Last night Adobe’s Create The Web Tour rolled into Portland, Oregon and I attended. The night consisted of two presentations highlighting the new tools that Adobe has developed for creating the web. Of the many tools demonstrated, Edge Code really made an impression. It looks a bit like this:
In the past, I’ve used a grip of opensource text editors. My favorite has always been Notepad++. While I am free to modify and redistribute the code under the GPL license, I never have for one very important reason: I have no idea how to. Notepad++, like many other text editors, is written in a language I do not understand. This is where Edge Code is a bit different.
Edge Code is a distribution of Brackets which is available under the MIT license and is written in html, css, and javascript. Three technolgies that I can read and write. This is pretty exciting; I’ve always wanted to be able to edit my editor and now I can!
This is only one of the many neat features of Edge Code. It also syncs with your browser so you can see your changes in real time. It understands the relationships between html and css, allowing you to edit your stylesheet directly from an html document. It’s great to see inovations like these being developed for those of use who build the web.
I’m going to install Edge Code today with the hope that I can introduce it into my daily work flow. Have you tried it yet? If so, please leave a comment and let us know what you think about it.
ThemeShaper 
This is super-powerful and definitely worth getting excited about. 🙂
Oh wow, this looks great. Thanks for the share, I wasn’t even aware 🙂
Emil
Thanks for coming. I wasn’t aware ThemeShaper was in attendance; I’m a fan of your WordPress work.
Thanks again.
Anytime! Thanks for sponsoring our Meetup and presenting about your new tools. Very inspiring 🙂
Ah, it’s built from Brackets! Just tried that out today for the first time. It’s the closest an editor has come in a long time that made me consider leaving SublimeText.
Wow! That’s a great review. I do not use SublimeText myself, but many of my colleagues love it. Hearing that Brackets almost made you switch is awesome!
Looks interesting, will check this out for sure.
I saw that demonstration last night and as soon as I got home I cloned the Brackets repo. With just a little more improvement Edge Code/Brackets will be replacing Notepad++ for my front-end web development.
I was also intrigued by Edge Inspect for previewing and inspecting web designs on devices. I especially liked the ability to instantly get screenshots from all the currently connected devices.
Hi Robert! Glad to hear that I’m not the only one who went batty over Brackets last night. What do you think needs to be improved before it would serve as a replacement to Notepad++?
Edge Inspect is pretty awesome too! I’ve been using it since the Shadow days 🙂 Really makes multiple device testing lees of a chore.
Nothing major but a few things that come to mind are tabs so multiple files can be open simultaneously, better file/directory access, and the ability to SFTP the finished files to the production server right from the editor.
The FTP isn’t there yet, but you can open multiple files. Instead of tabs Brackets uses a vertical list of open files. You can do normal tab things like rearranging them, but there is more space to read the whole file name and it scales a bit better. Thanks for checking it out.
Garth,
Thanks for the presentation and for pointing the above out to me. I’d just given Brackets a cursory once over. After playing with it a bit longer I see my concerns about multiple open files and file/directory access are unfounded. The inline editing and live preview features are awesome!
Yesterday I attended the event Create the Web in Sao Paulo / Brazil and I was very excited by what I saw. The Edge Inspect takes the mobile development to the next level.
Ha! it would be better than sublime text.
Just downloaded Edge Code. I’m really loving the simplicity and and “lightness” it seems to have. The only thing that keeps me using Coda is the built in FTP access. How would you go about working on a wordpress theme that’s currently on a staging/dev site? or even a live site? The live preview function seems to get a little funky with PHP files.