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Comment by tomasien | Hacker News Reader

LightTable and the source material that inspired me mean a lot to me, but I don't use it because I'm a really conservative adopter of technology.

HN: Do you use it and should I use it for my HTML/CSS/JS? As I understand it, Python but not Ruby is supported, but I could just keep using xCode or Coda for Ruby. What do you think?

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Genuine question: Is there a big advantage using an editor designed for HTML/CSS/JS? I do all my web work using straight Vim, but maybe I'm being a luddite... What am I missing out on?

Live preview would be one big thing.

What doing web-dev is just edit in vim using Syntastic[1], and a couple other[2][3] useful plugins.

1: https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic.git

2: https://github.com/pangloss/vim-javascript.git

3: https://github.com/digitaltoad/vim-jade

There was a vid floating around where you could edit the js and the browser could see the changes without a browser refresh. They were interacting with the code in realtime via the browser api. Great stuff.

I wish LT had more workflow vids as it tries hard to know hard to be a next gen editor it can be a little difficult to find the cool features.

There's an emacs mode for that: https://github.com/skeeto/impatient-mode

Here's a video of just that[1]! Except in Emacs instead of LightTable. Emacs is like a somewhat crufty version of LightTable that's also a few decades older :D. "Some assembly required."

[1]: http://emacsrocks.com/e11.html

Shameless plug: that's also possible in VIM with [1].

[1]: https://github.com/Bogdanp/browser-connect.vim

Cool! Are you using remote debugging for that? I wrote one recently that watches the file system for changes and keeps it in sync with chrome. It's really useful because you can change your js without reloading or losing existing objects. I have an angular project that takes a long time to go through the refresh cycle so it's a life saver on there. Also, because it just runs on the file system events it's text editor unaware.

https://github.com/aidos/chromesync

One more to add to the list: http://livereload.com/

From what I can see, all of the sibling links just eval javascript. I believe LT goes one step further and uses the jit to replace code, so that even closures (eg event handlers attached to the dom) are updated to use the new code.

That's correct! We're not just doing window.eval(yourCode)

In my experience vim is pretty good for JS/DOM development. Most IDEs out there targeting those stacks can't actually do much since JS is too difficult to do good code completion on. Aptana and WebStorm try their best to be good IDEs for this. I prefer LT over those. But really, I can't say you're missing out on much by using vim (and in fact are maybe on a better path). Compare this to Java where I'd think you're really cheating yourself by not using an IDE.

Netbeans gives me live feedback of JsLint, the code completion engine is quite good, type inference, refactoring, popups with information from JsDoc, outline navigation with inference from most AMD patterns.

CSS editing allows me to see the styles graphically.

HTML editing allows for easy navigation between CSS, JavaScript and HTML elements on the page.

The current beta version allows for 2 way editing between IDE and browser (chrome).

Can I do all of this in vim?

Why would you use a text editor if you need IDE features?

Because OP was suggesting a 70's development style, hence my remarks.

Yep.

But in my experience, developing JS and HTML in Netbeans feels like 70s style development. After using Eclipse (or Netbeans) for Java development, I find JavaScript development never is that great in IDEs. Maybe they've optimized certain use cases of JS auto-completion and type inference, but for me it always feels like the IDE is just an editor, and a lousy one at that, compared to vim.

Netbeans invested a lot into dynamic languages support when the JRuby team worked for Sun.

That work has been used for JavaScript as well.

IntelliJ does an amazingly good job of Javascript + html + CSS code completion, inspection, and reformatting. I primarily program in Java and I expected basically no IDE support for Javascript, but I was pleasantly surprised when it started warning me that imported files don't exist, my jquery selectors don't match any element IDs, my CSS is invalid, etc etc etc.

Forget the editor, what I'd like is a browser that reloaded the DOM every time it saw that a source file change.

You can do this with livereload: http://livereload.com/

Grunt has a live reload plugin that is fairly easy to set up

I'm not sure that's really how it works though, right? It does an actual refresh of the page which is no good if you have lots of state. See my comment about (my) chromesymc above.

https://github.com/aidos/chromesync

Webstorm by Jetbrains has some really nice features if you are doing a lot of JS development. It is an IDE, but if you are ok with that it is quite good IMO

So people decided to argue a sub-point of my question but not a single person would answer it directly? This is a community, do what you want, but I'm actually seeking your advice on what technology to use! Isn't that HN's dream??? Fulfill your destiny HN I need to decide on an IDE!

Maybe noone knows the answer. I certainly don't.

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