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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. Atom vs Brackets

Atom vs Brackets

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Atom
Atom
Stacks16.9K
Followers14.5K
Votes2.5K
GitHub Stars60.8K
Forks17.3K
Brackets
Brackets
Stacks450
Followers752
Votes202
GitHub Stars33.1K
Forks7.6K

Atom vs Brackets: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here, we will compare Atom and Brackets, two popular text editors, and highlight their key differences.

  1. 1. Built-in Terminal and Git Integration: Atom provides a built-in terminal, allowing users to access the command line interface without leaving the editor. Additionally, it offers seamless integration with Git, enabling developers to efficiently manage version control within the editor itself.

  2. 2. Popularity and Community Support: Atom boasts a larger and more active user community, resulting in a wider range of available themes, packages, and plugins. Brackets, on the other hand, has a smaller community but offers a more streamlined experience by focusing on essential features.

  3. 3. Live Preview: Brackets comes with a feature called "Live Preview," which allows developers to see the changes to their code in real-time as they work on it; this is particularly useful for web development. Although Atom also provides live preview capabilities through packages, it requires additional setup and configuration.

  4. 4. Language Support: While both Atom and Brackets support a wide range of programming languages, Atom has a broader ecosystem of community-developed extensions, making it more versatile for different coding needs and offering better syntax highlighting and autocompletion for various programming languages.

  5. 5. Performance and Load Time: Brackets has been optimized for faster load times and overall performance, making it ideal for quick coding tasks and small projects. Atom, on the other hand, can be slower and more resource-intensive, making it better suited for larger projects with extensive customization needs.

  6. 6. Advanced Customization Options: Atom offers extensive customization options, allowing users to personalize the editor's appearance, key bindings, and functionality to suit their preferences. Brackets, while still customizable, has a more focused and streamlined approach, providing a simpler and more user-friendly interface out-of-the-box.

In Summary, Atom offers a broader range of community support, versatile language support, and advanced customization options but can be slower and resource-intensive, while Brackets excels in performance, streamlined experience, and real-time code preview capabilities.

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Advice on Atom, 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
Andrey
Andrey

Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers

May 18, 2020

Decided

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

539k views539k
Comments
Felix
Felix

Graphic Designer & Web Developer at hosting.de GmbH

Jan 9, 2020

DecidedonVisual Studio CodeVisual Studio CodeAtomAtom

I use Visual Studio Code every day, it was very refreshing coming from Atom to get a lightweight, all i need setup right out of the box.

After working with Atom for around 2 years I switch to VSCode.

Here is why:

  1. Color display of variables in code. This may now sound much, but it improve the display of scss variables and its a core feature.
  2. Out of the box features.
  3. Automation! VSCode suggests usefull things to you.
  4. Integraded console. I love the console in VSCode. It is faster than my 'default' cmd on Windows. For Atom you would have to install a package, that doesn't work so well on Windows.
  5. Output logging per Plugin.
  6. Setup time. In VSCode I can set up my workspace in under 5 minutes. For Atom I need
  7. Plugins work perfect out of the box. This is a mayor one for me. For example: In order to set up Editorconfig you have to adjust mutliple values and plugins to get it work. Plugin creators of Editorconfig for Atom are not to blame: They include a linter, that verifies whether the settings are correct or not.
  8. Git implementation. VSCode ships with Git and even if the git packet of vscode doesn't look like much, theres a lot to it. For example you can watch changes inline.
  9. Minimap and vertical scrollbar. This feature is much better implementet in VSCode and you don't need an extra plugin.
  10. Auto completion. Sass mixins example: @include and you press CTRL+SPACE and VSCode shows you every Sass mixin.
  11. Copy paths from open file tab. In VSCode you can copy the path of an file directly when you have it open. In atom you need to select 'show in tree view' and than copy the path or relative path.
  12. Tree view. The tree view VSCode automaticly brings you to the current open file by default. This helps when working with components.
  13. File search. The file search supports the asterisk so you can search for eg molecule-*.ts.
  14. Tasks support. Tasks are integrated in VSCode so eg. for Typescript you can CTRL + SHIFT + B and select tsc: watch - tsconfig.ts.
  15. Short waiting time. For example when deleting files or beautifying 20.000 lines of json (Atom hangs up).
  16. More releases. Faster feature implementation. Active community.
128k views128k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Atom
Atom
Brackets
Brackets

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.

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

Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies;Node.js integration;Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core;File system browser;Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;Fast project-wide search and replace;Multiple cursors and selections;Multiple panes;Snippets;Code folding;A clean preferences UI;Import TextMate grammars and themes
Code Hints from a PSD;Inline Editors;Live Preview;Preprocessor Support
Statistics
GitHub Stars
60.8K
GitHub Stars
33.1K
GitHub Forks
17.3K
GitHub Forks
7.6K
Stacks
16.9K
Stacks
450
Followers
14.5K
Followers
752
Votes
2.5K
Votes
202
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 529
    Free
  • 449
    Open source
  • 343
    Modular design
  • 321
    Hackable
  • 316
    Beautiful UI
Cons
  • 19
    Slow with large files
  • 7
    Slow startup
  • 2
    Most of the time packages are hard to find.
  • 1
    No longer maintained
  • 1
    Cannot Run code with F5
Pros
  • 51
    Beautiful UI
  • 40
    Lightweight
  • 25
    Extremely customizable
  • 20
    Free plugins
  • 14
    Live Preview
Cons
  • 3
    Not good for backend developer
  • 1
    Bad node.js support
  • 1
    You have to edit json file to set your settings.
Integrations
GitHub
GitHub
JavaScript
JavaScript
Node.js
Node.js
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Dreamweaver

What are some alternatives to Atom, 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.

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.

Emacs

Emacs

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.

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.

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