Brackets vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Brackets

Stacks450

Followers752

Votes202

GitHub Stars33.1K

Forks7.6K

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Brackets vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Brackets and Visual Studio Code are two popular code editors commonly used by developers. While both editors provide similar features and functionalities, there are several key differences that set them apart.

Extension Ecosystem: Visual Studio Code has a much larger and more diverse extension ecosystem compared to Brackets. This means that developers using Visual Studio Code have access to a wider range of extensions and plugins to enhance their coding experience and productivity. Brackets, on the other hand, has a more limited selection of extensions available.
Integrated Terminal: Visual Studio Code comes with an integrated terminal, allowing developers to run commands and scripts directly within the editor. This eliminates the need to switch between the editor and a separate terminal window. In Brackets, an integrated terminal is not available, and developers have to use an external terminal for running commands.
Debugging Capabilities: Visual Studio Code offers powerful debugging capabilities, supporting multiple programming languages and providing features like breakpoints, variable inspection, and step-by-step execution. Brackets, on the other hand, has limited debugging capabilities and lacks some advanced debugging features.
Git Integration: Visual Studio Code provides seamless integration with Git, allowing developers to perform Git operations like commit, pull, push, and branch management within the editor. Brackets, on the other hand, lacks built-in Git integration and requires the use of external tools or extensions for Git operations.
Live Server: Brackets comes with a built-in live server feature that allows developers to quickly launch a local development server and preview their web pages in real-time. Visual Studio Code does not have a built-in live server feature, but it can be achieved by using extensions.
Code Navigation: Visual Studio Code offers advanced code navigation features such as the ability to quickly jump to definitions, find references, and navigate through code using breadcrumbs. Brackets, on the other hand, has limited code navigation capabilities and lacks some of these advanced features.

In summary, Visual Studio Code offers a larger extension ecosystem, integrated terminal, advanced debugging capabilities, Git integration, and better code navigation compared to Brackets, while Brackets has a built-in live server feature.

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Advice on Brackets, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M

Comments

Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

1.04M views1.04M

Comments

410-Ventures

Nov 18, 2020

Review

PyCharm (pro)

great editor designed specifically for Python and python apps
complex (good for configurability, bad for simplicity)
expensive ($200 first year, $120 third year)

PyCharm (free)

same as above but without a REST client or support for other web development tools (which you will likely end up using)
ok to get your feet wet (you can always upgrade later) Full comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html

VS Code (free)

Configurable "IDE" with support for most modern languages
TONS of simple-to-install extensions that add functionality
Great docs and UI

Sublime Text (free)

one of the most minimal editors out there
it just works

It's really down to personal preference. But I would recommend downloading all of the FREE editors, getting setup in each, and keeping only the ones you like.

My personal choice for web development is VS Code but I started with Pycharm (free), and use Sublime text on occasion.

Just focus on learning and developing and you will find what features you're looking for.

12.1k views12.1k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Brackets	Visual Studio Code
With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Code Hints from a PSD;Inline Editors;Live Preview;Preprocessor Support	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars 33.1K	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 450	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 752	Followers 169.1K
Votes 202	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 51 Beautiful UI 40 Lightweight 25 Extremely customizable 20 Free plugins 14 Live Preview Cons 3 Not good for backend developer 1 You have to edit json file to set your settings. 1 Bad node.js support	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
JavaScript Node.js Adobe Photoshop Adobe Dreamweaver	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Brackets, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

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.

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Kakoune

Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones. Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode.

Related Comparisons

Brackets vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Extension Ecosystem: Visual Studio Code has a much larger and more diverse extension ecosystem compared to Brackets. This means that developers using Visual Studio Code have access to a wider range of extensions and plugins to enhance their coding experience and productivity. Brackets, on the other hand, has a more limited selection of extensions available.
Integrated Terminal: Visual Studio Code comes with an integrated terminal, allowing developers to run commands and scripts directly within the editor. This eliminates the need to switch between the editor and a separate terminal window. In Brackets, an integrated terminal is not available, and developers have to use an external terminal for running commands.
Debugging Capabilities: Visual Studio Code offers powerful debugging capabilities, supporting multiple programming languages and providing features like breakpoints, variable inspection, and step-by-step execution. Brackets, on the other hand, has limited debugging capabilities and lacks some advanced debugging features.
Git Integration: Visual Studio Code provides seamless integration with Git, allowing developers to perform Git operations like commit, pull, push, and branch management within the editor. Brackets, on the other hand, lacks built-in Git integration and requires the use of external tools or extensions for Git operations.
Live Server: Brackets comes with a built-in live server feature that allows developers to quickly launch a local development server and preview their web pages in real-time. Visual Studio Code does not have a built-in live server feature, but it can be achieved by using extensions.
Code Navigation: Visual Studio Code offers advanced code navigation features such as the ability to quickly jump to definitions, find references, and navigate through code using breadcrumbs. Brackets, on the other hand, has limited code navigation capabilities and lacks some of these advanced features.

Brackets vs Visual Studio Code

Overview