Another take on Webstorm
Jun 16 2020
I’ve been a happy VS Code user for a couple of years. I love the community-based extension system, the GUI and the flexibility VS Code offers. I’m also the kind of person that can spend hours deciding on a new theme. Only to switch back to my old theme the next day (Sarah Drasner’s Night Owl theme).
I like how the Git integration works and combined with the Git Lens extension I git all my needs fulfilled.
But I’ve also had some annoyances with VS Code. In the last months, I’ve had to restart VS Code several times every working hour. This has been due to one or two extensions I believe, so I can’t blame VS Code directly. More specifically, the Prettier extension randomly starts hanging when formatting the code.
There’s no fix for this as far as I can tell, but google has told me other people have similar problems. Not only with Prettier, but other extensions as well. I’ve tried reinstalling VS Code, reinstalling extensions, and so on, but no luck.
Hello Webstorm
In a moment of frustration, I downloaded Webstorm. 🤭 Is this even allowed, I asked myself, thinking of the trendy tech twitter’s possible condemnation of such an unthinkable action.
I’ve evaluated Webstorm a couple of years ago also but didn’t really find it appealing back then. This time was different though.
The UI definitely has gotten a lot better. A custom Jetbrains font, and an enjoyable color theme instantly gave me a good first impression. It also felt snappier than what I remembered.
What really impressed me though, was the Vue.js support. It felt so solid, helpful, and thought-through. In comparison, in VS Code, I’ve always felt I’ve had to battle extensions and config to get what I want, and never really got it quite right.
There are so many useful refactoring functionalities and really helpful code hints. The UI just feels really nice and sturdy.
Overall, I think I’m sticking around with Webstorm. Even though it’s hard to compete with free (VS Code), the price is very justifiable, when I think of the number of hours spent in my editor every day.