For years (and years and years) I’ve used emacs as my primary editing tool. I sometimes use its built-in outline mode, but more often then not I just type into a never-ending buffer named “notes.txt”.

Lately I’ve been working on an extension to the brackets text editor for the robot framework. In order to eat my own dog food I’m slowing starting to use brackets instead of emacs for my go-to text editor. Emacs is a hard habit to break!

Today I needed to do a little outlining, so I pulled up brackets and created a new file named “notes.md” (.md is an extension for the markdown format). I was pleasantly surprised to see that this works quite well as an outliner. The markdown mode provides both syntax highlighting and code folding for headers and lists. This makes it easy to collapse and expand the sections of my outline as I work. I’m not a “power outliner”, so this is really all I need.

Brackets is really starting to grow on me. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a more comprehensive review. If you aren’t married to your text editor – or even if you are – brackets is worth checking out.