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Which is the best IDE for JavaScript development in 2024?

ThemeSelection on May 17, 2021

Ever wonder what is the best IDE for JavaScript development? Then here you are going to learn about what is the best IDE for JavaScript Development...
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theonlytails profile image
TheOnlyTails

I love WebStorm. I've been in the Jetbrains ecosystem ever since I started programming, and they make such high quality products I don't want to leave.

Note: IntelliJ Ultimate and WebStorm are basically the same, except IJ is more general purpose for all kinds of programming, and WS is more focused on web development, as its name implies.

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Brian B.

I second this. There is just something about it. With VSCode, I always felt like I was in an abusive relationship where I had to do all the work. The words seem bigger and complex, it requires plugins to do almost anything any other IDE does. Webstorm though, it's constantly trying to explain itself with the option to turn off the training wheels. It's weird too because I learned more from the ide than the tutorials I was reading and that's not how I typically learn.

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TheOnlyTails

I think that the most major thing that JetBrains IDEs have that teaches their users is inspections, simply because you're constantly being corrected and improved, up to the point where you don't need the IDE to correct you anymore.

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Atulit Anand

Vs code is so customizable that one day I believe some one will make an extension to add a refrigerator and bed in it 😂 and I'll be the one to stay in.
LOL

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ThemeSelection

Hahaha...😂

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Christian Herlein

Nice post!

Blame me for old, but VIM is still the best ide, imho.

Cheers!

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KyleReemaN

You know there is a vim plugin for like every modern ide :)

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eartykbaev

WebStorm + vim extension = my love

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ThemeSelection

Thank you very much for your appreciation.🙂

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andreidascalu profile image
Andrei Dascalu • Edited

WEbstrom, Like the product of the JetBean :) that's what happens when you mix jetBrains and netbeans in the same post.

On the more serious side, that's my take on IDE's:

  • Anything JetBrains: great products, but I don't like their approach to marketing. They have dedicated IDEs per language which are awesome individually, but not cross-functional so overall I wouldn't pay for that (at least not yearly). VSCode delivers 75% of the features of all JetBrains products for no or very little cost (for PHP I use Intelephense that has a $10 lifetime price tag and does everything PHPStorm does except refactoring aid) and it's all on one (which for me matters, as I code in JS/Go/PHP/Python daily. Also, JetBrains products are still missing a usable way to code directly in containers.
  • VSCode: I like it, don't love it. For me it's the one IDE to rule them all when it comes to support/extensions and so on. With Microsoft's support behind it, there's an amazing community behind it that supports anything and everything. Come on, you have Reddit and Stackoverflow extensions to search while you code. Not to mention music player. And they had a good live/peer coding extension way before JetBrains added one to their stack. My only wish: dump Electron already. In years I've only had 2-3 issues with it, but I can see why other usage patterns could lead to problems.
  • SublimeText: I'd love to love it, but all my attempts to have it work as well as VSCode for all my needs resulted in an unstable annoying environment.
  • Eclipse: awful and slow. I've been using it on and off since college (back in early 200x) and it's never gotten any better.
  • NetBeans: have the UI. Also very limited. It's ok for JS & Java. Between Sublime/VSCode/JetBrains/IntellIJ, I have no idea how come it's still around.
  • IntelliJ: it may be the standard for Java, but in other directions it's merely ok.
  • VIM/NeoVIM: I used to love it, but gone are the days when I can muster the patience to configure it properly. I can barely get myself to look over what Powerlevel 10k has new, nevermind spend a few days tinkering to get what I need out of VIM for all my tooling.
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ThemeSelection

Thank you very much for your feedback.👍

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Vladyslav Yakovenko

Using anything less that webstorm/rider means losing time. I love em to death

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chris-czopp

Not necessarily, I think it hugely depends on other tools you're using and your dev process. The only feature of Webstorm which I like is refactoring, other than that I could use something much simpler, and I use it because it's just a habit.

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Vladyslav Yakovenko

search & navigation are the winners for me. I never spent more than 5s looking for anything inside that program using search. My colleagues always manually navigate...

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chris-czopp

yeah, the global search is also legit

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ThemeSelection

Good one..!!🤘🏻

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Ashish Khare😎

Beginners drop the thought of using an IDE, let yourself get tangled with errors and ditch those fancy features. Be the true mason for your projects. What you want at most is a simple text editor like sublime or atom.
While I appreciate the time and effort of the author, who presented all options so vividly making this post completely justifying the title. Thanks for sharing!

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ThemeSelection

Thank you very much for your review and feedback. We appreciate it.👍

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huncyrus

Vim! Emacs!
(joke)
IntelliJ & Webstorm & Sublime & VSC for me.
I prefer to let everyone use whatever they want and whatever the code require (for 4 line code do not need an IDE). But many real IDE provide more productivity (IntelliJ*).

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Tomás

I use VS Code as my main IDE for web projects. It's fast, easy to use and very stripped down. The UI doesn't overwhelm you with features, toggles and buttons. It's very clear that VS Code is a IDE aimed at web technologies built with said technolgies by people, that use it every day.

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ThemeSelection

Indeed VS Code is the best one.👍

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Andrei Dascalu

Sadly nothing comes to mind. When I got into JetBrains (via PHPStorm, but later tried PyStorm, Webstorm and Goland) it was based on recommendations and then I started researching on a case-by-case bases "how do I do X in PHPStorm" + just stumbling into features (and also some YouTube videos of how to use refactoring tools - which is still the most awesome JetBrains functionality that I've yet to see implemented in a useful way elsewhere, though IntelliJ has it for Java I think).

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Mr.Habibi

I am currently using VSCode. But I still love Sublime text and Notepad++ because of its simplicity.

Please, sorry. The worst code editor ever that I have tried is Brackets (Adobe). I don't know why, try Atom instead of Brackets

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ThemeSelection

VS code is indeed the best one. Yes, the sublime text is also a good choice...👍

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J_C___

I've been using webstorm since college and I don't know what I'd do without it. I had a stint where I used atom and it was certainly less demanding on my computer but I couldn't resist going back to webstorm.

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Vilim Stubičan

In my experience, there is a huge distinction between IDE (JetBrains products, Eclipse, Visual Studio [not Code], etc.) and code-editors or text-editors with extensions/plugins (VSCode, Sublime, Notepad++ at the end of the day, etc.).

We tend to look at this from our own personal experience in development and not from the perspective of the tool: IDEs are developed with a lot of research on what is good and functional in regards to DevUX (and these are not just common guesses from implementors, there is a lot of market testing, focus groups, etc.).

When we are talking about editors, they will solve that problem and stop there. Plugins and extensions are community additions to this ecosystem and they also solve their problem while often ignoring the ecosystem in which they will be run (i.e., compatibility between different plugins/extensions).
In IDEs these things are already considered and integrated with the feature.

It’s the same as using a framework vs building your own: you will get all the tools for the problems that you might not be solving now for the adequate cost (either physical space, code requirements or price) vs solving every "current" problem with some approach (either coding it yourself or pulling some library that will solve that problem while fixing potential non-compatibilities between libraries).

My personal favorite: JetBrains tools (any of them)
I shifted from using literally 10 different tools to a single tool (PHPStorm most of the time for both frontend and backend, switching to other tools is other backend language is used).
It has one of the most functional and simple-to-use integrated support for Git.
It has integrated functionalities of Datagrip for all database functionalities.
It has always up-to-date debugging toolsets for supporting languages (yes, even JS on both frontend and backend that links directly to the code).
It has integrated support for linting (ESLint), transpiling (TypeScript), library specific supports (React, Vue).
Plus the whole Performance management that will track your personal bettering with shortcuts and other available functionalities.
And recently they integrated Code with me functionality for easier pair programming together with voice and video chat.

And yes, it is "pricey" but considering how much time you might spend on installing and maintaining different extensions whilst possibly missing out some new great functionality just because you as a developer are not exposed to certain blog posts or communities, the price is completely all right. Also, if we in IT cannot spend ~$400/year for our toolsets, we are (in my opinion) doing something wrong. :))

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mcleanross

Thank you very much for your contributions. JavaScript is, as we all know, the most popular programming language on the internet drift boss. It integrates well with CSS and HTML to create robust front-end applications.

 
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Jose E Saura

Atom was brought by GitHub, then Microsoft began with VScode.

Microsoft bought GitHub... you can guess the rest. It is the same software.

Much love

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CoreIDE

Hello everyone, I have developed an IDE named CoreIDE. It is an IDE which provides support for Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Spring Boot and many more programming languages and frameworks. You can visit our website coreide.com/ to learn more about it. If you find CoreIDE worth being listed in your future articles then that would be very encouraging for us.

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Junior Hernandez • Edited

I don't know why but every time I read someone who says that VS Code is lightweight, I get a headache. 😩

By the way, Sublime Text is already 4 (and my favorite editor).

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doramaswow

I completely agree! WebStorm is a fantastic tool, and the quality of JetBrains products is top-notch. I've been using them since I started programming as well and never felt the need to switch. IntelliJ Ultimate and WebStorm really complement different programming needs, with WebStorm excelling in web development. By the way, I recently found a great resource that dives deeper into the comparison between the two—definitely worth checking out!. doramaswow.me/

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Muhammad Uzair

VS Code is <3

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Manik

Webstorm any day! I just love Jetbrains products and I've trued switching to Vs code many time but its just not that full blown IDE and I hate wasting time working around plugins!
WEBSTORM it is!!

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Oskar Codes

VSCode is actually just a text editor with a bunch of additional features, not an IDE. I do agree that it suits web development very well, but it isn’t really in the same category as the other ones.

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Aaron Reese • Edited

I don't know about the others on the list but in vscode, the ability to run Azure serverless functions locally and then push them directly to Azure within the editor (not a terminal window) qualifies it as a fully fledged IDE.

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KyleReemaN

I like VS Code but I loooooove Webstorm

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Jitu Chauhan

I love to work with VSCode with GitHub repo. Recently we working on the Geeks UI Bootstrap 5.
Thank you for sharing this amazing.

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ThemeSelection

Thank you very much for your appreciation. 👍

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Faris Mecinovic

I'm using WebStrom. Jetbrains member since I started on college. Loving their products, but WebStorm is whole another level of IDE

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ThemeSelection

Yes, webstrom is a good option. 👍

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Ivan Jeremic

You old

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Ivan Jeremic

Trust me it is a buggy software and you can look at VSCode as Atom 2.0 without bugs and faster, it is anyway by the same company.

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Steven Diamante

IntelliJ Ultimate Edition is required to do any Javascript coding. I am a huge IntelliJ fan, but have switched over to VSCode for this reason as I no longer have an Ultimate license.

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ThemeSelection

Thank you very much for your inputs.👍

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Memo Villalta

Is WebStorm free?

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theme_selection profile image
ThemeSelection • Edited

Hi. No, It is not totally free. You'll have 30 days free trial then you'll have to purchase it.

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Pemburu Kode

is there still using Atom IDE until this year?

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ThemeSelection

Hi,
They have officially archived Atom and all projects under the Atom organization for an official sunset on December 15, 2022.