Adobe Brackets VS Sublime Text Post Image - Logo VS

IDE: Adobe Brackets vs Sublime Text

A longtime fan of Adobe Brackets IDE, here's why Sublime Text is my latest text editor of choice for most aspects of the development workflow.

Don't get me wrong, Brackets is great. I love working with it and still use it for front-end and design related work, but after a couple weeks of working with and refining my Sublime Text environment, I've fallen in love.

Speed: Sublime

Brackets is slow... I had seen a few others complain of this, but didn't really see what they were talking about until I had Sublime as a comparison.

If you tried setting Brackets as the default text editor for Bash, you're going to have a bad time. It may load quickly in comparison to programs like photoshop, but it still takes a moment to get up and running.

Sublime Text on the other hand, loads almost instantly, even with a considerable collection of plugins installed. I have it set up as the default text editor for Bash and it works perfectly, just disable the 'close without saving' prompt and it works like a charm without interrupting your flow.

Front-End/Design: Brackets

Not a huge surprise that brackets takes the prize for front end work. Brackets was built with the front-end developer/designer's needs at heart. The extract extension from Adobe allows for simple interpretation of PSD's, and there are a host of other extensions that speed up the design workflow.

Another winner from Brackets is 'quick edit', which allows you to select and edit CSS classes from HTML files with an inline window. AngularJS has an extension that allows you to utilize this feature with your Angular projects.

Topping all that off with a built in live-server, Brackets takes the cake as the best front end IDE, hands down.

Text Editing / Build Tools: Sublime

If you thought you were a quick coder before, learn the Sublime workflow and be amazed. Out of the box, Sublime Text works the way you imagine a text editor should work. From multi-selection to a built in command line to a wide range of build tools, Sublime's got it all...

If that's not enough for you, there are a handful to plugins that extend that functionality as far as you could imagine.

Simplicity of Extensibility: Sublime

The icing on the cake is just how simple sublime text is. It's been around the block the longest, and it communicates that loud and clear. It's a 'no-frills-attached' editor that can become anything you'd like it to while remaining a lean, mean, coding machine.

I do like brackets, and I probably will continue to use it for a lot of my front end work, but it's definitely got some big shoes to fill if it wants to take market share from the likes of Sublime Text.