How to Build the Brackets App Shell on Mac

For most of your work on Brackets, you should only need to edit the HTML/JS/CSS code in the brackets repo. But if you need to do work on the native app shell in brackets-app, here's how. (These instructions are for Mac; Windows instructions are [here] (https://github.com/adobe/brackets-app/wiki/How-to-Build-the-Brackets-App-Shell-on-Windows).)

Modifying the app shell

To modify the application shell code, load src/mac/Brackets.xcodeproj into XCode 4.1 (or newer).

There are three main build targets:

1. Brackets CEF Debug - this is a full debug build and is really slow. This target should only be used if you need breakpoint debugging.
2. Brackets Development - this is a "release development" build. It's much faster, but you can't set breakpoints.
3. Brackets Archive - this target does a full release build and copies the build to the bin/mac directory. This target MUST be built before checking in any changes to the shell application.

NOTE: Before you build anything, you need to make a couple changes to the build schemes. This only needs to be done once since these settings will persist when you quit Xcode.

1. Click the combobox at the top that says "Brackets Archive".
2. Select "Edit Scheme..." from the dropdown.
3. In the window that opens, select "Run Brackets.app" on the left hand list
4. In the right pane, select "Release" for Build Configuration
5. Click OK to close the window
6. Select "Brackets Development" from the dropdown
7. Repeat steps 1-5 for the Brackets Development scheme