It sounds dumb, but just try it. You'll get hooked on Webstorm and never want to go back. Example: press shift twice. It pops up a "Search Everywhere" box, and you can type filenames, symbol names, actions (Rename, etc)... it's basically helm M-x, but way better.
You won't ever feel like "CSS names are bad!" because you won't ever need to remember anything. Want to center something? Just type "align" and usually webstorm pops up autocomplete with the right thing. And that's true in every context: https://i.imgur.com/jCAAesF.png
All of these IDEs are specializations of IntelliJ IDEA (https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/#section=mac). They specialize it for web and call it WebStorm, for Python and call it PyCharm, etc. But all the plugins and settings work in all the IDEs, so really the underlying awesomeness is IDEA.
At this point I trust IDEA enough to know that if I open any codebase, I can start navigating it right away. Doesn't matter if it's C++, ocaml, or VueJS. Typing shift-shift will always let me jump to definitions.
Yeah it costs money, but $13/mo is super reasonble. Dropbox was similarly impactful on my life, and that was $10/mo.
It also has 6000+ unresolved issues reported, a lot of them open for 3-4 years with little hope of getting fixed. They keep rolling out half-baked support for the trendiest new JS frameworks, while basic parts of the IDE are falling apart every day. (For example, when opening the mentioned "Search Everywhere" dialog, sometimes it just doesn't receive focus. Good luck with that productivity.)
Meanwhile, after launch, the IDE grabs focus about six times while loading. Symbol navigation sometimes picks up random unrelated functions from ignored folders instead of the one sitting right beside the file, because it has the same name. Want autocomplete for that vertical-align's value? It just throws up every possible value for any CSS property.
Pretty bad when code editors running in a browser engine are getting more usable than your paid product.
Yeah, the unresolved bug reports are pretty annoying. I ran into similar problems trying to get Live Edit working with AngularJS.
Symbol navigation sometimes picks up random unrelated functions from ignored folders instead of the one sitting right beside the file, because it has the same name.
Even after excluding a directory? If you have autogenerated build folders (e.g. dist/, out/, etc) you have to mark them as Excluded: https://i.imgur.com/E2uXJzu.png
Odd. I haven't noticed that, but I'll watch out for it.
This usually happens from node_modules, marked as a library folder, so it's indexed and might even be relevant, but it shouldn't really be a better match than the one in the source. And it's not even consistent.
Hope they'll get their shit together, it used to be a pretty great IDE before these annoyances started piling up.
But I can not praise its abilities as you do. My experience has been mixed. Sure it's cool when it works well, but then its bugs are all the more painful. You expect intelligence and you get the opposite.
It thinks "y" is a global if I put "x.y = ..." anywhere in my code. Genius!
Also, It's lacking in its support for Vue Js. I get lots of red squiggles all over my code for perfectly valid Vue props, and PostCSS within single-page Vue component also is weak (no $variables support).
VSCode is indeed awesome for Vue. It supports pretty much any lang in any block properly, due to its support for embedded language contexts. If you have template lang="pug" and pug grammar plugin, it just picks it up. Also Vetur extension adds a lot of autocompletes and typescript support.
Aha! I see. Do you happen to have a repo I can clone to reproduce the problem? I'm interested in fixing that.
Vue's tooling is context aware. It knows when you're within a <style scoped> tag. I see that there's a PostCSS plugin: https://i.imgur.com/JTPlIEk.png
Theoretically, the tooling should be able to use that plugin's lexer rules. PostCSS already registers itself as a language (pcss) so Vue's tooling logic should be: "are we within a <style scoped> tag? search for PostCSS tooling; if if none found, use vanilla CSS."
But it's flawed. PostCSS is itself a host for plugins. So a WebStorm PostCSS plugin would need to allow user to select the PostCSS plugins that they are using.
Case in point: I use postcss-simple-vars but the WebStorm plugin assumes I use postcss-custom-properties. And so it fails me.
It's gonna be a little while before I can scrape together the time to look at this. This week is gonna be a doozy. Sorry.
I think we should open a ticket in the appropriate place though. There's a good chance that a plugin maintainer can look into this and fix it quickly. It's such a clear example of brokenness, and should be pretty easy to fix.
I'm not quite sure where to raise the issue though. And I'm falling asleep, so that's all for now.
It's not so much that it has X feature or Y widget, but rather that the whole ecosystem feels cohesive. With emacs you sort of cobble together your configurations until you're happy with it, and that's very powerful -- it's why it's so successful. But there's something to be said for having "awesomeness out of the box". It's why Spacemacs was so popular.
I hear you about FOSS. I was reeeeally hesitant to throw my time into yet another closed source clusterfuck. I grew up as a gamedev, and back in 2000 that meant you had to use Visual Studio. All of my VS skills are now completely obsolete. And whenever I ran into VS issues, I couldn't debug it since it was closed source.
Two things convinced me IDEA is probably worthwhile:
1. They're partially open source. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community You can build that from source and run it, so you can at least see how most of the system is architected. You won't be able to extend some of the closed-source plugins, but you get some of the benefits of FOSS.
2. Their tooling is their primary business model. When Microsoft lost their VS monopoly, Microsoft didn't die. JetBrains' sole focus is making the tooling ecosystem work; they're the Adobe of tooling.
I've been using WebStorm (and IntelliJ IDEA) for the past couple years and love it. I have no intention of swapping to any other IDE unless I really have to. Can definitely speak to the extreme convenience of instantly finding usages/definitions, "intellisense" of func params, plugin architecture, super customizable settings, built-in language support and linting/evaluation, refactoring assistance, live templates... Just a godsend, to be frank.
Is there a reason you wouldn't just use IntelliJ and install the plugins you need? I used to use separate IDEs pycharm and phpstorm, but then I needed IntelliJ for some Java dev and realized I could just install PHP and Python plugins instead and from then on only needed one IDE (IntelliJ Ultimate). I havent been able to do this with C#, .Net but for everything else it seems to work.
Mm, good point. WebStorm performance is good, but IDEA is noticeably slower. I haven't used PyCharm yet, so it's possible performance could be a pain point there. I find myself firing up Webstorm instead of IDEA due to slower IDEA indexing.
FWIW Cursive is a bit sluggish to start, but after it's done indexing it feels like the best Lisp development environment ever made.
I liked PyCharm's feature list but the index-the-world behaviour definitely like it going back to the pre-SSD era. Not a show-stopper for my biggest project but the cost for everything else definitely left me hesitant to switch.
Sorry, this may be a silly question, but is it possible for PyCharm (and other IntelliJ IDE products) to define a specific working folder / path for the file index-the-world feature to stay within or does it always permeate through the entire computers hard drives, just in case?
It works similarly to git. You define a project root, and then exclude subdirectory trees as needed. I believe there's a way to add additional directories outside the root if needed.
I had the same experience with a Vim plugin called Jedi. It was great, but typing "pdb." would freeze Vim for 5 seconds. IDEs can definitely try to do too much.
But I agree with your points. Despite its flaws, it is probably the best thing out there for creating visual layouts from code.