Komodo Edit is a FOSS “freemium” subset of Komodo IDE. Longish startup time. Reasonable tooltips and autocompletion. (You can add APIs and links to dirs that should be scanned.) Flexible linting. No code reformatting. You can add external tools to interface.

Netbeans has lots of support for HTML5 built in. Good tooltips and autocompletion. Long startup time. Inflexible linting, testing, etc. Can't add “external tools” to interface (plugins for this either don't work or work poorly on Linux). And oh-so-painful Swing font rendering on Linux. If it weren't for the font rendering, in spite of the other limitations this would still be a very attractive option.

Aptana is based on the Eclipse IDE. Buggy. Long startup time. Probably has awesome tooltips and autocompletion, but I didn't get that far.

Didn't try because of the oh-so-painful Swing font rendering on Linux.

Too hard to add tooltips, etc.

Should be automatic.

• JS Testrunner
• Testem

Ideally automatic.

• JSHint
• JSLint

• ?

• tidy?

• js-beautify does JS, CSS, and HTML

We want to be able to compile LESS, SASS, or whatever, and it should probably be automatic.

• ?

Applied at deploy time?

• ?

The following describes what I have done to help make Komodo Edit a more complete Web development platform. The following addresses only the needs of front-end development.

It will use:

• JSHint for JavaScript syntax checking. (This is built into Komodo Edit).
• Testem+Mocha+Chai for automated unit testing.
• jsbeautify for JS, CSS, and

I've yet to get to:

• CSS and HTML syntax checking
• Compiling CSS
• Minification

Note that Komodo Edit configurations don't appear to carry over when you install a new point release. So you will have to repeat a lot of this when doing version upgrades. Decent support for JSHint and JSLint are built in, so we won't have to add those.

Download and install Komodo Edit from http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit.

Confirm that you have the following extensions and install as needed:

• NST
• TODO Helper
• Emmet [todo]
• Side By Side Diff [todo]

I also disabled a whole bunch of extensions that didn't seem relevant to my needs.

Go through the list of plugins and disable anything that was automatically picked up from Firefox but isn't relevant to Komodo Edit.

The expected file manager in Linux is hard coded as nautilus or konqueror. A workaround for this if you have neither of these is to add a script to your local bin named nautilus or konqueror that handles

os.system('nautilus "%s" &' % filename)

or

os.system('konqueror --profile filemanagement "%s" &' % filename)

respectively.

A simpler workaround is to add a soft link in your local bin named nautilus to /usr/bin/thunar or your prefered file manager.

Both Testem and js-beautify rely on Node.js and the Node.js package manager (i.e., npm). Follow your OS's/distribution's directions for installing these. On my Debian sid-based system, it meant installing three packages:

# apt-get install nodejs nodejs-legacy npm

Install Testem with

# npm install testem -g

This will pull in Mocha and Chai as well.

Install jsbeautify for Node.JS with:

# npm -g install js-beautify

I also added a config file in my home directory for my default js-beautify settings.

.jsbeautifyrc

{
    "indent_size": 4,
    "indent_char": " ",
    "indent_level": 0,
    "indent_with_tabs": false,
    "preserve_newlines": true,
    "max_preserve_newlines": 10,
    "jslint_happy": true,
    "brace_style": "collapse",
    "keep_array_indentation": false,
    "keep_function_indentation": false,
    "space_before_conditional": true,
    "break_chained_methods": false,
    "eval_code": false,
    "unescape_strings": false,
    "wrap_line_length": 72
}

I added a this script on my PATH that accepts a file, senses whether it is HTML, CSS, JS, or none-of-the-above, and then does an appropriate inplace beautify on it possible.