I love my IntelliJ <3
December 05, 2017
I love my IntelliJ <3
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IntelliJ WebStorm
We use IntelliJ Webstorm as the primary development editor for our development purposes. We mainly code in NodeJS and Angular and this was a perfect fit for JavaScript editor. We initially tried many other editors such as Atom, Eclipse, but none of them were giving us the full experience we wanted. Purchasing WebStorm was the best decision we took, because since then we have all the tools we need in one place. We use WebStorm as an editor, debugger, version control, database views, terminal, code-beautifier, linter, and what not.
- This is the only editor in my opinion which gives you the full development experience if you want to code in JavaScript.
- WebStorm supports many different linters including "standards". This has been such a blessing for our team. All our PRs look perfect now.
- WebStorm is very good in design. I love coding in it.
- It has terminal built right into it. I know many other editors also provide this, but I really like how seamlessly the terminal works out of the box.
- Most of the plugins you will ever need is already installed right off the box. I haven't installed anything new so far.
- The rename/reformat functions are very intelligent. I feel very confident renaming something new.
- There is a "validation" inspector which reports anything as small as spellings. This helps us keep our codebase very-very clean.
- The auto-complete feature is the worst/weakest thing about WebStorm. It definitely works very much like other editors (not bad when compared to other editors), but I expected more intelligence.
- It does not natively supports many frameworks (like mocha if I remember correctly), which is okay because obviously they cannot support everything, and you have the option to install the library-support. But the auto-complete/function-definition is very bad. The library-support only adds method calls from the "TypeScript" version. E.g. if a method abc() is defined in a library, but the typescript version that WebStorm downloaded does not have that method, it shows a warning. I would like WebStorm to scan my node_modules and use method-signatures from there instead of typescript signatures.
- The profile exporter will only export language settings. However I would like WebStorm to also export other settings such as right-margin length and any other setting that I might change. In-fact I would like the profile to be version-controlled locally so that I can keep track of what changes I made over the time period.
- We paid full price after the 30 day trial, and that was for the entire year. I think our ROI was just after a month. WebStorm saved us a bunch of time debugging, or configuring otherwise. This just worked out of box, and I think we have made very minimal changes to the default configuration.
- The negative side of it is that we are now addicted to this editor. It would be very difficult for us to move to any other editor.
- If we ever start coding in other languages (which I expect is very soon), then we need to buy other intellij editors, which is additional cost. So in future we are expecting a larger bill :|
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.