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Rayven Wolfe
Rayven Wolfe
Participant
March 23, 2021
Question

Any way to keep Brackets viable for all of us who teach web design?

  • March 23, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 180 views

Brackets has been absolutely invaluable as a teaching tool to get design students an introduction to HTML and CSS. It has been reasonably lightweight, unburdened by trying to be an environment for developing everything and just focused on what was useful for authoring web pages. I have been able to use Brackets to teach my often code-phobic students because of this.

The live preview that highlights the portion of the page affected by the line of markup or rule is utterly indispensable for teaching HTML and CSS.

In the age of COVID, many of us had to move to fully online courses and so we created our screenshots and video lectures using Brackets so our students could follow along. 

I am crushed by the EOL announcement for Brackets. No other editor provides the live preview. I can't force my students to pay for a software title when they already have to deal with an Adobe subscription. The free options are either way too bulky or way too barebones. Brackets has been a lovely balance that is exquisite for teaching.

Yes, I know we've been invited to fork it and maintain it. I'm not a software developer, however. I'm a teacher. I could host it but I do not have the skillset to maintain or update Brackets. Adobe does though.

This isn't just about "go download some other thing". This fundamentally changes the way we have to teach. The alternative solution suggested doesn't solve that.

Is there any way Adobe will reconsider this decision? Is there any other real alternative to Brackets?

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Liam Dilley
    Liam Dilley
    Inspiring
    March 31, 2021

    Brackets is one of several core lightweight node/html5 based editors that were spawned.

     

    You have Visual Studio Code [https://code.visualstudio.com/] from Micorosft which a lot of people use so any students going into work may go to environments using this more than anything. Great plugins and plugin community, The MS team behind it are doing great stuff and it is well maintained and updated. Great theme support and will have all similar features and has several preview plugins availible as well.

     

    Another option for you is of course is Atom [https://atom.io/] which again is one of the same children of this modern code editor era. The thing with this is that Microsoft own Github now so I do not know how long Atom will be around.

     

    There are plenty of other small ones but you want something well maintained and out of the free bunch I think Visual Studio Code is defiantly the way to go.

    An testimant to the work on it it works on all platforms including Mac OS with Mac Silicone.

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