How to Hack on Brackets

Folder organization

Brackets is currently built using a thin native app shell around an HTML/JS/CSS app. If you pull the repos as described below, or look in the contents of the ZIP file, you'll see that the main app binaries are in the bin/ folder, but the actual HTML/JS/CSS files that implement the main app are in the brackets/ subfolder. The src/ folder is just the source for the native app shell, which is currently based on CEF.

Getting the source

Brackets is currently hosted in two github repos: the brackets-app repo, which contains the native app shell, and the brackets repo, which contains the HTML/JS/CSS code. The brackets-app repo contains the brackets repo as a submodule. (These repos are currently private, so you'll need to contact us for access.) We also have our own fork of CodeMirror; we're working with Marijn Haverbeke, the owner of CodeMirror, to get our changes merged into the main repo.

In addition to pulling brackets-app from github, you'll need to also grab submodule references by the Brackets application. To do so, first make sure you have SSH access to github (since the submodules are referenced via a git: URL rather than https). Then run the following command in the root of your brackets-app repo:

git submodule update --init --recursive

See Pro Git section 6.6 for some caveats when working with submodules.

To test if everything is working, run bin/mac/Brackets.app or bin/win/Brackets.exe. You should see the brackets interface.

Here are instructions for modifying the app shell on Mac (Win instructions coming soon):

To modify the application shell code, load src/mac/Brackets.xcodeproj into XCode 4.1 (or newer).

There are three main build targets:

1. Brackets CEF Debug - this is a full debug build and is really slow. This target should only be used if you need breakpoint debugging.
2. Brackets Development - this is a "release development" build. It's much faster, but you can't set breakpoints.
3. Brackets Archive - this target does a full release build and copies the build to the bin/mac directory. This target MUST be built before checking in any changes to the shell application.

NOTE: Before you build anything, you need to make a couple changes to the build schemes. This only needs to be done once since these setting will persist when you quit xcode.

1. Click the combobox at the top that says "Brackets Archive".
2. Select "Edit Scheme..." from the dropdown.
3. In the window that opens, select "Run Brackets.app" on the left hand list
4. In the right pane, select "Release" for Build Configuration
5. Click OK to close the window
6. Select "Brackets Development" from the dropdown
7. Repeat steps 1-5 for the Brackets Development scheme

IMPORTANT: If you make changes to the application shell, you MUST build the Brackets Archive target. This will ensure a updated Release build is checked in to /bin/mac.

Useful tools

Because Brackets is built in HTML/JS/CSS, we've actually started using Brackets itself to edit its own source code. It's pretty fun!

If you use Brackets to edit Brackets, you can quickly reload the app itself by choosing View > Refresh from the native menu (not the in-Brackets menu). You can also bring up the Chrome developer tools on the Brackets window using View > Show Developer Tools.

You can open a second Brackets window from the Debug > New Window item in the in-Brackets menu (not the native menu). This is nice because it means you can use a stable Brackets in one window to edit your code, and then reload the app in the second window to see if your changes worked. You can bring up the developer tools on the second window, too.

You can use Debug > Run Tests to run our unit test suite, and Debug > Show Perf Data to show some rudimentary performance info.