Choosing IDE for thesis project

Hello all!

For my thesis project I need to develop a mobile app and I stumbled upon Ionic. I have fallen in love ever since.
I am a complete beginner with Ionic and Angular, therefore I need your advice to choose the best IDE to develop as quickly and as problem-free as possible (since I’ll soon have a pressing deadline).

What I’ve found experimented with:

Visual Studio Code seems user friendly and lightweight and is mentioned quite a lot from what I saw. However, it doesn’t seem to have strong Intellisense support (including indexing of my own functions, vars etc).

Visual Studio 2015 seems to need extra configuration to work properly.

Webstorm has amazing, magic-like Intellisene. I had settled on this but with Ionic v2, all the html tags get marked as unknown. Is there a way to fix this?

Atom, Sublime - no real reason to use these over the others I believe.

Overall, I would greatly appreciate it if you guys could point me to the right direction so that I do not waste much more switching between IDEs.

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate any help.

Hi there Dimitrios,

Im currently in the final stages of building my final year project with Ionic as well. I’ve tried everything there but VS2015 and I decided on atom. I added angular & ionic specific plugins which really sped up my learning and development of ionic and angular.
I found the intellisense of the others ok but after adding a few packages to atom, I found its autocomplete worked alot better. I also prefer the extensibility and simplicity of atom & text editors over IDEs and find I get alot more work done. I also did ionic 2 dev in webstorm vs atom vs vscode as I thought webstorm/vscode would have the advantage therefrom what alot of the ionic/angular devs have been saying. Went straight back to atom though just added some typescript plugins and it was much better.

That said, I am the type of person that likes to customise my dev environment. So the constraints of the others and the heaviness of full IDEs really bothered me. That left me with sublime vs atom and I lean towards supporting open source so there you go.

Truly though, just pick one and learn it. Its good to know modern IDEs and the way around them (I currently have 4 jetbrains IDE’s installed) but its also good to know a simple text editor and the terminal. Just find which one works best for you.

If your in a hurry and really have no idea, you seem to be leaning towards webstorm anyway so just go for it.

Hey @jamesbyrne, thanks for the reply!

I might give Atom another try with packages installed. What did you install?
As for Webstorm, the main issue I have is the unknown html tags. It really messes up the code. This only happens with Ionic v2 so I don’t know if there’s a way to fix it for now.

Hey Dimitrios,

Heres the list of what I have installed, theres a few odd things out there. Theres a couple of themes (Ui & Syntax), terminal plus which adds a terminal to atom, atom-beautify which restructures your code (tabbing etc) to make it more consistent and some vim plugins and waka time which I use for tracking my time in the editor.

Ya Webstorms html autocomplete turned me off big time.

├── angular2-snippets@0.3.0
├── angularjs@0.3.4
├── atom-beautify@0.28.22
├── atom-material-ui@1.2.0
├── atom-ternjs@0.13.2
├── atom-typescript@8.2.0
├── autocomplete@0.47.0
├── autocomplete-angular-material@0.4.0
├── autocomplete-html-entities@0.1.0
├── autocomplete-ionic-framework@0.2.2
├── chester-atom-syntax@0.1.1
├── ex-mode@0.8.0
├── file-icons@1.6.15
├── git-control@0.4.0
├── imdone-atom@1.3.27
├── ionic-framework-snippets@1.2.1
├── jshint@1.8.3
├── linter@1.11.3
├── linter-csslint@1.3.1
├── linter-tslint@0.7.0
├── merge-conflicts@1.3.7
├── minimap@4.19.0
├── minimap-find-and-replace@4.4.0
├── minimap-git-diff@4.1.8
├── minimap-linter@1.1.1
├── native-ui@0.17.0
├── oceanic-reef-syntax@0.6.0
├── relative-numbers@0.5.0
├── terminal-plus@0.14.5
├── vim-mode@0.64.0
└── wakatime@5.0.8

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i would use atom for a non pro user --> it is free and you get everything you need for angular 2 there (typescript plugin is a dream).

But i prefer sublime but i was not able to test visual studio code, yet (no time^^).
In my opinion webstorm and other real IDEs are to much for fast web development. i want a fast and small toolkit.

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The thing that pulled me to Webstorm (I got a free academic license btw) is the autocomplete functions - I thought it’d be easier for a beginner.

@jamesbyrne thanks for the list! do you have a link handy for autocomplete perchance?

Cheers guys!

If you install it through the command line apm tool or go to atom => preferences => install and just type in what your after there.

Autocomplete and Javascript dont blend all that well unfortunately. The atom-typescript plugin is brilliant though.

@bengtler, any recommendations for a “pro user”? :slight_smile:

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Thanks!
For typescript, do all files have to be .ts?

sublime… it is fast as hell.
And if you want some special tasks to run on save there are powerful grunt, gulp -plugins --> where you can run those tasks over the gui.

And you can turn your editor in something like an IDE with https://github.com/SublimeCodeIntel/SublimeCodeIntel
There you get very good code-completion for many script languages :wink:

I have put my sublime config and plugin/theme list in a public gist:

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Thanks! I might also give Sublime another spin :slightly_smiling:

Do you guys know of a way to fix the HTML tags issue in Webstorm?

Tried sublime, it was nice and it started up fast but I didn’t see much benefit after that. I found atom was more easily customised and being built with web tech and being a web dev fixing issues and reporting bugs is a lot easier. Im also an open source supporter :slightly_smiling: .

@Dimitrios : No idea I’m afraid

yeah i told… if you are a pro user… use sublime… because then you need no fancy UI for package settings and so on (but hopefully it will get it in some years^^).

Yeah, and because of Atom is implemented with web techs it laggs of performance in some ways. But i also used it. But in last time it crashes a lot and i need to install atom-beta to get around that.
Not updated plugins causes many error bubbles and i need to deactivate them and wait for updates.

So I will use both… it depends what i do :slightly_smiling:

Funny I had the exact opposite experience, everything just works in atom and ya a slow start with all the stuff I’ve added but its basically my entire workstation now and once I wait 2-3 secs (lots of plugins) for start there no lag in the editor itself.

Sublime on the other hand kept running my cpu up and down for no reason :confused: . Was very strange. But I think at this point we are in danger of hijacking a thread so we better move to the vim vs emacs forums lol :wink:

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VIM FTW!

BTW there are plugins to add VIM-GUI and SHORTCUT support to sublime/atom^^

Now THAT I agree with vim & ex mode on atom FTW!! :smiley:

I’m very happy with NetBeans. If you are new thus will help you a lot. This is a complete IDE

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Does it work well with Ionic 2?