WebStorm is an integrated development environment (IDE) by JetBrains. Designed for JavaScript and TypeScript development, WebStorm also aims to make it easy to tackle the most challenging tasks. Whether resolving Git merge conflicts or renaming a symbol across multiple files, it takes just a few clicks.
$0
per year
TextPad
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
TextPad is a free and open source general purpose plain text file editor, for Windows.
Groups that use a [variety] of development environments (.net, python, web), Jebrain's products and Webstorm, in particular, are a great choice for productivity. If your developers are accustom to another IDE it might be better for all to sync on the same one. I wouldn't take the cost aspect as a consideration. A productive developer is far more important.
I like the macro feature for transforming text. For example, taking a CSV file of data and quickly turning it into a set of SQL "insert" statements. Also, useful for this is the find/replace feature using regular expressions such as taking a URL QueryString and breaking all the parameters into separate lines and perhaps sorting them for review.
The popup file search sometimes frustrates me. It caps the number of results, and sometimes it isn't clear that it simply stopped looking. I also used to have trouble finding string occurrences that I knew were in my project, but I think they've made improvements in this area recently.
Being a AAA IDE, WebStorm can be a memory hog. If I don't kill it every few days, it can get really slow. I would love to see performance improvements.
Speaking of performance, WebStorm can take a long time to launch. I'd like to see improvements in launch times.
Great in debugging, testing, developing and maintaining softwares in a number of languages. Great support for many languages and their syntaxes. Great support of many third party extensions and plugins like GIT and html plugins. The RAM usage of WebStorm however could be really improved, it literally takes almost all of the RAM of my machine with 16GB RAM
I gave this rating because I have never needed their customer support, which is the highest level of support I suppose. When a product works just fine out of the box and everything you may need is well documented, it's a paradise for the customer. But I've seen some questions asked on their portal, and I've seen thorough answers given to the questions and the willingness to support the customer with follow-ups and everything else.
I think WebStorm is way ahead of open-source editors. Please don't get me wrong, I love open-source. But the other free editors have a lot of configuration which blocks my whole coding experience. Take "Atom" for example. I used it for about 3 months, but in that time I had to update the plugins hundreds of time, and for every little thing (e.g. linter) I had to download a community plugin, and with each plugin atom would get a little slow. Take "Eclipse" for another example, which is very suited for Java, but not so suited for JavaScript. Sublime was good, but WebStorm comes with many exciting features that I did not find in sublime/notepad.
When you want to quickly edit a file, TextPad starts up quickly and has many features over Microsoft Notepad. Visual Studio Code is an alternative in that it is full-featured and will edit text files but is slower at startup. I prefer the macro feature in TextPad due to its simplicity.
