An alternative to editing JavaScript in Visual Studio: RubyMine

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A while ago Chris Missal asked the following question on Twitter.

One of the projects I am currently working on is a JavaScript intense web application. That’s why the question instantly caught my attention, JavaScript editing in Visual Studio has been bugging me for a long time. In one of my previous posts about Visual Studio somebody said in the comments that VS isn’t build with web developers in mind. Well, that’s the least you can say. But still, since my business is mainly focusing on .Net web development I’m obligated to use Visual Studio for all my ASP.Net Webforms and MVC projects. And for all the JavaScript, (LESS)CSS, ASPX, HTML editing that comes with those projects. If you don’t know it yet, Visual Studio is really bad at all those things. In those cases the editor is comparable to a colored version of Notepad.

Some of the replies to Chris’ question suggested Notepad++ others suggested RubyMine. RubyMine from JetBrains, the same company that created Resharper, is a tool I always wanted to try out and I thought this was the perfect opportunity. So I downloaded the whole thing, there is a trial available, installed it and pulled my Scripts folder into the editor. I didn’t have very high hopes, because I use JavaScriptMVC and jQuery on this project and I thought it would be very hard for the IDE to figure out all the different references and relations between the files and classes. To my surprise the IDE succeeded in parsing the different JavaScript files. So we were all set, time to try some stuff out:

I created this simple class, using the functionality JavaScriptMVC provides for creating classes:

First thing to try out that comes to mind, let’s declare a variable that is not used and see what RubyMine says about it:

Very nice, this thing is already doing more than Visual Studio does. It detects unused variables.

Time to try some more complicated like things renaming a variable which is not possible in Visual Studio. So I tried right clicking on the variable and there is a nice Refactor item in the context menu. A very Resharper-like experience, I haven’t tried out all of them but the basic things like Extract Method, Rename and Introduce Variable worked very well.

All this is really impressive, and there is more! I have multiple classes in this project and RubyMine detects them and provides Intellisense. Even though I use a framework to declare my classes, it still detects which are classes and what functions are defined on my class. Pretty nice huh? On top of that, all R# shortcuts that you are used to also work in RubyMine. Ctrl+N to find a given file, even Ctrl+12 to list and find a method of the open class:

Although I only scratched the surface of RubyMine, navigating, editing and refactoring JavaScript has been a great experience. Certainly when you’re used to using Visual Studio for that. I can already conclude that it beats Visual Studio in every aspect when it comes to writing JavaScript. It’s a shame that we have a feature-rich tool like Visual Studio and still need to open a second IDE to edit JavaScript files. I can only hope that Visual Studio 2010 brings some more options to the table. Maybe JetBrains should think about adding an ASPX editor and a C# compiler to RubyMine, call it SharpMine and sell it. That would definitely be something I would consider buying.