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Comment by tuananh | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: (everybody already know this) webstorm is better at debugging

Actually for me, this is much more important: "Symbol and definition lookup is another great feature of WebStorm. While Emacs can find symbols and definitions in a single file via Tern, WebStorm can actually inspect your whole project and find a definition, or at least give you a very pruned list of candidates to choose from."

not being able to Ctrl-click a variable or function really reduces my efficency (especially with code that I did not write entirely on my own).

I'm not sure how other emacs users do this, but I use `projectile-grep` to grep for symbols in a project all the time. In the spacemacs this is bound to `SPC g s p`.

Projectile-grep is awesome. I use it too. Although I swapped out grep for platinum-searcher for freaky fast results (at the loss of certain regex features)

I use helm-ag for the same purpose, but it still generally isn't as fast as CMD-b in webstorm. I should hook up something to do helm-ag for the symbol under point...

This is possible in emacs to a certain extent, with the help of node itself. See my comment above:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10973687

Sure, but the right metric with emacs is how feasible something is, not whether it's possible.

as other have mentioned in this thread, Tern also is capable of inspecting your whole project to find a definition.

Exactly. I'd rather see how WebStorm compares to Visual Studio Code which has pretty great debugging for Node dev.

The debugger is huge to be sure. But a bigger thing for me personally is the TDD workflow. Being able to have it sit there and autorun a subset of relevant mocha tests as I am working is huge for me.

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