Next Generation of Dreamweaver

Today at MAX, we are excited to announce that a new, modern code editor will be added to Dreamweaver CC in 2016. This is the start of a significant modernization effort for Dreamweaver where we will add a modern, dark UI along with the modern code editor that we will be rolling out over the course of next year. It is going to be an incredibly exciting year for Dreamweaver and improving the code editor is the first step.

A few years ago, Adobe kicked off the open source Brackets project, a code editor specifically for the web that was actually built upon HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Since then, we’ve seen tremendous momentum and growth with over 350,000 users a month. A vibrant community of committers to the core project has emerged, and hundreds of extensions created by third-parties are now available.

As our team discussed possibilities to improve Dreamweaver’s code editor, we kept coming back to a number of ideas that were successful in Brackets, such as Live Preview and the inline editors. We quickly realized that it made perfect sense to use Brackets as the base for an improved code editing experience, rather than trying to replicate its features in Dreamweaver.

So what does this mean? Over the next few months, we will be hard at work integrating Brackets into Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver users will get all of Brackets’ benefits along with advanced capabilities you might be familiar with already, like preprocessor support, inline editors, and code hinting for multiple languages. The Brackets open source project itself will remain independent.

We’ll be sharing a lot more about the modernization effort over the coming months. We also plan to do an open beta so we can get this version of Dreamweaver in your hands and gather feedback. Stay tuned to the Dreamweaver blog and follow us on Twitter for more news.