This Week in JavaScript - 7 September 2015

JavaScript
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Hello and welcome to This Week in JavaScript—a lovingly curated collection of links relating to what’s new and exciting in the world of JS. The complete list is tagged jsweekly. (Don’t forget to check out our weekly .NET and front end roundups too!)

And now on with the show …

npm

Editors

Performance

Frameworks

Everything Else

For more links like this and to keep up-to-date with the latest goings on in JS land, you can follow SitePoint’s JavaScript channel on Twitter.

Please PM us if you have anything of interest for the next issue or if there is anything you would like to see featured. Paul and Pullo.

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Probably the best list written on this ever.

At least that’s my opinion, I might be a little biased. :smile:

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No, no, you’re spot on. This is going to go viral soon.
The way the text flows makes me think the editor knew what he was doing, to.

It might be interesting to hear which text editor plugins people can’t live without (not just JS related).
Top of my list is Emmet. You heard of that?

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Yeah, I almost included it but didn’t see any use in JS.

Also, Color Highlighter is very good. But I started playing with Atom recently and the one for Atom is 10x better, which makes Color Highlighter look really bad in comparison.

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What are your first impressions of Atom?
I gave it a spin a while back, but couldn’t really get on with it. I found it to be a bit sluggish and lacking in plugins. Has much changed?

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It’s slow.

I gave it a legit shot recently in the last few weeks and the performance just wasn’t there. It loads fast enough, but everything else is slow. Large projects and large files just bog the thing down considerably. Every once and a while it would actually lock up and need to be restarted if I accidentally clicked a large file, like uncompiled Angular.js or something. Anything over 100kb is like slugging through mud. But it is a lot better now that it’s 1.0, than when I first tried it when it was Mac Only.

However, other than performance it’s very well put together and the plugins are absolutely amazing. There are tons of plugins now and many are much better than the Sublime alternatives. I hope it matures and gets some decent speed.

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Interesting. How are they better? For example, I am using the Color Highlighter for Sublime and it does what it says — highlights colors. Does the Atom one have more features?

I have found some of the heavier Sublime plugins to be a bit buggy, though.

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It’s just all around better, cleaner, and is easier to configure. In general though, the quality of plugins are higher I think. Since the whole thing is based in JS, building a plugin is much more accessible.

https://github.com/abe33/atom-pigments/raw/master/resources/pigments.gif?raw=true

https://github.com/abe33/atom-pigments/raw/master/resources/project-settings.gif?raw=true

https://github.com/abe33/atom-pigments/raw/master/resources/context-menu-conversion.gif?raw=true

https://github.com/abe33/atom-pigments/raw/master/resources/background-renderer.png?raw=true

https://github.com/abe33/atom-pigments/raw/master/resources/dot-renderer.png?raw=true

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Yeah, that does look quite a bit more polished than on Sublime. Maybe I’ll give Atom another go.
A third editor I thought about giving a go was Visual Studio Code., which madly enough runs on Linux.

It still seems like it’s in the early stages of development (i.e. no plugins as far as I can tell), but it may well be worth checking out.

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I tried VS Code for about 5 minutes when it first launched and it seemed nice enough. I don’t have any reason to use it though.

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Anyone tried Brackets? I’d heard that it suffers from bad performance too.

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Not personally. I think @PaulOB does, though (although maybe I got it wrong).

What’s your editor of choice, Nilson?

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Mainly Sublime these days… it’s light-weight (memory-wise) and fast. I do sometimes fire-up NetBeans for heavy PHP stuff, although to be honest I imagine there’s not much Sublime couldn’t do with the right plugins. I’ve seen some people raving about Vim lately, but that looks a bit too much like hard work.

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Any Sublime plugins you couldn’t live without?

This is what I’ve currently got installed:

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I’m using GitGutter, which is pretty handy because I can scroll down a file and see at a glance what has changed since the last commit. Also I’ve been trying out Tern, to provide code hinting/completion for JS/jQuery.

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Is that any good?
I use the jQuery one from mawburn’s article and am pretty pleased with it, although it doesn’t do a lot more than suggest code snippets as you type. On it’s homepage, it says that Tern offers you automatic refactoring. Does that actually work?

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