Brackets

Get it: brackets.io

Brackets is a WYSIWYG editor for working with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It’s an offshoot of some projects at Adobe and runs cross-platform. There’s an active community writing add-ons and plugins for Brackets. At its heart Brackets is a very capable auto-completing code editor, but with extensions it can become a complete, lightweight, development environment. It features a live view of rendered CSS/HTML in a separate Chrome browser, so that you can tweak a bit of code and immediately see the result.

We use Brackets in CS101 to work with CSS, HTML, and Javascript. It’s simple enough for beginners but robust enough for some serious coding.

If you download Brackets, it’s worth noting that by default you will also download a ‘preview’ version of Adobe Extract. Extract works with Photoshop such that you can do design work in PS, then do a one-click export of all of the elements of your design into CSS, including layers and fonts.