Welcome to Part 2 of this review of the Pluralsight course “Creating a JavaScript Development Environment” by Cory House.

Cory is a Microsoft MVP in C#, founder of OutlierDeveloper.com, avid tech reader, and speaker.

He believes in clean code, pragmatic development, and responsive native UIs.

He has also created reactjsconsulting.com, and has the authored Pluralsight courses including Building Applications with React and Flux and Building Applications with React and Redux in ES6.

Also in this series:
Part 1 – You Need a Starter Kit
Part 2 – Editors and Configuration
Part 3 – Package Management
Part 4 – Development Web Server
Part 5 – Automation
Part 6 – Transpiling
Part 7 – Bundling
Part 8 – Linting
Part 9 – Testing and Continuous Integration
Part 10 – HTTP Calls
Part 11 – Project Structure
Part 12 – Production Build
Part 13 – Production Deploy

Editors and Configuration

What To Look For in a JavaScript Editor

Cory recommends looking for:
– Strong ES2015+ support
– Autocompletion
– Parse ES6 imports
– Report unused imports
– Automated refactoring
– Framework intelligence
– Built-in terminal

JavaScript Editor Recommendations

Any of these options are good:

– Atom
– Webstorm
– Brackets
– VSCode

In Cory’s React and Redux course he said Atom was almost as good as Webstorm. Since then VSCode has come on a long way with many new features and it runs very fast. Cory uses VSCode for this course.

He recommends AGAINST using an IDE such as Visual Studio, Eclipse or Netbeans. Although these work with JavaScript, they are not optimized for working with it.

Editorconfig

Tabs vs Spaces is a classic example of an argument that will rage on and on. EditorConfig helps developers define and maintain consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs.
See editorconfig.org/

Demo: Editorconfig

We see that this is quite easy to setup: we create a .editorconfig file and add our preferences.

We also learn that we may need to download a plugin for our editor of choice. See editorconfig.org/#download
Cory shows us how to install the “EditorConfig for VS Code” plugin.