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Ask HN: What editor/environment to use for Front-End Dev

1 pointsby plessthanpt05about 7 years ago
I'm a very experienced (10+ years) vim user (doing ML engineering, data engineering, back-end dev, etc), but have never dipped my toes into serious front-end development before. Any suggestions and suggested plugins (e.g. like live loading a page being edited)? Oh yeah, preferably for Debian(/Ubuntu).

3 comments

johncoltraneabout 7 years ago
I have two comments to make before detailing my workflow:<p>* You already have experience with one of the greatest programing-oriented text editors so why don&#x27;t you just keep using it?<p>* An environment is what you get after you have solved your problems, satisfied your needs, optimized your workflows. Not something you start with.<p>Now, I&#x27;ve been doing (web front-end) development since the late nineties and only switched to Vim from TextMate 8 years ago. I run Vim in a terminal emulator with only a few plugins. Half of them are mine, essentially snippets of code I extracted from my config for others to use.<p>For moving around a project I generally avoid file-based navigation in favor of the built-in &quot;symbol-based navigation&quot; features: :help include-search, :help tags, and :help ctags. For ctags, I let my task runner take care of the indexing.<p>For linting I use the built-in :help &#x27;makeprg&#x27;, :help &#x27;errorformat&#x27;, and :help quickfix.<p>For livereload I currently use Webpack Dev Server on every front-end project at work. This happens outside of Vim, as it should.<p>For manual completion (I <i>hate</i> autocompletion) I just use the built-in :help ins-completion with custom mappings.<p>I use snippet expansion a lot via the Snipmate plugin (there are others).<p>No Tmux. No Git integration. No fancy statusline. No line numbers. No unnecessary plugin. Nothing more than a soothing and familiar dark grey rectangle.
xavierwebglabout 7 years ago
I use sublime text, it is lightweight, it has many plugins, it is fast and works great on Ubuntu 16.04.
vshirguppiabout 7 years ago
VS Code!