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Table of Contents
Toward a Web Development Environment
You might want to jump directly to Komodo Edit for Web Development.
Candidates for core editing
Komodo Edit
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 JS linting. No code reformatting. Fairly easy to add external tools.
Netbeans
Netbeans has lots of support for HTML5 built in.
What I like
- Built in server with auto-update in Chrome or Chromium.
- Pretty syntax highlighting icons.1)
- Good tooltips and autocompletion.
- Resource suggestion (e.g.,
<img src=“img/will bring up a list of files). - Good and easy autoformatting.
- Nifty “wrap in tag” feature.
- Built-in support for LESS/SASS.
Neat but not that awersome (yet?)
- Built-in JavaScript debugger.
What I don't like
- Long startup time.
- Inflexible linting, testing, etc.
- Adding “external tools” is not built in. Available plugins for this are either buggy or don't work.
- Oh-so-painful Swing font rendering on Linux.
Aptana
Aptana is based on the Eclipse IDE. Buggy. Long startup time. Probably has awesome tooltips and autocompletion, but I didn't get that far.
JetBrains
Didn't try because of the oh-so-painful Swing font rendering on Linux.
Geany, Gedit, etc.
Too hard to add tooltips, etc.
Desired Features
Unit test runner
Should be automatic.
- JS Testrunner
- Testem
Linting
Ideally automatic.
JavaScript
- JSHint
- JSLint
CSS
- ?
HTML
- tidy?
Code formatting
- js-beautify does JS, CSS, and HTML
CSS compiler
We want to be able to compile LESS, SASS, or whatever, and it should probably be automatic.
- ?
Minification
Applied at deploy time?
- ?