I’ve been using a Mac Book Pro Retina display for everything now and if an app isn’t made for the retina, it’s really obvious. One of the biggest things I was bummed about was Brackets. Luckily Terry Ryan reminded me that the Brackets team has been working on a new shell that fixes this problem.

The documentation for getting it set up is pretty straightforward (and there’s also a binary for those who don’t want to mess with building the new shell from source). But one area where I got tripped up was how to actually get the binary from source. Anyone who knows Xcode at all will have no troubles, but if you’re a web developer, this might help.

By default, my Xcode project listed “All” which is incorrect, so I changed it from “All” to “Brackets” in the drop down

Then you select Product->Archive from the menu bar (I still don’t totally get why it’s labeled Archive).

That will compile all the source files and open up the Organizer. Your app should be listed there as “Brackets” with an option to Verify and Distribute. I think you’re supposed to Verify most Xcode apps but it wouldn’t let me Verify anything. So just click Distribute and select “Save Built Products” on the next page. That will prompt you for a save location.

When you browse to that folder you’ll see the directory, and within that directory is an Applications directory which includes a Brackets.app binary. Open that, at first launch point it to your brackets source directory, and you’re up and running!