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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

I can’t imagine anyone is still using Dreamweaver—that market must have been utterly subsumed by Squarespace. If you are a, say, small business that needs a 3–5 page marketing site with contact info and about pages, surely it makes more sense to use Squarespace (or wix, or what have you).

But this sent me down a memory rabbit hole…a former manager of mine loved Brackets. Brackets was Adobe’s open-source text editor (https://opensource.adobe.com/brackets.io/?lang=en) that was sorta VSCode, but prettier.

Adobe sunsetted that project, but it still apparently somewhat lives on, in the form of Phoenix Code. (https://phcode.dev) And it still does look very “designed” in comparison to VSCode. I really like the default typography, tag highlighting, and some of the details of the text editor itself.

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Does it? IMO it looks very outdated and cluttered compared to most editors. Clicking around a bit, this screen specifically stood out to me as lacking a lot of visual hierarchy: https://i.imgur.com/Y7iBS2p.png. It just kind of reads as a visual jumble with too many elements competing for your attention with slightly different/incoherent styling—I count 5 different unique button styles on this page alone, with some buttons having flat borders, some buttons having shiny highlights, and 3 completely different shades of grey button borders. Definitely doesn't feel "designed" to me.

> I can’t imagine anyone is still using Dreamweaver—that market must have been utterly subsumed by Squarespace. If you are a, say, small business that needs a 3–5 page marketing site with contact info and about pages, surely it makes more sense to use Squarespace (or wix, or what have you).

You're right, considering that Dreamweaver is SaaS now. Were it a single purchase it would actually be more affordable for independent webmasters making websites as one could buy a single copy of Dreamweaver, make several websites, and host them on a single server with multiple domain names, while not paying the subscription over and over again.

> But this sent me down a memory rabbit hole…a former manager of mine loved Brackets. Brackets was Adobe’s open-source text editor (https://opensource.adobe.com/brackets.io/?lang=en) that was sorta VSCode, but prettier.

Oh wow, I remember playing around with this editor sometime in the mid 2010s (post-Atom, I think, and pre-VSCode existence(?)/dominance).

Was that an Electron project too? Can't recall.

Friend of mine insisted it was the best for web development. I feel like I used it once and totally forgot about it until now.

I also recall that one mac specific editor that was popular at that time? Textmate maybe?

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