StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Brackets vs Emacs

Brackets vs Emacs

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Emacs
Emacs
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes322
Brackets
Brackets
Stacks450
Followers752
Votes202
GitHub Stars33.1K
Forks7.6K

Brackets vs Emacs: What are the differences?

What is Brackets? A modern, open source text editor that understands web design. With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, Brackets is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser. Try Creative Cloud Extract (preview) for Brackets for an easy way to get clean, minimal CSS straight from a PSD with no generated code.

What is Emacs? The extensible self-documenting text editor. GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets and Emacs belong to "Text Editor" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Brackets are:

  • Code Hints from a PSD
  • Inline Editors
  • Live Preview

On the other hand, Emacs provides the following key features:

  • Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.
  • Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
  • Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.

"Beautiful UI" is the top reason why over 46 developers like Brackets, while over 57 developers mention "Vast array of extensions" as the leading cause for choosing Emacs.

Brackets is an open source tool with 29.9K GitHub stars and 6.42K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Brackets's open source repository on GitHub.

Bukalapak, Accenture, and Webedia are some of the popular companies that use Emacs, whereas Brackets is used by WorldGaming, 4RWeb Interactive, and LifeChurch.tv. Emacs has a broader approval, being mentioned in 99 company stacks & 73 developers stacks; compared to Brackets, which is listed in 36 company stacks and 32 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Emacs, Brackets

Samriddhi
Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

1.04M views1.04M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Emacs
Emacs
Brackets
Brackets

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.;Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.;Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.;Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.;A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs others are available separately.
Code Hints from a PSD;Inline Editors;Live Preview;Preprocessor Support
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
33.1K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
7.6K
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
450
Followers
1.2K
Followers
752
Votes
322
Votes
202
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 65
    Vast array of extensions
  • 44
    Have all you can imagine
  • 40
    Everything i need in one place
  • 39
    Portability
  • 32
    Customer config
Cons
  • 4
    Hard to learn for beginners
  • 4
    So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked
  • 1
    Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux
Pros
  • 51
    Beautiful UI
  • 40
    Lightweight
  • 25
    Extremely customizable
  • 20
    Free plugins
  • 14
    Live Preview
Cons
  • 3
    Not good for backend developer
  • 1
    You have to edit json file to set your settings.
  • 1
    Bad node.js support
Integrations
No integrations available
JavaScript
JavaScript
Node.js
Node.js
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver

What are some alternatives to Emacs, Brackets?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Neovim

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

gedit

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Kakoune

Kakoune

Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones. Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana