Brackets vs Sublime Text
Text editors are an essential asset for any web developer. They help to improve productivity, provide syntax highlighting, and offer a host of other features that make coding less stressful. However, with so many text editors available, choosing one can be a daunting task. In this post, we will compare two of the most popular - Brackets and Sublime Text.
Overview
Brackets and Sublime Text are code editors ranked among the top 10 most popular text editors by Stack Overflow's 2021 developer survey. Both are highly customizable and have a large number of packages or plugins built by their communities. Brackets is a free, open-source code editor developed by Adobe, and Sublime Text is a proprietary code editor that offers a free evaluation version but requires a license for continued use.
Features
Brackets
Brackets is tailored to web development, and it's highly recommended for anyone who works on front-end projects. It includes live preview features such as Auto Reload and Quick Edit, which make for a smoother editing experience. Brackets also has an extension library with many packages available, which allows developers to easily integrate Git, LESS, Emmet, and many other tools. It also supports preprocessors such as Sass, Less, and Stylus.
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a highly customizable text editor that can be used for a wide variety of programming languages, with a bunch of built-in packages for JavaScript, JSON, PHP, and many other languages. Along with a wide variety of features such as Goto Anything, Command Palette, and many productivity-oriented shortcuts, it also lets you create custom snippets and commands, which improve productivity. Sublime Text also has an extension library, but it is not as vast as that of Brackets.
Performance
When it comes to performance, Sublime Text has the upper hand. It starts up quickly and runs smoothly, even when handling large files. Brackets, on the other hand, has been known to slow down when handling larger files.
Cross-Platform Compatibility
Both Brackets and Sublime Text are compatible with macOS, Windows, and Linux. This allows developers to easily use the text editor they choose, regardless of their OS.
Pricing
Brackets is entirely free, while Sublime Text requires a license for continued use. Sublime Text offers a free evaluation version with no time limit, and it costs $80 for single-user use with free upgrades for all releases of V3.
Conclusion
Both Brackets and Sublime Text offer a wide range of features suitable for modern web development. When it comes down to the decision between the two, the choice depends on personal preferences, requirements and the kind of project a developer is working on. Brackets is tailored specifically for web development, whereas Sublime Text is more versatile and customizable, but this comes at a cost.
In terms of performance, Sublime Text is more resource-efficient than Brackets. Overall, one offers more freedom, but with a price tag, while the other is geared towards simplicity and offers entirely free features.