What about support for CSS preprocessors?

I concur with zachzman and think CSS preprocessors should be a priority, especially if you want to gather support from the bleeding-edge developer community. Beyond syntax support, you should also provide build support for the various preprocessors, starting with SASS and LESS, like CodeKit, but baked in. This would be a differentiating factor that could pull people away from the many other options out there, and become the first real competent Windows contender. I like what I'm seeing!

Just want to add my two cents. Without support for preproccesors, Edge COde Preview is a non starter for me. Please add it.

Going beyond installed software, live previews, integration options are all nice steps in the right direction, but features like CSS preprocessors listed are opportunities for power users to take notice and consider moving to the "edge". I'm curious as well about Adobe's approach to including these into the cloud services.

Preprocessor support is definitely on our roadmap and something we plan to add in the near future. You can vote it up and comment on it in our feature backlog.

https://trello.com/c/WkKpIVvd

-Adam

Hi Zach,

It's probably fair to say LESS is a slightly higher priority for the Brackets core team, for at least two reasons: Brackets itself is built using LESS, and CodeMirror (the open source editor widget we're based on) supports LESS code coloring out of the box but not SASS.

That said, bear in mind that this is an open source project, so no one has to be beholden to our priorities.  If anyone is into adding SASS support, please feel free to code it up and send us a patch! :-)  The best place to start would probably be code coloring, which is all we currently support for LESS so far.

But beyond simple code coloring, an important question is: what would you consider "support" for LESS or SASS?  E.g.:

• Functionality to automatically compile it down to CSS for you (on save, or perhaps via an explicit command)
• Live Preview supports editing LESS/SASS (similar to what we support for CSS today)
• Quick Edit (the nifty inline editor feature) supports showing LESS/SASS code for a given HTML tag (similar to CSS today)
• Code hinting CSS properties/values in LESS/SASS code (similar to the simple code hinting we might provide for CSS)
• LESS/SASS-specific features -- like code hinting of mixin names/parameters, or Quick Edit functonality to show the definition of a mixin as an inline snippet.

Each of those is a feature that takes work, so the more input we* can get from you guys on what matters most, the better we can prioritize how soon to work on what.

*And by "we" I mean not just Adobe / the core Brackets team, but also anyone else who's interested in joining the Brackets project!

- Peter

Peter, thanks for all your work on Brackets! Although for me and many other developers I no, Brackets is not usuable until it has live SASS preview built in.

Live Preview supports editing LESS/SASS (similar to what we support for CSS today) - this would be a top feature!

Something similiar to www.getedge.io would be awesome. Having a live edit feature like this would save me many hours per week (you won't believe how much my Ctrl-S/Tab keys get used).

What would it take to get this feature moved to "top priority"? I'm interested in helping in whatever way I can - although I'm not sure what languages such a feature would be programmed in.

Thanks, Caleb

To directly answer the question of what I see as "supporting" SASS/LESS, I would probably tier what features are most important.

1. Syntax support, at least provide the ability to select CSS as a document type as Sublime Text or Komodo Edit do, for the interim.
2. Code hinting
3. Auto Compile
4. Live Preview
5. Extension support like Compass

Even if you could just allow us to treat SCSS files (or LESS) as CSS it would allow me to at least use the application for any of my projects. I currently do this with other applications if they don't have SCSS support baked in. As I said before, I like what I see and hopefully some (or all) or these features can be integrated. That way it can become something I like to use.

I'd hope to see .LESS compiling as well, the Syntax Highlighting and Code Hints are great and certianly a must have, but the old "include JS and letthe client side to the translating" is bad practice. If we can compile from .LESS (or .SASS/SCSS) to .CSS upon saving that would be the full whole shabang, perfect preprocessor support.

I agree, without less and more

Specifically sass I have very little interest in useing any editor, this is the future for web.

UVU, do you agree with the folks above about what "supporting" LESS/SASS means? I agree that a web editor that doesn't suppor them isn't going to be very useful. And I'd like to nail down what people's expectations are so I can start creating the story and adding it to our backlog.

=Ryan

ryan@adobe.com

I think you would want to support both less and sass mainly because there are so many differnt opinions on what works best, I started out using less and then learned about sass and did a little research and decided sass had more to offer, but I Know there are sever folks who think less is easier to use,

I think your biggest problem is getting people to open up something new such as Edge Code and decide what will this offer me that I can't get elsewhere, for example before I got creative cloud, I started with dreamweaver way back in the early days, latter on when jquery started getting popular I couldn’t seam to get code hinting to work, and there where a few random folks offering a half-assed plugin that didn't always work and between that and not being able to pay for the updates for dreamweaver and other products I looked around and found Aptana which I still use today because so far It has never been unable to do what I need and its free, now that I have just recently started using CC which is freaking awsome Im thinking about giving dreamweaver another shot, in-fact I was downloading it when I noticed edge code and decided to try it, the first thinks that I thought was how am I going to use sass with this.

So that said I think to me the most annoying part of using sass is the setup which consists of the following steps, copy a folder I made and update on my local machine, which has all the basic structure such as css folder, js folder, an index that has the basic linking to folders and files then rename the folder change some of the basic things such as title and well the obvious things, then open terminal and do a sass —watch then carefully make sure I only point to the css folder I'm working in so I don't have the annoying delay you get if you point to a folder that has several projects in it, and then once its set up if I still have any ambitions to even work anymore I do my thing, so things I think would work great would be thus, and this is keeping in mind Im new to the edge products so some of this may already exist, I haven't spent allot of time in any of the apps,

What if not only could I just drag my preset work folder(s) into Edge Code and get going but maybe have it auto start a sass watch if it detects a .sass file.

I think code hinting and color are obvious needs.

Maybe a button that would create a project folder and include some pre determined files in the folder and link to them.

Maybe a option to work in sass mode.

Link files between the edge apps, really I could go on forever I am more of a visual person so I made a sample of what it might look like if I could create a picture with my words and I'm sure I'm leaving things out, I don't have allot of time to really explore this like I would like, over all I think the edge apps are looking really positive and I can't wait to see where they go, I hope this helps and let me know if I over looked things.

cid:0A2D995B-A35B-45BC-82F6-3E7D1C582E35

Hi UVU,

This is really helpful, thanks very much. I think that along with the basic syntax-highlighting/code completion the thing I'm most interested in adressing is the workflow pain involved with setting up new SASS/LESS/Stylus projects and then managing the compliation of those projects. I'm hopeful we'll stat working on this over the next few months and that combined with Live Preview will make for compelling and innovative support for preprocessors.

I appreciate you taking the time to jot these down. It's great feedback. If you have anything else that you think of or want to see in Edge Code, feel free to drop me an email.

=Ryan

ryan@adobe.com

I think that CodeKit already does a beautiful job of handling the compiling and project creation for preprocessor projects. So I would place this low on the priority list for Edge.

SASS is growing faster and gaining more support than LESS. And I think SASS is a far easier transition for CSS-coders. So I would much rather see SASS support added to Edge Code.

Here is my list of priorities.

1. Syntax support
2. Live preview (this would be killer as I don't think any SASS-supporting app offers live preview)
3. Code hinting (including recognizing custom functions)

Looks good Joseph! I aggree that Live Preview (without saving, just like CSS works right now) would be killer. Once you get used to live preview you can't every go back to the old way of Cmd-S and refresh.

One of the things I miss (for now, I can handle live reload with Codekit or Ghostlab) is when editing the CSS from the HTML: cmd + e would be good to have the right LESS file where those css rules are.