First and foremost, I am using WebStorm. I know. I am paying for my licence. Why? Because I find it extremely powerful in terms of performance, typing, and debugging capabilities. I am also used to its shortcuts now, which makes it hard for me to switch to VSC (and believe me, I’ve tried many times!)
The nice thing about WebStorm is also that it has all the plugins you need coming out of the box. You then end up adding very specific plugins you need, and that’s it.
Note: I recommend to disable the plugins you won’t need for your projects though. For example, if you are a React developer, it’s pretty safe to say that you won’t need the Angular plugin. Just go to Settings -> Plugins -> Installed, and disable it. A clean working environment is a powerful environment ;)
So, what are the plugins that I am using?
.ignore: is a plugin for all .[something]ignore you can think of: .eslintignore, .dockerignore , .vercelignore , .gitignore …it will help with syntax highlighting, suggesting new .gitignore files on a project, support comments and brackets, or entries inspections with quick-fix proposals. You can see the full list of feature here!
.env files support: isn’t annoying that you cannot just go to declaration (in .env file) and usages (in code) just by hitting a shortcut command? With this plugin, you can 🙏 — This plugin also helps with autocompletion on environment variables, which is pretty convenient.
Wakatime: this one is not for everyone. Only for the metrics lovers 🙈 As it turns out, there are a lot of metrics lovers among us, developers (shocker): in 2023, more than 500k developers spent a combined 51 million hours programming, all tracked with WakaTime plugins 🤯 — so, if you don’t use it already, give it a try!
Rainbow Bracket: because honestly, who never got crazy trying to find the start and the end of endless divs???
Prisma ORM: this is obviously if you are using Prisma in your project. I started to experiment with it recently as my data models and data queries to Mongo, it works great. This plugin will make your experience even better as you won’t have to go to your terminal or to the Prisma interface in your browser, no, you’ll be able to interact with Prisma and your backend directly from WebStorm 😎
Github copilot. You can check the github page if you want to know more about its powerful capabilities. Some developers — IMO the hard core developers — will tell you copilot is a bad thing to use, but honestly, it allows me to be much faster and to spend time on the trickier part of the code, not the trivial ones AI can help me with. So, just give it a try and take it with a pinch of salt. You will still be a good developer even if you are using the help of AI ;)
MDX: not a must, but very convenient if you are using this format that combines Markdown and Javascript. It is especially useful if you want to write markdown inside React components since it allows to write JSX in markdown content. This plugin therefore helps me save time thanks to its code completion and syntax highlighting.
And that’s it! I’d love to hear in the comments what plugins do you find the most useful in your projects?
Happy coding! 🌞
Top comments (2)
Thanks for this! I'm most curious about your choice of WebStorm and would love to hear more about why you use it over VSCode. Is WebStorm worth the yearly subscription costs? Is it difficult to collaborate on projects with people who are using VSCode or is it better if everyone uses WebStorm?
Hi @aaronblondeau, thanks! I mainly use webstorm because I find it more powerful, faster and more reliable than VSCode. For instance, refactoring with Webstorm is very fast as it finds quickly all code usages. I am also used to all the shortcuts and dev tools webstorm provides, which makes me very efficient in the IDE. The autocomplete capabilities are also absolutely great and impressive, and go beyond what you would normally have on a type. Overall I think VSCode can work well, but Webstorm, as part of jetbrains, is more advanced and robust. It s a tool I completely trust whereas when I tried VSCode I had several issues where I had to restart the IDE often, I had typing issues, and refactoring was more tedious.