I’ve been taking the 30 day eval of WebStorm for a spin. I’ve watched a few videos of people hacking on code in Javascript with various frameworks and libraries, and what’s really impressive is the speed that they manage to type code taking advantage of WebStorm’s code complete features.
I haven’t really thought about this too much as you take for granted what you’re used to, but in other IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans, most of the code complete features center around offering properties and methods on a Class after you type ‘.’ or Ctrl-Space – or at least that’s the way I’ve always thought how code complete works in those IDEs.
In Webstorm you get the same popup complete after a ‘.’ or on pressing Ctrl-Space. In addition though, if you start typing the first few letters and press return, if there’s anything matching those first few letters then it inserts that text, or shows you possible alternatives.
For example, if you type fu[Enter], you get:
[code]function () {
}[/code]
This saves some typing for sure, but what’s pretty cool is that the code complete can vary based on the *.js files you have imported using <script> in an HTML file, or other selected Libraries from the Preferences/Languages and Frameworks/JavaScript/Libraries. Which pretty much means you get code-complete on anything, anywhere in your source. Now that’s pretty cool.
There’s a great walkthrough of some of these features in this video from the guys at JetBrains:
