I use Brackets for web development. I had tried several other IDEs but Brackets is my current favorite IDE. A few things I liked is listed below
- It is free software licensed under the MIT License
- written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Availability of large number of extensions
Some extensions I use with Brackets are:
- Markdown Preview for easy editing of markdown
- Brackets Git for git integration
- Themes for Brackets For Monokai Darksoda theme I use
- Brackets Linux UI
- Interactive Linter realtime JSHint/JSLint/CoffeeLint reports into brackets as you work on your code
- WD Minimap for SublimeText like code overview
- Beautify for automatic code formatting as you save using jsbeautify
Beautify extension helps me a lot because most of the MediaWiki related code I write needs be as MediaWiki javascript coding convention. I never get it right if I format manually. The convention is a bit different from usual js code formatting. In general you need to use a lot of whitespaces. This extension was using a default jsbeautify formatting configuration and I wanted it to be customizable per project so that I can write my own .jsbeautifyrc file to get my code formatted as per conventions.
There was an enhancement bug for this. I wrote a patch for handling project specific jsbeautifyrc and Martin Zagora merged it to the repo. Here is my .jsbeautifyrc for MediaWiki https://gist.github.com/santhoshtr/9867861
Brackets is in active development and I look forward for more features. The most important bug I would like to get fixed, that all code editors I tried suffer including brackets is support of pain free complex script editing and rendering. Brackers uses CodeMirror for the code editor and I had reported this issue . It is not trivial to fix and root cause is related to the core design. Along with js,css,html, php etc I have to work with files containing all kind of natural language text and this feature is important to me.