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The Legacy of Brackets - Continued

· 2 min read
Arun Bose
Arun Bose
Maintainer of Phoenix and Brackets code editors
Charly P Abraham
Charly P Abraham
Maintainer of Phoenix and Brackets code editors

A decade-long journey of pushing web development forward: The Brackets story continues with Phoenix Code.

Brackets 1.0 - The Beginning​

Brackets 1.0 was released 10 years ago at Adobe, on the 4th of November 2014. At the time, Atom from GitHub was the only peer editor built on the same web-based architecture as Brackets. The web was a very different place then. Adobe was preparing for a post-Flash world (Read: Thoughts on Flash - an open letter by Steve Jobs). Just a month earlier, in October 2014, HTML5 had become a W3C Recommendation.

Brackets was born as an editor built on web standards, designed for building the web—a window into the future from Adobe. Adobe was mostly right in this vision. Visual Studio Code (VSCode), built on similar web technologies, has since risen to dominate the landscape of code editors.

Brackets was created to serve as a bridge between Designer and Developer workflows before the time of Figma and XD. However, Adobe was primarily about design tools. As a free developer tool, Brackets was never able to find a place among its design-focused peers.

Brackets 2.0 - The Brackets Open Source Community is Born​

In January 2022, Adobe transitioned the development of Brackets to the newly formed Brackets Community. Version 2.0 focused on establishing an independent foothold to continue Brackets' development.

We kick-started the Phoenix Code project as we recognized the need to address nearly three years of development backlog. This laid the groundwork for the next generation of Brackets.

Phoenix Code - 3.0, The Next Generation of Brackets​

With Phoenix Code, we built the foundation to run Brackets almost anywhere with a web browser. The first web version launched in June 2023, followed by desktop builds in February 2024.

Version 3.0 was primarily about achieving feature parity and stability with Brackets—and then surpassing it.

Phoenix Code - 4.0, Present & Future​

We start this year with the release of Phoenix Code 4.0- as we reach feature parity with Brackets and exceeds it in most cases. With this milestone, we return to the original mission of Brackets - to serve as a bridge between Designer and Developer workflows for the Web. To help people get things done simpler and faster.

With immense gratitude for our users' support, we're excited to begin this next chapter of Phoenix Code.