A Farewell to my Text Editor

One morning, one wakes up and finds his favourite text editor is going to be forsaken. That happened to me, as Adobe declared they seize to support Brackets text editor on September 1, 2021.

My acquaintance with the beloved editor had started somewhen in 2015, when I switched from Windows to Mac and looked for a simple text editor that would work with it. I found brackets and fell in love.

You may ask what is there in this simple software that is worth whining about. Well, I’ll try to point out some of the things that stands out for me.

I write code. A lot of it. But I’m not a developer, I’m an academic and technical instructor, and I teach a lot of courses on various programming languages and platforms.

In addition, I read a huge amount of code, as a reviewer, again, in many different programming languages.

It’s very common for me to go on one day from writing a script in Python, reviewing a class in Java, writing some code in Javascript and jump to the HTML to change some properties. That’s what I’m doing, actually. So for me, the number one requirement from my text editor is that it would allow me to write and use all those languages in one place.

Yeah, sure, I have Intellij for Java and Kotlin, I have Pycharm for Python but jumping from one environment to another is exhausting.

And sure, we have VSCode. All of us. And it’s really a fantastic development tool. But for me, I find all the hassle and whizzes to be just too much, and the need of jumping between languages becomes cumbersome with this mighty software.

And then enters Brackets. With a click I fire this modest editor and it does miracles. It opens every text, without complaining. It recognises every language and has all the needed tools as auto indentation, closing parentheses and quotation marks and so on.

But Adobe had decided to end their support, so I guess I’ll stick with it as long as I can, but then — anyone can recommend a good simple editor for me?