Why WebStorm is the most productive IDE for JavaScript development

Aaron Janes
4 min readJan 21, 2023

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WebStorm offers several advantages when it comes to productivity.

WebStorm is a full-featured IDE with built-in debugging, testing, and version control tools. These features become exceptionally useful for larger and more complex projects.

Advanced coding assistance:

WebStorm includes advanced code completion, refactoring, and error detection features, which can save developers time and increase productivity. Consider working in a code base where you have to refactor a function — finding and rewriting all the contexts where the application has used the process so you can adequately refactor all the instances of the operation is a laborious and time-consuming task. Using WebStorm, Press Shift+F6 and continue with your day. Or another common refactoring situation is renaming a file. Webstorm has a safe renaming feature where it searches for all instances of the file and refactors the imports for you.

Another fantastic productivity feature is the search anywhere function. Press Shift + Shift (double tap shift) and begin typing. Suppose you are looking for a method, file, folder, or internal setting for WebStorm. All you have to do is type its name, and WebStorm will do the rest.

Language-specific features:

WebStorm has specialized support for several popular programming languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, and CSS, providing exceptional coding support, auto-completion, refactoring and code snippets. Hot tip -> add in sonar lint for even more fantastic code support.

Better Webpack integration:

WebStorm has better integration with Webpack and other build tools like gulp, grunt, etc. WebStorm natively integrates with the Webpack module bundler. This integration with Webpack improves coding assistance in JavaScript files by considering Webpack module resolution and resolving aliases.

Better debugging:

WebStorm has an excellent built-in debugger. The setup for WebStorm debugger for client-side applications like react or angular is as simple as holding Shift + CMD when you click the link in your terminal to localhost. For node applications, it features built-in templates to get you going instantly.

Transfer HTML to JSX:

Want to transfer an HTML page to React? Just copy and paste the HTML into a react component, and WebStorm will convert the HTML into JSX syntax for you.

React code snippets ( no, they are not just for class components anymore)

Creating new functional components is as pressing -> rsi then tab to create a stateless arrow function component. To see all the live templates, press CMD+ J to bring up a selection menu or if you want to see language-specific snippets push CMD +, to see and edit the templates.

Extract a React component

Is your component getting crowded? The best practice would be to refactor the extra component by moving it to a new file. Extracting the feature component is often a tedious process that WebStorm can handle for you. You can remove the element from the file by pressing selecting it and pressing F6, then following the extract menu. WebStorm will move the part to its file exported and imported back to the original, Viola!

Git Integration

Out of the box, WebStorm features full GitHub integration, which manages all branches, and commits. You can create, review and merge pull requests from inside the IDE.

In closing, all these features enable you to be more productive, but there are a few things to be aware of, cost and resource use.

WebStorm includes many built-in tools and features that can consume more memory and processing power. Additionally, its advanced coding assistance and language-specific features may require more resources. It is worth noting that the resource usage of WebStorm will depend on the specific hardware and the size and complexity of the project.

If your IDE is slow, the first thing to check is your memory allocation. Jet Brains set the default memory allocation to 2 gigs. In my experience, this was not enough memory; I opted to put it to 4 gigs.
Follow the guide below for adjusting memory allocation for your IDE.

Cost: Free 30-day trial, $6.90/month for an individual license and worth every cent.

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WebStorm shortcut cheat sheet

https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/webstorm/docs/WebStorm_ReferenceCard.pdf

More WebStorm tips and tricks

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Aaron Janes
Aaron Janes

Written by Aaron Janes

Technical Team Lead and 4 x AWS Certified

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