Brackets vs Visual Studio Code

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Brackets

448
748
+ 1
202
Visual Studio Code

174.1K
157K
+ 1
2.3K
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Brackets vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Brackets and Visual Studio Code are two popular code editors commonly used by developers. While both editors provide similar features and functionalities, there are several key differences that set them apart.

  1. Extension Ecosystem: Visual Studio Code has a much larger and more diverse extension ecosystem compared to Brackets. This means that developers using Visual Studio Code have access to a wider range of extensions and plugins to enhance their coding experience and productivity. Brackets, on the other hand, has a more limited selection of extensions available.

  2. Integrated Terminal: Visual Studio Code comes with an integrated terminal, allowing developers to run commands and scripts directly within the editor. This eliminates the need to switch between the editor and a separate terminal window. In Brackets, an integrated terminal is not available, and developers have to use an external terminal for running commands.

  3. Debugging Capabilities: Visual Studio Code offers powerful debugging capabilities, supporting multiple programming languages and providing features like breakpoints, variable inspection, and step-by-step execution. Brackets, on the other hand, has limited debugging capabilities and lacks some advanced debugging features.

  4. Git Integration: Visual Studio Code provides seamless integration with Git, allowing developers to perform Git operations like commit, pull, push, and branch management within the editor. Brackets, on the other hand, lacks built-in Git integration and requires the use of external tools or extensions for Git operations.

  5. Live Server: Brackets comes with a built-in live server feature that allows developers to quickly launch a local development server and preview their web pages in real-time. Visual Studio Code does not have a built-in live server feature, but it can be achieved by using extensions.

  6. Code Navigation: Visual Studio Code offers advanced code navigation features such as the ability to quickly jump to definitions, find references, and navigate through code using breadcrumbs. Brackets, on the other hand, has limited code navigation capabilities and lacks some of these advanced features.

In summary, Visual Studio Code offers a larger extension ecosystem, integrated terminal, advanced debugging capabilities, Git integration, and better code navigation compared to Brackets, while Brackets has a built-in live server feature.

Decisions about Brackets and Visual Studio Code
Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 6 upvotes · 968.7K views

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.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.3M views

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.2M views

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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Pros of Brackets
Pros of Visual Studio Code
  • 51
    Beautiful UI
  • 40
    Lightweight
  • 25
    Extremely customizable
  • 20
    Free plugins
  • 14
    Live Preview
  • 13
    Free themes
  • 8
    Clean
  • 7
    Easy
  • 6
    Integration with photoshop
  • 4
    Perfect for web development
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    Fast
  • 2
    Awesome UI
  • 2
    Clean UI
  • 2
    Code suggestions
  • 339
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 308
    Fast
  • 193
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
  • 126
    Git integration
  • 106
    Intellisense
  • 78
    Faster than Atom
  • 53
    Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
  • 45
    Great Refactoring Tools
  • 44
    Good Plugins
  • 42
    Terminal
  • 38
    Superb markdown support
  • 36
    Open Source
  • 34
    Extensions
  • 26
    Large & up-to-date extension community
  • 26
    Awesome UI
  • 24
    Powerful and fast
  • 22
    Portable
  • 18
    Best editor
  • 18
    Best code editor
  • 17
    Easy to get started with
  • 15
    Lots of extensions
  • 15
    Built on Electron
  • 15
    Crossplatform
  • 15
    Good for begginers
  • 14
    Extensions for everything
  • 14
    Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
  • 14
    All Languages Support
  • 13
    Easy to use and learn
  • 12
    Extensible
  • 12
    "fast, stable & easy to use"
  • 11
    Totally customizable
  • 11
    Git out of the box
  • 11
    Faster edit for slow computer
  • 11
    Ui design is great
  • 11
    Useful for begginer
  • 10
    Great community
  • 10
    SSH support
  • 10
    Fast Startup
  • 9
    It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
  • 9
    Powerful Debugger
  • 9
    Great language support
  • 9
    Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
  • 8
    Python extension is fast
  • 8
    Can compile and run .py files
  • 7
    Great document formater
  • 7
    Features rich
  • 6
    He is not Michael
  • 6
    Awesome multi cursor support
  • 6
    Extension Echosystem
  • 6
    She is not Rachel
  • 5
    Language server client
  • 5
    Easy azure
  • 5
    SFTP Workspace
  • 5
    VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
  • 5
    Very proffesional
  • 4
    Supports lots of operating systems
  • 4
    Has better support and more extentions for debugging
  • 4
    Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
  • 4
    Virtualenv integration
  • 3
    Has more than enough languages for any developer
  • 3
    Better autocompletes than Atom
  • 3
    Emmet preinstalled
  • 3
    'batteries included'
  • 3
    More tools to integrate with vs
  • 2
    VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
  • 2
    Big extension marketplace
  • 2
    Customizable
  • 2
    Microsoft
  • 2
    Light
  • 2
    Fast and ruby is built right in
  • 2
    CMake support with autocomplete

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Cons of Brackets
Cons of Visual Studio Code
  • 3
    Not good for backend developer
  • 1
    You have to edit json file to set your settings.
  • 1
    Bad node.js support
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 16
    Microsoft
  • 13
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
  • 10
    Poor autocomplete
  • 8
    Super Slow
  • 8
    Microsoft sends telemetry data
  • 7
    Poor in PHP
  • 7
    Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
  • 6
    It's MicroSoft
  • 3
    No built in live Preview
  • 3
    No Built in Browser Preview
  • 3
    Poor in Python
  • 3
    Electron
  • 3
    No color Intergrator
  • 3
    Very basic for java development and buggy at times
  • 2
    Powered by Electron
  • 2
    Bad Plugin Architecture
  • 1
    Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes
  • 1
    Slow C++ Language Server

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What is Brackets?

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

What is 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.

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What companies use Brackets?
What companies use Visual Studio Code?
See which teams inside your own company are using Brackets or Visual Studio Code.
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What tools integrate with Brackets?
What tools integrate with Visual Studio Code?

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What are some alternatives to Brackets and Visual Studio Code?
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.
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 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.
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
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.
See all alternatives