
Of course you can do anything in a text editor that you can do in a modern IDE as long as you have patience. I programmed exclusively with text editors for a number of years. But I get it, whoever would be smart enough to get that working reliably would probably make better use of their time trying to cure cancer or solve climate issues or go to Mars etc. In an ideal world, if some React component was written in OCaml mixed with Clojure and transpiled to JS, I'd want to be able to jump to the implementation into that actual original OCaml or Clojure code.
INTELLIJ VS WEBSTORM FOR REACT CODE
just that they've ended up with a codebase where something like this is genuinely hard to do.Īnd when they'll finally get it will still be frustrating as hell because >50% of the time it would jump to some unreadable transpiled code because there's no actual standardized way to jump to the original source the final js got transpiled from. 10x more frustrating when you see that there are >1 y old bug reports about this but it's always delegated as lower priority than smth else and after (I think, not sure anymore.) someone fixed some underlying functionality that was supposed to make this possible, the actual functionality of usable jump-to-implementation is still not fully implemented!Īnd I'm not saying that the devs don't care or not doing wonderful work.


This creates a huge divide between framework/library/component-author and "lowly" client/user-programmers.Ĭompare this to the Python ecosystem where basically any editor or IDE can help me jump to the right place in a library's nice and readable code, and even in the worst case where the author didn't bother to write either tests or docs I can still make use of foreign code just fine.

Maybe people should realize that the problem is with the JS libraries ecosystem and how most are build in a way that "just jumping into a lib/framework to read its code and see what it does" can't seam to be feasible anymore.įor example, in a React app if I'd want to jump from a `Route` import from react-router to it's readable code definition, NO IDE or editor around is capable a properly doing the jump, I either get to a Typescript definition (VSCode does this - imo the worst possible behavior) or to some unreadable transpiler outputed code.
