Brackets vs Emacs: What are the differences?

What is Brackets? A modern, open source text editor that understands web design. With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, Brackets is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser. Try Creative Cloud Extract (preview) for Brackets for an easy way to get clean, minimal CSS straight from a PSD with no generated code.

What is Emacs? The extensible self-documenting text editor. GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets and Emacs belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Brackets are:

• Code Hints from a PSD
• Inline Editors
• Live Preview

On the other hand, Emacs provides the following key features:

• Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.
• Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
• Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.

"Beautiful UI" is the top reason why over 46 developers like Brackets, while over 57 developers mention "Vast array of extensions" as the leading cause for choosing Emacs.

Brackets is an open source tool with 29.9K GitHub stars and 6.42K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Brackets's open source repository on GitHub.

Bukalapak, Accenture, and Webedia are some of the popular companies that use Emacs, whereas Brackets is used by WorldGaming, 4RWeb Interactive, and LifeChurch.tv. Emacs has a broader approval, being mentioned in 99 company stacks & 73 developers stacks; compared to Brackets, which is listed in 36 company stacks and 32 developer stacks.