paid for Sublime and partly because I risk getting my self completely confused.

I think it will depend on workflow. If you tend to flow towards github, then Atom will tempt you. If you are solely web orientated, then Brackets is focused exactly in that area. If you have wider needs and want maturity, then Sublime ticks the right boxes. 

Sublime is the mature product of the three and it shows in many ways. But that does not mean it can keep its place at front - these others will mature too!

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I'll stay with ST though the slow development pace is a shame.

Though, what needs to be developed? I think we can get to a situation where we think a product has lost its way because it hasn't been changed. And yet, if it is doing exactly the task set out for it, why would it need to change?

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i tried atom but it is much slower than sublime text... but it looks cool with all the features it has

just today i was thinking about downloading brackets but i didn't find anything really interesting about it, or i was just too lazy to try and install it ...

so instead I downloaded new skin for sublimetext - spacegray 

:)

btw how does the live preview work ? something like in prepros ?

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In brackets?

You switch on live preview on the file and it opens up chrome (has to be chrome for the moment) and then as you type in the code it updates the page in front of your eyes. Same with editing css and so on. So it is not refreshing, but pushing the update continuously.

Quite fun! :)

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Though I tried brackets and atom I stayed with sublime text. With atom (one of the first puplic versions) I had the problem, that one would clearly see, that it's programmed in a browser. Not really snappy, small rendering issues all over the place. It just wasn't polished enough to bother. Brackets on the other side looks very clean and sofisticated, but does so only for html/css/js. But mostly I would miss the multiselect / multicursor thing from sublime text. It's such a great feature for programming. Wanna change some variable naming. Highlight it – Strg / CMD + D a few times – write new variablename. The only thing I really miss with sublime text would be some UI improvements. 

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May I ask what the advantages of dreamweaver over ST are when developing a static site?

One of the holds which Dreamweaver has on my worflow is the FTP element and the fact that it holds all my SiteProfiles.

If you're using ST and developing remotely, what are you using for FTP?

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Adobe have announced the end of the Edge Code project and are reversing back into their Brackets project.

http://blogs.adobe.com/edgecode/returning-to-our-roots-edge-code-is-now-brackets/

Brackets looks interesting. Having downloaded it and tried it for a few mins, it certainly has my attention. Not sure how useful the Extract engine really is but thats an optional add on.

Only reason I'd put the brakes on using Brackets as part of my tool kits is I feel I'm already overly invested/reliant on Adobe products. I use the Creative Suite platform and while overall, I think it's good value I don't necessarily trust them not to keep raising prices (Irish customers are already overcharged) and they have a habit of randomly culling products. Take Fireworks for example.

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One of the holds which Dreamweaver has on my worflow is the FTP element and the fact that it holds all my SiteProfiles.

If you're using ST and developing remotely, what are you using for FTP?

I use transmit, then mount the FTP server on my desktop as it is a local drive. Then you can work with FTP just as you would have done on your local drive.

Edit an image on FTP, no problem, just open the file in Photoshop and press save.

Want to edit a MS Word file on FTP, browse to the file, open it, edit and press save.

You get the idea.

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If you're using ST and developing remotely, what are you using for FTP?

I generally work locally, but if I need to, cyberduck lets me edit single files with every editor. It just downloads the file to a temporary folder and uploads the changes back again.

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In brackets?

You switch on live preview on the file and it opens up chrome (has to be chrome for the moment) and then as you type in the code it updates the page in front of your eyes. Same with editing css and so on. So it is not refreshing, but pushing the update continuously.

Quite fun! :)

I wonder if it works well on Linux?

-----

Edit: Won't run due to outdated library

/usr/bin/brackets: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by /usr/bin/brackets)

Found this fix: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/issues/4816#issuecomment-39495629

Run brackets

:D:P:)

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In brackets?

You switch on live preview on the file and it opens up chrome (has to be chrome for the moment) and then as you type in the code it updates the page in front of your eyes. Same with editing css and so on. So it is not refreshing, but pushing the update continuously.

Quite fun! :)

You can do that in Linux with Sublime Text and Emmet LiveStyle plugin.

EDIT: actually the LiveStyle plugin also works in the other direction. It writes changes that you make in the Chrome dev tools to your CSS file which is also a nice feature. Only major drawback is that it doesn't support SCSS/SASS/LESS atm.

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Though, what needs to be developed? I think we can get to a situation where we think a product has lost its way because it hasn't been changed. And yet, if it is doing exactly the task set out for it, why would it need to change?

Well said!

- Happy Emacs user

(Though, on a more serious note, Emacs is actually actively developed. I just haven't upgraded in a long time. Why bother, when it already does everything.. and a bit more.)

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