Project
More Languages for Adobe Brackets — Editor Syntax Plugin
An open-source Adobe Brackets plugin adding syntax highlighting and comment shortcuts for 19 languages the editor didn't support out of the box — from COBOL and Fortran to Julia, R, and Swift — via CodeMirror modes.
Adobe Brackets was a good editor with a narrow idea of which languages existed. Open a COBOL or Fortran or IDL file and you got a wall of uniform gray text. This plugin fixed that for nineteen languages it had left out.
Context
I was working across a wider spread of languages than a web-focused editor expected — scientific and legacy ones especially — and Brackets treated most as plain text. Rather than switch tools, I extended the one I liked and published the result.
The problem
Brackets is built on CodeMirror, which already knows how to highlight far more languages than Brackets exposed. The missing piece was the wiring: registering each language’s CodeMirror mode, mapping it to file extensions, and hooking it into the editor’s comment commands so the new languages behaved like first-class citizens.
Approach
The plugin registers CodeMirror modes for 19 languages Brackets didn’t ship — COBOL, Fortran, IDL, Julia, Lisp, Mathematica, R, Swift, and more — binding each to its file extensions so highlighting works on open, and wiring them into Brackets’ line- and block-comment shortcuts. Released under AGPL-3.0.
Outcome
It’s published on GitHub and makes Brackets usable for a much broader range of code than it shipped supporting. It’s the most-starred project on my GitHub.