Release Notes: Sprint 38

This is a draft!

This document will not be finalized until the end of Sprint 38 -- approximately April 4.

What's New in Sprint 38

• Multiple Cursors
  • Multiple cursor / multiple selection support, including...
  • Ctrl/Cmd-click or drag to create multiple cursors/selections
  • Alt-drag to create a rectangular selection (add Ctrl/Cmd to select multiple rectangles)
  • Ctrl/Cmd-U to undo selection/cursor changes (add Shift to navigate forward in cursor history)
  • Ctrl/Cmd-B to add a new selection at the next occurrence of a word or selected text. Shift-Ctrl/Cmd-B to skip an occurrence and add a selection on the next one. Alt-F3 or Cmd-Ctrl-G to add all occurrences as selections at once.
  • Read the full documentation for details.
• Live Preview
  • CSS Shapes visual editor: After enabling experimental Chrome features, you can edit CSS Shapes visually in the browser preview. The editor automatically appears in Chrome when you put your cursor on Brackets on a Shape definition. (TODO: see blog post for setup instructions)
• Linting
  • Support asynchronous linting: Linters that require reading extra files from disk or talking to network services can now integrate with the standard Brackets linting UI.
• Search
  • Improved usability of file/folder exclusions: Filter editor displays how many files are left after filtering. Search shows warning if filter excludes all files in subtree. Filters disabled when searching only a single file.
  • Improved performance on Windows if large binary files exist in the project
• Files and Folders
  • File tree expand/collapse shortcuts: Ctrl/Cmd-click to expand/collapse all siblings; Ctrl/Cmd-Alt-click to collapse subtree.
• Image Preview
  • View .ico files, e.g. often used as website "favicon"
• Overeall UI
  • Visual polish, subtle animations added
• Localization
  • UK English locale added
  • Process change: translation pull requests should include which SHA (commit) the update is based on. See localization README for details.
• Ongoing Research (not implemented yet)
  • Research: JS Code Hints Cleanup: Investigate how to simplify the code, improve performance & maintainability, and unify with new preferences system.
  • Research: Improved LESS support: Investigate support for Live Preview, Quick Edit, and Quick Find Definition with LESS code.

Full change logs: brackets and brackets-shell

UI Changes

Find in Files - If you've set a file/folder exclusion filter and then you use 'Find In...' on a single file, filtering is temporarily disabled to ensure the file is always searched.

API Changes

CodeMirror v4 & multiple cursors/selections - See the Brackets CodeMirror v4 Migration Guide. Notably, referencing CodeMirror as a global identifier is now deprecated; use Require instead, as with other modules.

PHP files - Editor.getLanguageForSelection() will now return the correct "php" language (instead of the generic "clike").

New/Improved Extensibility APIs

Inline Editors - When a provider has nothing to show for the current cursor position, it can return an explanation string instead of just null. If no providers respond, the explanation is shown in a popup. This can help make inline editing functionality more discoverable to users.

LanguageManager - If a file extension already has a default Language mapping in Brackets, an extension can unregister the mapping in order to use it with a new Language. (For example, changing ".twig" from generic HTML highlighting to a new Twig-specific highlighting mode). Use Language.removeFileExtension() and removeFileName().

Editor - All get* and set* methods for Editor settings now take an optional path parameter to get setting for a particular file. If omitted, then the current document is used. The set* methods also now return a boolean value which indicates whether value is valid.

In addition, all the add/remove file name/extension APIs can now optionally be passed an array of items instead of a single item.

Jump to Definition - use EditorManager.registerJumpToDefProvider() to register a provider for the Navigate > Jump to Definition command.

Known Issues

• With Chrome 34, using Live Preview will show a console error: "'CSS.getAllStyleSheets' wasn't found". This is harmless and shouldn't affect Live Preview. See #7127.
• Activity Monitor in Mavericks (OS X 10.9) says the Brackets Helper process is "Not Responding" even when it's working normally (#5794). You can safely ignore this unless Brackets is actually failing to respond when you click or type text.
• On Windows XP, Brackets will not detect external file changes instantly. It behaves similarly to Sprint 35 and earlier releases - changes are detected upon window activation, and the folder tree must be manually refreshed.
• #2272: Windows Vista may not allow the Brackets installer to run (you may not see any error message). To work around this, right-click the installer file, choose Properties, and click the Unblock button.
• #4362: Slow startup of Brackets and Live Preview on Windows due to Chrome proxy settings. See workaround.
• Debug > Run Tests is disabled in the installer/DMG distributions of Brackets, because the unit test code is not included. To run unit tests, pull Brackets from GitHub instead.

Community contributions to Brackets

TODO

Pulling source code from Git

TODO

Bugs fixed in Sprint 38

For details on the bugs addressed, please refer to closed sprint 38 bugs. Not all fixed bugs will be caught by this search query, however.