
Ask HN: What editor/environment to use for Front-End Dev - plessthanpt05
I&#x27;m a very experienced (10+ years) vim user (doing ML engineering, data engineering, back-end dev, etc), but have never dipped my toes into serious front-end development before.  Any suggestions and suggested plugins (e.g. like live loading a page being edited)?  Oh yeah, preferably for Debian(&#x2F;Ubuntu).
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johncoltrane
I have two comments to make before detailing my workflow:

* You already have experience with one of the greatest programing-oriented text editors so why don't you just keep using it?

* An environment is what you get after you have solved your problems, satisfied your needs, optimized your workflows. Not something you start with.

Now, I've been doing (web front-end) development since the late nineties and
only switched to Vim from TextMate 8 years ago. I run Vim in a terminal
emulator with only a few plugins. Half of them are mine, essentially snippets
of code I extracted from my config for others to use.

For moving around a project I generally avoid file-based navigation in favor
of the built-in "symbol-based navigation" features: :help include-search,
:help tags, and :help ctags. For ctags, I let my task runner take care of the
indexing.

For linting I use the built-in :help 'makeprg', :help 'errorformat', and :help
quickfix.

For livereload I currently use Webpack Dev Server on every front-end project
at work. This happens outside of Vim, as it should.

For manual completion (I _hate_ autocompletion) I just use the built-in :help
ins-completion with custom mappings.

I use snippet expansion a lot via the Snipmate plugin (there are others).

No Tmux. No Git integration. No fancy statusline. No line numbers. No
unnecessary plugin. Nothing more than a soothing and familiar dark grey
rectangle.

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xavierwebgl
I use sublime text, it is lightweight, it has many plugins, it is fast and
works great on Ubuntu 16.04.

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vshirguppi
VS Code!

