Antechinus JavaScript Editor v10
posted in Technology, Developers, Software |A good programmer’s editor is probably one of the most important tools you can have. I’ve been working with PHP and Javascript a bunch lately and the fact that I mostly use Visual Studio is really quite sad. It doesn’t know anything about PHP and so far I’ve not been that impressed by editing JavaScript in it either (its ok for debugging Javascript).
So I got mail today that the Antechnius JavaScript editor is out with version 10. The big deal in the new version is that they merged the PHP and JavaScript editors. I have played with both before but never stuck with them at all, mostly because it sucked that there were two different ones. The notion of one environment for both sounds great.
First of all, it doesn’t appear to have a “find in files” function. I use this all day long in VS. Find everywhere that calls foo(). Find this variable somewhere in the code-base. Especially when tackling a code-base that you aren’t familiar with yet this is crucial. The editor has a notion of a “project” but it seems limited to providing a file browser and uploading things via FTP.
It does have a handy thing that picks out all the functions in the current file, but again, it doesn’t know anything beyond the current file. So no help to find where foo() is declared.
It doesn’t really support mixing HTML and Javascript. So debugging Javascript in stand-alone JS files is fine, but if you put it in your HTML file you can only execute a little bit at a time by selecting it and saying “execute”. Its also not clear when you do that (or otherwise try out your Javascript) how it deals with bringing in includes and libraries and what-not.
It does let you run PHP stuff and do a syntax check, but its not really integrated. Its just running PHP.exe to do that, and displaying the results in a text window. You can’t even click on errors to go to the right line and they do nothing to help with the poor error messages in the PHP engine (two examples- you can be missing a close parenthesis but it tells you unexpected ‘{’, or forget to close a string and you get unexpected T_STRING, both referencing the wrong line. And yes, I know why the compiler gives the errors there, but its not user friendly and not really 2008-state-of-the-art).
I’ll play with it for a few more days but it feels like its still in the “not quite enough to be useful” category.