What Best IDE to program in JavaScript ?

What tools do we need to develop in Javascript? In this article we will discover a set of software and tools that I recommend in order to best realize your applications.

Good tools improve the productivity of a developer, they will allow you to greatly simplify your task as you master them.

The development environment

An IDE or Integrated Development Environment is software that helps developers write and debug source code. It provides features like autocompletion, advanced file content search and / or testing tools.

It is the essential tool for developers today.

FDI can be grouped into several families: free / paid and light or heavy.

Heavy IDEs, such as the tools from the company Jetbrains, embed a good number of basic functionalities helping you to develop. Proprietary software, they are generally chargeable. If you are just starting out, however, I do not advise you to invest in such paid tools immediately. Take the time to understand the fundamentals beforehand with open-source tools that will be more than enough.

The second family is light and modular software, the functionality of which you can extend through extensions, generally developed by the community. In this family I recommend the use of a simple, powerful and very modular editor, I speak obviously of  VScode the program developed by Microsoft.

VScode is the IDE reference for Javascript development !

Functional on Windows, Mac and Linux, supporting many languages, in particular via its extensions, it will allow you to do everything you need.

You can download VSCODE at the following address.

Once installed, ideally it should be personalized with extensions according to your needs.

Here are some extensions that i use and i recommend to improve the basic tool :

• Auto Rename Tag
• Debugger for Chrome
• Document This
• DotENV
• EditorConfig for VS Code
• Gatito Theme
• Git History
• GItlens – Git supercharged
• GraphQL
• Markdown All in One
• Prettier – Code formatter
• React Native Snippet
• React Native tools
• React-native / React / Redux snippets
• Launcher Terminal

Here ! You are ready, I let you discover for yourself the flagship features of the tool such as Intellisense, the set of features that makes VSCode send heavy! Autocompletion, hinting code, content assist…