Adobe has this week released version 1.0 of Brackets, its open source code editor for web designers and front-end developers.
In "Brackets 1.0 and Extract for Brackets (Preview) Now Available", web developer evangelist Ryan Stewart says:
This will mark the 45th release of Brackets in 3 years.
In those early releases we acknowledged that there were a number of features Brackets was missing so we warned that it was still early and not necessarily ready for every day use.
But in the past 3 years we’ve been very busy adding features to help make Brackets a world class text-editor. Declaring this release as 1.0 is our way of telling the world that Brackets is ready.
With Brackets out of beta, the release brings with it several major features.
Details on the What's New in Release 1.0 GitHub page include Quick Edit, where users can now "Quickly collapse results from a particular CSS, SCSS, or LESS file", meaning developers can more easily hide the results from files that they don't want to edit.
Mentioned specifically by Stewart is improvements to Quick Open, that he says makes "JavaScript hinting more accurate." With improved case-sensitivity in code hints and Quick Open, preference is given to results where the capitalisation matches the query. For example, search results in lowercase are ranked above those in uppercase if the query is in lowercase, "function" over "Function."
Stewart says the 1.0 release also includes "multiple cursors, split view, theme support, and many more fixes and enhancements."
Aside from the new features and improvements to Brackets, Adobe have released a preview of Extract for Brackets, a " Creative Cloud service that lets you view and get information and assets out of a PSD right from your text editor."
As the name might suggest, the tool allows users to "extract" specific elements including colours, fonts, measurements and gradients from their Photoshop document "in the form of contextual code hints in CSS and HTML files."
In a conversation about Extract on Hacker News Colin Ramsay commented
The default link to 1.0 includes something called "Extract." I don't want Extract. Yes, there's a link to just download Brackets underneath this primary button, but given Adobe's form with packaging unnecessary cruft with their software I'd have thought they'd be trying to avoid this sort of nonsense.
Others were more interested in the promise of Extract. Isaac Forman, founder of the South Australian web design and development company Triplezero, asked:
Does anyone use the Extract feature? I canned my Creative Cloud after Adobe were hacked, but do a lot of Photoshop work and then building templates from PSDs. Is it as useful as they proclaim? If so, I might need to create a new account.
Extract is pretty brand new, so not so many people are using it yet, but I've played with some previous incarnations (it was previously beta'd as a standalone web service).
That said, it's damned handy if you're turning a PSD comp into HTML/CSS. That's the use case it was made for - smoothing the workflow between the PSD-making designer and the HTML-writing coder. If a PSD comp has, say, a button with a gradient and a drop shadow, then Extract gives you CSS to reproduce that design, without your needing to open Photoshop and copy/paste the gradient colors and so forth.
Stewart says Adobe are treating Brackets' 1.0 release like any other, and the next release will follow in 3-4 weeks.
The Brackets project is described by Adobe as "a community sandbox where everyone is invited to experiment with new ideas for web tooling." InfoQ readers interested in contributing to the open source project should visit the contribute page for more information.