About two weeks ago I put together an initial list of JavaScript Tools & IDEs. Over the last week at OSCON, talking to a number of people who are into and using JavaScript on a daily basis, I’ve come up with a larger list of tools and IDEs.
Browsers On Your Dev Machine
Tools I’m Using…
- Visual Studio 2010 w/ ReSharper 6 (Microsoft + JetBrains)
- RubyMine (Jetbrains)
- WebStorm (Jetbrains)
- Firebug on Firefox
- Node.js
Tools I’m Trying Out…
- Emacs
- Vi/Vim
- JS Fiddle
- Jasmine
- JS Test Driver
- Coffeescript
- Chirpy (Coffeescript -> JS Compilation)
- Web Workbench (Mindscape)
- Aptana
- Notepad2
- Textmate
- Sublime Text 2
Suggestions From The Twitterverse! Thanks Everybody.
- JoshuaPoehls (Joshua Poehls) JS Fiddle, Jasmine, JS Test Driver
- davidalpert (David Alpert) Firebug + Aptana
- xinmyname (Andy Sherwood) Chirpy, Web Workbench
- encosia (Dave Ward) VS2010, PhpStorm, Notepad2, Vim, & Textmate depending on the project…
- danemorgridge (Dane Morgridge) Macvim, Textmate, and Chrome
- lazycoder (Scott Koon) WebStorm, vim Chrome dev tools, Google Closure Compiler
- jerrysievert (Jerry Seivert) Textmate, jshint bundle which activates on save.
- liammclennan (Liam Mclennan) Sublime Text 2, CoffeeScript and Shell Scripts
- lucisferre (Chris Nicola) Vlm, js Vlm Plugins, & Jetbrain’s Stuff.
My take on that is that you can use IDEs for statically type languages very successfully.
But using IDEs with dynamic languages gives more headache.
So it is better to just use a text editor – the simpler the better (but of course with support of snippets, file search etc).
Another reason why I don’t like using IDE is that it imposes its own restrictions and ways of doing things.
It limits you with what it supports and you are discouraged to do something that’s not out of the box.
While text editors give you only one tool – tool for writing code. That’s what it’s all about to me.
I totally get that, and often go back and forth between both. I get ideas from the way IDEs setup their workflow too though. In addition sometimes having a debugger, text editor, visual display of the content, and everything wrapped into one environment is pretty nice instead of having a half dozen windows floating around. 🙂
No doubt though I spend at least 50% of my time these days in a regular text editor, even for some of the statically typed languages I use. Especially for a few edits here and there and rebuilding. Opening something like Visual Studio 2010 and then opening the solution just takes a ridiculous amount of time. Edit, edit, save, build, and done.
Thanks for commenting & giving my blog a read!
But would be interesting to know more about your comparison of all the tools.
I’ll be working that up. Need some time to use each one. 😉 Thx for reading/commenting!
I’m evangelizing R# 6 here with it’s new js support – the integrated code navigation between my server-side C# and client-side js is awesome!
I hear that IDE’s (esp. VS) can be heavyweight, but I really don’t notice it except on open/close of the IDE/solution, which I rarely do. Sort of like why I don’t reboot any more often than I have to. I pay the price as rarely as I can because I am not willing to do without code navigation that IDE’s (and their plugins) afford.
One thing I liked about WebStorm that I may end up missing in VS with R#6 is its tab management. By default I think it only keeps up to 10 tabs open at once. After that when you open a new file/tab, it closes the one that hasn’t been used for the longest. Very different, but made a *lot* of sense when I thought about it.
Next I just really want a Crossfire ( http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Crossfire ) client for VS. *That* would be another huge step forward.