Brackets

Brackets is a text editor used by developers for coding. Being a web developer, a lot of your time is going to be dedicated to coding. Although you can use practically any text editor, regardless of whether or not it is designed to write code into, you can certainly save your time and have many perks at your convenience if you use a text editor meant solely for coding. If you are looking for a sleek, modern easy to use text editor, brackets should be your first pick. It was first released during the year 2014 by Adobe Systems. There is a repository available on GitHub. It was created with JavaScript, HTML and CSS and supports both the Windows, Mac and the Linux operating systems. Seeing as it is fairly lightweight, operating system friendly and intuitive, there is no reason not to use it. Let’s find out what you can get out of it and if it could be worth your time!

System Requirements Needed To Run Brackets

Keep in mind that there are different system requirements based on the operating system you would like to install brackets on. If you are installing brackets for windows, you should ensure you have at least the Pentium 4 Intel Processor, a Windows 7 or Windows 8 operating system, as well as a total of 256 MB with the RAM memory. It is recommended that you have at least 2 GB of RAM available for live development. In terms of space, you’re only going to need 200 MB for brackets. On the other hand, brackets for Mac will require at least Mac OS v10.6, v10.7 or v10.8 in addition to the requirements Windows users have. As you can see, brackets is very easy to install and will not demand a lot from your machine.

Downloading Your Copy Of Brackets

It’s time to see how the brackets download process works. You simply need to visit the developers page to find the latest version of brackets. You can also choose from some of the previous versions that have been released, if you wish, but normally you would be looking for the latest version. This text editor still gets new updates once every three weeks or so, so your best source would be the brackets website. You will immediately see the latest version highlighted with a button prompting you to download the executable file. It is only 77 MB large,  so it should download to your computer fairly quickly. Once you have finished downloading it, you can go ahead and find it in the download folder you specified. From there on out, you will need to install brackets before you can use it.

Installing Brackets On Your Computer

The installation is very quick and efficient. It will only be moments before you can launch brackets. This is a free piece of software that is open source. All you need to do is run the installer, follow the instructions and monitor the progress bar until the installation is complete. There’s really not much to it and hardly anything can get in your way of installing it. There are no other prerequisites you should have installed on your computer prior to installing brackets, so it all comes down to waiting for the installer to finish its work.

Using Brackets And Locating Additional Resources

And now we finally come to the fun part! Before you start using brackets and writing your code, it is worth mentioning that you can go back to the official brackets website. There are also other resources there that could enhance your experience. We are talking about the extensions page, where you can find a myriad of user submitted extensions that you can install into your brackets, in order to customize it to your needs. Although you will find that there are many cosmetic extensions you can download and use, a lot of them are also utility based. Although you might be spending a lot of your time configuring what your text editor looks like, there are a few utility based extensions that you should get. These are seriously going to make your life a lot easier. The best part is that they are all free and that they all make your coding experience that much smoother.

Useful Extensions To Consider Adding To Your Brackets Editor

  • For one, you are going to want to install the canIuse extension. This is very important for developers working on projects that are supposed to work across multiple platforms, or be supported by different web browsers. Now you can scan your code and check if it’s currently compatible with all of the major browsers, as well as iOS or Android operating systems. Considering you would have to manually research all of this information, having it highlighted for you to see without even having to leave brackets is extremely useful.
  • You also may want to use HTML Skeleton. This will let you have brackets automatically create a boilerplate template for your HTML code. All of the tags that need to be in your code for HTML to run will be automatically inserted, thus saving you a lot of time you would’ve otherwise had to do yourself manually each time you are creating something using HTML.
  • Although this is primarily a visual extension, Brackets Icons is still a very useful extension to consider. It’s going to recognize different files you worked on and allow you to distinguish them by visual cues. This will make it much easier for you to locate whatever file you want to work on, as it might get a little cluttered in the vanilla version.
  • If you are all about that efficiency and want to make your coding time is short as you possibly can, get your hands on the Emmet extension. This is a scripted extension that introduces a large number of keyboard shortcuts that can help you automate your HTML and CSS authoring and make it much faster.

As you can see, there are a lot of things that make brackets a very good choice for aspiring front-end developers. The amount of customization it offers is amazing it can be all yours for a small price of free! There is really no reason not to use this to your advantage. With brackets continuing to receive frequent updates and so much user submitted content you can use to further enhance and optimize your experience, this is a solid pick no matter which platform you are going to develop for.

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