Comment by acemarke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acemarke | Hacker News Reader

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I've been a WebStorm fanboy since I purchased a license during a sale two years ago. The biggest selling point for WebStorm for me is its smart searching abilities. "Find In Files" doesn't just do text search, it's also smart enough to allow you to include or exclude matches in strings and comments. It also has a great parser that understands the structure of your code well enough to do legitimate "Find References" searches with really good results in spite of Javascript's dynamicness.

Obviously Python is a very dynamic language as well, so PyCharm has most of the same strong points. I'd been using the Community edition for a while, but finally picked up a Commercial license a couple weeks ago. In this case, the feature that finally convinced me to pay for it was no-kidding Remote Debugging. Drop a .egg next to your deployed app and stick an extra import and connection call into your code, and then PyCharm's debugger (which is another great feature in and of itself) just flat-out works over SSH.

Ultimately, both these tools have saved me enough time and effort to pay for themselves repeatedly.

While WebStorm and other JetBrain IDEs are great, the RAD/WYSIWYG part is missing. We had already Frontage/Dreamweaver for HTML3-4. If JetBrains would add a HTML5 WYSIWYG editor based on webkit/blink to their IDEs, it would be awesome.

I think that would not happen, with all the difference and mess in implementation under multiple browsers (even with webkit based Safari and Chrome), and file watcher+auto reload is less of a headache.

WYSIWYG always had a split-screen view which allows one to work in design and code mode at the same time (and see the changes in the other mode).

It's very efficient and less headache. WebStorm could add webkit and sync the code view like Dreamweaver. JetBrain's IDE is Java based and integrating a C++ based WYSIWYG view might be more complicated. And all the Java based browsers have been discontinued like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava .

Netbeans has it for HTML5 apps.

I don't think so. They have an excellent IDE for editing html on a source basis and an HTML WYSIWYG wouldn't have a developer as a main target, most developers would prefer editing the html directly (and would need to, unless they used a templating system based on the ideas of Enlive).

These days the target market for WYSIWYG HTML editors would be probably be using an online CMS like WP - which actually has a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Failing that, Microsoft Word actually had nice HTML output last time I checked.

A joke, right?

> HTML WYSIWYG wouldn't have a developer as a main target, most developers would prefer editing the html directly

WYSIWYG always had a split-screen view which allows one to work in design and code mode at the same time (and see the changes in the other mode). It's very efficient.

> Microsoft Word actually had nice HTML output

MS Word 2000-2013 web page export is based on the old Frontpage engine, and generates invalid HTML4 and converts vector graphics and word art to VML, the proprietary predecessor of SVG, that IE10+ don't even support anymore (except with legacy quirks mode mode).

> online CMS like WP

The contentEditiable HTML4 API that CMS use is sadly completely broken in every browser in a different way - the experience and the code output quality is far worse than Frontpage ever was - and Dreamweaver is better in every aspect.

There is a reason why we have BBCode and Markdown, because contentEditiable isn't that great at the moment. And as several browser vendors have a competitive advantage with their web based Office services (Office365 Web Word, iCloud.com Pages, Google Docs), they will never fix the various bugs of contentEditiable in IE/Safari/Chrome.

The current year is 2015, MS word has come a long way since 2001. In fact they bragged with clean HTML output, suitable for inserting into your blog, in MS Word 2007. If you haven't worked with Word for almost 15 years do yourself a service and don't assume it looks much the same anymore - most the complaints I hear about it are no longer so much an issue in the newer versions.

Also I have no idea where you got the idea that WYSIWYG always had a split-screen view unless there is some product that is named WYSIYG, for me it has always meant What You See Is What You Get and the entire idea was that you have to mess with how it worked under the hood. As implemented in e.g word (or open office) you don't even have the option of doing that. Are you arguing that Word is not WYSIWYG?

Finally take a look at the the output from the WP HTML editor, I have no idea why you bring up the contentEditable API, but either you are misinformed or wordpress use something else because the output is pretty clean and it can convert between that and free HTML entry.

You are wrong, please test it again. In Word 2010 it still uses the Frontpage engine to output not so good HTML4 code with VML graphics. Btw. Office applications haven't changed that much since Office 97 (beside regular interface changes).

Wordpress uses the TinyMCE rich text editor which uses the contentEditable/designMode API, TinyMCE is one of many such editors that try to fix many of the glitches: https://en.support.wordpress.com/editors/ , http://www.tinymce.com/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_rich-text_editor

And just because some have never have seen a good HTML WYSIWYG editor doesn't mean it's a bad rapid development method and should not be integrated in a modern IDE.

To clear this dispute in a scientific way, I created a word document in Word 2010 (Windows 7) with a badly drawn graphics and exported it to HTML:

> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B654HhgdE0ZTRktjSERNS3pxd00...

Note that the generated HTML5 source code

  - contains VML code
  - will not render correctly in any modern browser
  - If you want to be able to render it in IE11, you have to press F12 (Developer tools)
    and change from "Edge" to compatibility to version 7 (or even 5) of the IE engine. 
    Then it will be drawn "correctly".

Thanks.

To clarify the generated code is invalid HTML 4.01 (20 errors according to W3C HTML4 validator https://validator.w3.org/check ) and the first view lines look like this:

  <html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml"
  xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
  xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
  xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml"
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
  <head>
  <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html;
  charset=windows-1252">
  <meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>
  <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 14">
  <meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 14">

Microsoft split Frontpage in two products SharePoint Designer and Expression Web (the later with a new web render engine), though both products are either a shadow of the former self (no WYSIWYG view anymore) or abandoned (free download without support): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Expression_Web

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