Brackets 1.0 and Extract for Brackets (Preview) Now Available

1.0, we did it! This is a big milestone for the Brackets project. Right now you can grab version 1.0 of Brackets, as well as a preview of Extract for Brackets, an extension that Adobe has been working on. Extract for Brackets (Preview) speeds up the process of pulling design information like colors, fonts, and measurement info out of a PSD and turning it into clean, minimal CSS.
When we first started Brackets we wanted to release early and often. We did both. 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.

What’s New in 1.0?

We’ve been busy over the last few releases adding a number of major features. If you haven’t looked at Brackets in a while, now is a great time to see the awesome stuff we’ve been working on. We’ve added multiple cursors, split view, theme support, and many more fixes and enhancements. This release includes support for custom key bindings so you can change the shortcut key combinations that Brackets uses. This wiki page describes how to customize them and includes example key bindings that align Brackets’ keyboard shortcuts with the ones you might be used to in Sublime Text.

This release also includes the ability to collapse Quick Edit results so you can hide results from files that you don¹t want to edit,like the generated CSS files when you¹re working with LESS or SCSS files. We’ve also made JavaScript hinting more accurate by matching by case when filtering.

Extract for Brackets (Preview)

In addition to Brackets 1.0 we’re also releasing a preview of Extract for Brackets. Extract for Brackets is a Creative Cloud service that lets you view and get information and assets out of a PSD right from your text
editor. Extract for Brackets lets you pull out things like colors, fonts, measurement, gradients, and more from a PSD in the form of contextual code hints in CSS and HTML files. You can also extract layers as images, use information from the PSD to define preprocessor variables, and easily get dimensions between objects. We’re excited about how this will improve the process of moving from design to development and speed up workflow. You can either download Extract for Brackets (Preview) as a standalone extension on the Brackets Extension Registry or included with Brackets 1.0 in a bundle that’s available for download on brackets.io.

What’s Next?

While we’re very excited about 1.0, we are also treating this like any other release, so we’ll continue to release often and will be doing the next Brackets release in 3-4 weeks. As mentioned in this blog post we are going to be slightly changing the things that the Adobe team works on. We think there is an unmet need for a coding tool that supports design and we think that Adobe has a lot of expertise in that area. We will continue to work on core features and to support the community’s work on Brackets, but we also want to build the perfect editor for web designers and front end developers that are creating or implementing designs in code. Some of the things we’re going to be working on are improving our preprocessor support, making SVG editing more powerful, and adding more visual inline editors.

Thank You

Since putting Brackets up on GitHub 3 years ago we’ve seen a great deal of momentum, largely thanks to our community. Our releases regularly see over 100,000 downloads, there have been 245 people who have contributed code directly to Brackets, and we¹re currently the 16th most starred project on GitHub with 18,566 stars. Those are humbling numbers and we’re excited to be working with all of you on making Brackets a success. We’ve also seen over 400 extensions and over 75 themes created in that time, all of which grow the reach and feature set of Brackets. To those of you who have taken the time to write extensions, contribute code, file issues, or even just try out Brackets, we want to say thanks. We couldn’t have done this without you and we are looking forward to continuing to move Brackets forward with you!

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