25 of the Useful and Best Brackets Extensions
Brackets has been rising in popularity as a code editor meant for front-end development and web design.
The best about Brackets is that there is a wide range of Brackets extensions that you can choose from.
What is Brackets?
Brackets is an open source code editor originally developed by Adobe. It may not have the same publicity as Atom, GitHub’s new lightweight editor, but it is a promising option for front-end developers.
Brackets primarily aims at front-end developers and web designers. It is a code and text editor fully optimized for HTML, CSS, and JS.
Brackets is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Major Features
- Live Preview: It launches a new browser window showing the current page that not only does not require a manual refresh when you change a file, but also as you type. As such, Brackets feels like an extension of your browser’s Developer tools. This feature is incredibly useful, as it can combine the advantages of coding in the browser with those of an editor.
- Quick Edit: When you are editing HTML code, if you click a tag with a corresponding CSS declaration situated in a linked file and hit Ctrl/Command+E, an inline editor appears allowing you to quickly edit that rule.
- JSLint: It works with your JavaScript code upon saving, with its results displayed as a panel below the main editing window.
- Brackets implements code completion especially meant for web designers and front-end development.
- Additional features such as command line integration, multiple code selection, and quick open and quick find, add to the highlights of Brackets code editor.
In addition to the core features built into Brackets, there is also a large and growing community of developers building extensions that add all sorts of useful functionality. There are a number of extensions available like Code Folding, Markdown Preview, Autoprefixer, and others.
You can also change the color scheme of the editor with the help of such extensions, or create your own themes to suit your preferences. In this post, we have put together for you a collection of 25 amazing and totally free extensions for the Brackets code editor. All links go to GitHub, so you can easily grab the latest stable version of the extensions, without having to worry about corrupted code or bugs.
Brackets Extensions
Without further ado, let us check out the free extensions for Brackets!
1. Beautify
Beautify Brackets extension makes your code look good. Not only does it make your files more readable, but it also gives you a handy shortcut key to beautify those files — CMD-Shift-L (Mac) and Ctrl-Shift-L (Win). JavaScript code can be consistently formatted and made more readable using Beautify.
2. Autoprefixer
Autoprefixer is a postprocessor for dealing with vendor prefixes in the best possible way. Autoprefixer parses CSS files and adds vendor prefixes to CSS rules. All you have to do is to add it to your asset building tool. Autoprefixer cleans outdated prefixes as well.
3. Emmet
Emmet helps improve your HTML and CSS workflow by letting you type in CSS-like expressions that can be dynamically parsed and produce an output according to what you actually typed in the abbreviation.
Emmet abbreviations look like CSS selectors but are parsed in runtime and turned into a structured code block with just a single key press.
Once you learn the abbreviations, it’s a helpful way to speed up your workflow.
4. Minifier
Minifier minifies JavaScript and CSS files in brackets and saves them as filename.min.ext
To minify a file, use the keyboard shortcut CMD+M or Ctrl+M. It compresses files and saves your time as it minifies the relevant JavaScript automatically so you can continue to work and have the file minified and fully ready for deployment.
5. ToDo
ToDo is Brackets extension that displays all To-Do comments in the current document or project. By default, it supports five tags — TODO, NOTE, FIXME, CHANGES and FUTURE. To keep track of your team’s progress, you may mark tasks as done.
Tasks can be sorted so that done tasks are moved to the bottom of the list by checking that option in the settings dialog. ToDo Brackets extension lets you define custom colors for tags as well as your own tags too, if you want to get creative with your comments.
6. Bracket Gits
Bracket Gits is an extension for Brackets editor that provides Git integration for Brackets. It is tested and works on any platform supported by Brackets (Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux). Bracket Git is easily the best among similar Brackets extensions as it lets you easily commit changes from Brackets itself, as well as push and pull changes with a single click.
7. Brackets File Icons
Brackets File Icons adds file icons to the Brackets file tree. It supports files like JavaScript, HTML, JSON, XML, CSS, PNG, and JPG. You can spice up your code editor with file icons by adding colors to your icons based on your file type to all files listed in your side bar. You can also post icon requests on the GitHub page.
8. Swatcher
Swatcher generates code hints and color palettes by mporting via LESS/SASS files, images or Adobe Swatch files. It supports all color related functions, such as rgba().
Swatcher also comes with a built-in color picker of its own.
9. Lorem Pixel
Lorem Pixel is a Brackets extension that can be used to generate placeholder images. It is simple and free of cost. It lets you insert beautiful placeholder images of any size. Lorem Pixel also gives you a grayscale option to use only black and white placeholder images.
10. eqFTP
eqFTP is an FTP/SFTP client for Brackets code editor. It delivers an intuitive interface to work with your remote servers, synchronization, and remote file structure exploring, and password encryption. eqFTP can be used to transfer and sync your project’s files to and from your web host and server.
11. Code Folding
Code Folding Brackets extension provides simple code folding for files edited in Brackets. It supports brace folding, tag
folding, indent folding and multi-line comment folding for JavaScript, JSON, CSS, PHP and LESS files. It also has some support for HTML and XML files based on tag matching. With Code Folding, you can collapse large portions of your code into a single line.
12. Color Picker
Color Picker appears to be handy if you are working with CSS files. It can help you pick colors within minutes right within Brackets.
13. CSScomb Brackets
CSScomb is a utility to sort CSS properties within each selector declaration in a predefined order. It helps in maintaining uniformity and makes code independent of coding style. It helps you understands code and prevents accidental errors, and also sorts properties with multiline values. In other words, CSScomb Brackets extension can help you reduce bugs in your code and maintain uniformity.
14. Brackets Outline List
Brackets Outline List can be used to display a list of the functions or definitions in the currently opened document. It works with JavaScript, CoffeeScript, CSS, SCSS, LESS, XML, HTML, SVG, Markdown and PHP.
15. HTML Skeleton
HTML Skeleton is a collection of a set of tags required by every HTML webpage you build. The tags that make up the skeleton tell browsers what kind of file it is reading and without the skeleton, HTML files will not be rendered correctly in web browsers. This is a must-have extension if you regularly use HTML to build pages in Brackets.
16. HTML Wrapper
HTML Wrapper is a Brackets extension that formats nav and select tags with a single command. You can use it by selecting a list of items encapsulated by the desired tag, and then run the command.
17. Minimap
Minimap is a Brackets extension that comes with syntax highlighting, autohide functionality, adjustable fading transparency, quick preview function, zooming, and smooth scrolling. It displays a sublime style map of your code within the editor and works well with third party themes.
18. Legibility
Legibility Brackets extension increases the legibility aspects of your code, such as font sizes, line heights, heights of the elements like code hints, drop down menus, status bar, vertical toolbar, modal bar, bottom panel and extension modal.
19. Live Reload
Live Reload is a Brackets extension that monitors changes in the file system. It keeps track of the changelog of your project files, and is refreshed automatically.
20. CSSLint
CSSLint is a Brackets extension that can enable CSS linting support. CSSLint makes use of Bracket’s built-in linting system. It shows errors with a yellow warning icon, and if there are no errors, a green icon is displayed instead.
21. Extension rating
Brackets Extension Rating can be used to display other extensions’ statistics based on downloads and GitHub stats. It shows online and maximum users counters for selected extensions, and displays star and forks counter from the GitHub repository.
22. ClipBox
ClipBox is an extension for keeping track of your clipboard history. It captures Ctrl+C key strokes and stores selected text in its own internal array. ClipBox can store a maximum of ten clipboard items.
23. JavaScript and CSS CDN Suggestions
Brackets CDN extension lets you work with CDN services. As you already know, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) saves your web server resources by loading files via cloud servers.
24. Brackets Bookmarks
Brackets Bookmarks extension provides functionality to bookmark lines in Brackets. Bookmarks are serialized and remembered globally. This extension lets you add bookmarks to file and close the file. When you reopen the file, Brackets will restore the bookmarks.
25. Interactive Linter
Interactive Linter integrates with linters such as JSHint, JSLint, ESlint, JSCS, CoffeeLint, and more. As you work on your code, this extension gives instant feedback right in the document. You can access the details of the lint report therein, and then work accordingly.
Over To You…
Which Brackets extensions form a regular component of your development workflow? Share them in the comments below!
Yeeeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not what Emmet does? Emmet’s a tool for improving HTML/CSS workflow via CSS-like syntax for generating code and general shortcuts.
You got it! 😉
You don’t need LiveReload anymore. Live Preview is in-built in the Bracket Editor now.
you are wrong, the built in only suport for chrome, while this one can suppoert firefox chrome opera etc
Live Preview does support other browsers without LiveReload. You have to enable other browsers via the brackets preferences file.
you make firefox default browser and then click the live button in brackets.
I believe Code Folding is building into the latest version of Brackets. I can totally vouch for Beautify and Emmet though!
How did you get CSSComb to work?
eqFTP is discontinued. And the last version of eqFTP does not work in the latest Brackets version. What would be the alternative? I have tried some other sync tools, but I can’t find any that may hold different settings (I work on several websites) and sync on save.
Have you found any yet?
Thanks for making the list. A couple of these extensions aren’t working with the latest version of Brackets / being supported anymore (eg. Minifier and Todo)
thanks man, you help a lot
I don’t use a Brackets extension, but there is FileZilla and it is pretty smart.
Template literals work with Brackets, but only to display data items. If I try to enter html tags, Brackets displays the tag instead of just the information within the tags. The tutorials I watch are able to display just the pictures, for example, but Brackets displays the surrounding html. What’s up with that?
I really like Brackets, there are great videos on YT, “Quick Coding with Brackets”, these are made in 2014, but still useful.
Thanks a lot. I have just started to learn web development. I think Bracket is awesome to write web code. 🙂
unfortunately I will have to look for an alternative to brackets because it doesn’t have an efficient way to work with an FTP server. This complicates my job too much.