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General Discussion

Best IDE??

So I read the other article out there and searching in Google brings the usual plethora of results. Looking for a great IDE to use for future freelancing that support CSS, HTML, JScript, JQuery, php, mysql....

I like the clean feel of our workspaces and found atom, same feel if not the actual product. I also read somewhere that maybe a full fledged IDE is best to utilize shortcuts etc to make coding easier (I'm sure that will spawn a debate).

I can download and play with editors for a week, just looking for some personal experiences.

Thanks for any input!

6 Answers

And does Atom support all those languages...

Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points

I've used NetBeans for years. I think the only full fledged IDE's that I've tried are Eclipse and Visual Studio to be fair.

Point of Reference, Atom is a text editor (like Sublime Text and Notepad++). Albeit one with a some fancy extensions like Sublime Text, in the end it's an editor not an IDE.

Ken Alger
STAFF
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher

Okay, I'll bite at the IDE war argument. :smile: I am a big fan of the products put out by JetBrains. You will find that they have dedicated IDEs for multiple languages, PyCharm for Python, WebStorm for JavaScript, IntelliJ IDEA for Java, PHPStorm for (you guessed it) PHP, and several more. With the multitude of plugins available you can use, for example PHPStorm to do you PHP work and have JavaScript plugins for code formatting of your JS code.

Probably many of the same features are available in NetBeans, etc. I just have found the JetBrains products to be intuitive to learn, user friendly, full of useful features, and very extendible.

Just my thoughts.

Happy coding,

Ken

I use Atom almost exclusively these days - for Web related languages. The markdown preview is really nice, and I just don't miss Sublime any more. Also, I'll echo what Ken said - I've heard great things about JetBrains products, if you're looking for an IDE.

Sublime does it for me :)

Ken Alger
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher

Robert;

Sublime Text is a great product but just for clarification, it is not an IDE, but a high end text editor.

Ken

You are correct Ken, but if you put side by side lets say Dreamweaver and sublime, I'll be choosing sublime :)

Ken Alger
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher

Robert Araujo;

I would definitely choose Sublime Text over Dreamweaver right now. However, to the best of my knowledge and correct me if I am wrong since it has been a long time since I have used Dreamweaver, I don't think it is an actual IDE, is it? Since the original question was Best IDE and not Best Development Environment or Best Text Editor I answered based on my IDE preferences.

One obviously doesn't have to use an IDE to generate code and for some projects I still find myself using Sublime Text 2 and even NotePad++. However, the features of a full blown IDE reduce my development time on larger projects.

Again, just my thoughts.

Happy coding,

Ken

Ken Alger Dreamweaver will give you code hinting while typing. And it will help you with CSS and HTML coding also as well as other languages, therefore I consider it an IDE for me, but that's just my thought.

Thanks!