- a “fuzzy finder”,
- the ability to search quickly and across projects,
- Multi-cursor and Windows options,
- Snippets and code folding as well
- the ability to import TextMate grammars and themes.
Atom is particularly useful for browsing repositories cloned from GitHub because the GitHub application includes a context menu item for this purpose.
- Preis: for free;
- Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux;
Another free, open-source editor that works well with JavaScript – but only runs on Windows. Notepad++ also supports around 50 other programming and markup languages. In addition to its multi-document editing window, this editor also offers a “Workspace Tree View”, as well as tabs with function lists and document overviews. In practice, you never get the feeling of being slowed down.
With syntax coloring and folding options, powerful editing features, and parameter hints, Notepad++ has what it takes to be the primary JavaScript text editor. However, it is far from the most comprehensive JavaScript editor when it comes to:
- to generate code,
- Initiate refactoring or
- to quickly navigate through large projects.
Nevertheless, Notepad++ is still useful today – especially when you need it to be quick and free.
- Preis: for free;
- platform: Windows;
With BBEdit, a proprietary JavaScript editor is also available for macOS users. It supports around 35 programming and markup languages. Community support (of varying quality) is available for many other languages via the BBEdit website. Both the free and licensed versions offer syntax highlighting. Code completion for function and variable names, some keywords and ctags are reserved for paid version users. This can also be integrated into the version control systems Git, Perforce and Subversion.
BBEdit was fundamentally revised some time ago and is now also impressive in practice when it has to process larger files. There’s also nothing to complain about when it comes to HTML and Markdown – they even work better than JavaScript.
- Preis: free but limited version; $59.99 per user for the full version;
- platform: macOS;
This (also macOS exclusive) code editor was once all the rage, then lost a lot of importance and is now being actively developed again. Although TextMate is not an IDE, it can be equipped with functions via bundles, snippets, macros and its scoping system that even language-specific development environments lack. When it comes to speed, TextMate is almost as fast as Sublime Text.
For IDE-like functionality, you can use TextMate’s shell integration, but don’t expect code refactoring or automatic unit and regression testing. Of course, if you set up Grunt correctly, you can still automate your JavaScript testing at this level.
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Support for Markdown is also provided via an integrated bundle. This contains:
- a preview function for documents,
- a Markdown “cheatsheet” as well
- various keyboard shortcuts to generate markup.
However, the Git bundle is ideal for integrating TextMate with Git and GitHub. In practice, TextMate detects existing Git repositories and can update them using a pull command from the GitHub bundle. The SQL bundle allows you to work with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
- Preis: for free;
- platform: macOS;
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This article originally appeared at our sister publication Infoworld.com.
