Craciun Dan | October 10, 2014

Brackets is an open-source editor for web designers, developed by Adobe, with a wealth of features and a huge number of extensions, which can be installed in a few clicks, turning Brackets into a very powerful tool for web developers.



Brackets is written entirely in HTML/CSS and JavaScript. Brackets has a very clean, web-like interface which looks very good, providing a menu, a work area and a side panel. It doesn’t look cluttered at all, which is one key point the developers had in mind when designing Brackets.

The editor comes with some powerful features like syntax highlighting for HTML/CSS and JavaScript, image previews support, tree-like project organizer in the side panel, indentation, commenting, line numbers, support for extensions.

Brackets also comes with an extension manager, which provides support for tens of extensions that extend the editor’s functionality, and also includes a big number of themes to choose from. You can install extensions directly from the list provided by the manager, drag a ZIP archive containing an extension, or provide an URL.

The extension manager provides a big number of extensions which can be installed easily. Some include notes, W3C Validation, LiveScript syntax highlighting and more. The extensions can practically add any functionality to Brackets.

The extensions will turn Brackets into a full-fledged editor, designed to please any taste and requirements:

You can change the default look using themes, here’s the Obsidian theme:

Brackets 0.44, released a few days ago, comes with several new neat features, like split view (both horizontally and vertically), improvements to the project tree, improvements to stylesheet editing, a new option in Preferences to show the cursor when text is selected, and localization support for the Extension Manager.

Vertical split view:

In addition to these, this version contains several API and UI changes. The full changelog is available here.

You can also watch an introductory official video of Brackets here, outlining the concepts used to built it and the main features that it ships.

Install Brackets 0.44 in Ubuntu 14.04

There are DEB packages available for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures here. Download the version which fits your operating system, and install it using:

For 32-bit:

sudo dpkg -i Brackets.Release.0.44.32-bit.deb

For 64-bit:

sudo dpkg -i Brackets.Release.0.44.64-bit.deb

If DPKG complains about missing dependencies and fails the first time, you can use sudo apt-get -f install to fix these issues and finish installing Brackets.

You can also install the latest Brackets release in Ubuntu using UbuTricks.