Both Atom and Brackets are lightweight source code editors written in javascript and have gotten a lot of attention from the web development community. I quickly want to compare the two and tell you which one I prefer at the moment and why.
If you haven’t read my comparison of a couple of editors some time ago, you should check it out: Best Free Source Code Editors for e.g.: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
As some of you might now, I’m sticking with Atom , but there’s primarily one reason for it, that many of you might not care about.
My biggest drawback for Brackets right now is, that it can not open the file tree for a directory I currently am in, from the terminal. That means if I type:
cd projects brackets .it will just open the default project or most recent project and not the one residing on the file system. This feature has been requested and is awaiting implementation though trello card for this feature (MAC) or same feature for linux .
This though is very incompatible with my workflow, because I actually open directories I’m currently in a lot through the terminal. Before Atom I used Vim or gVim for that.
Both Atom and Brackets have a very experienced company behind them that maintains and develops, GitHub and Adobe. Brackets further is featured in the Creative Cloud Package as quite a contender to Dreamweaver under the alias Adobe Edge Code.
Atom has developed a lot more traction in the past couple of months. My impression is, that Atom is built with a product in mind that a lot of developers love, Sublime Text, whereas Brackets goes some new paths by appealing more to beginners.
For me, Atom is the clear winner, but if you’re not relying on the command line, Brackets might be better for you.