Komodo Edit is awesome and you should all use it.

Seriously. I don’t know how much more I need to go on about this point, but the productivity benefits of a good IDE are astounding, and if you’re still using Notepad or gedit or the like like, then you are Doing It Wrong.

If I had to recommend a good IDE, I’d recommend Komodo Edit. I have before. Hell, I’m still their go-to quote, a fact that I find puzzling, yet rewarding.

Anyway. The guys at Activestate switched to using the Mozilla codebase a while ago, which means that anyone who can write a Firefox extension can (in theory) write a Komodo extension. And so they have! And I have found three that I have fallen absolutely in love with.

They are:

TODO Helper

The TODO Helper plugin is great if you leave all kinds of little “TODO:”s scattered through your code as mental bookmarks. This plug-in can quickly search your entire project for all TODOs listed and display them in the bottom panel.

It’s a little frustrating when the framework you’re using leaves TODOs in their releases, but it’s not hard to take those suckers out anyway.

kJSLint

A long while ago, I blogged about how to integrate jslint into Komodo Edit, but I guess that’s not really strictly necessary these days. Since there’s a plugin that integrates jslint into a menu command.

Sure, you lose out somewhat on the ability to control exactly what version of jslint you use, but the version included is rather up-to-date, and saves you the trouble of having to install an interpreter just to run it. A definite win.

(Also, the “Crockford says no.” message it spits out when you fail validation makes me smile every time.)

Source Tree

Though not as slick as Komodo IDE’s code browser, at least the Source Tree plugin is free and does what it says on the tin. Having the entirety of the file’s functions and classes available and easy to navigate is very handy. Shame this isn’t in the free version of Edit to start, but they’ve got to have some features to differentiate the two enough to encourage people to buy the “pro” edition.

And in Conclusion

Komodo Edit. It’s good. Komodo Edit with Plugins. Even better.

Now get coding.

WTF is JS Lint?

Well, a long time ago, someone noticed that while there are all kinds of ways to write certain code, certain specific ways are sloppier than others and can lead to errors. They wrote a tool called lint to parse through code and find those little linty bits and draw them to your attention.

Javascript, while an incredible language, is absolutely chock-full of language constructs that allow for sloppy coding to occur. So, the inestimable Douglas Crockford wrote JS Lint – a lint program for the Javascript language.

Okay, so how do I do this?

First, you’ll need to download an executable form of JS Lint. If you’re running Linux, make sure you’ve got Wine installed and you’ll be just fine.

Make a copy of the “js.default.conf” file in that directory, and call it lint.conf. Find the following section:

### Output format
# Customize the format of the error message.
# __FILE__ indicates current file path
# __FILENAME__ indicates current file name
# __LINE__ indicates current line
# __ERROR__ indicates error message
#
# Visual Studio syntax (default):
+output-format __FILE__(__LINE__): __ERROR__
# Alternative syntax:
#+output-format __FILE__:__LINE__: __ERROR__

Comment out the un-commented line there, and un-comment the last one. Finally, at the bottom of that file, remove the entry in the “Files” section.

Now boot Komodo Edit.

Open the Toolbox by clicking the little “Show/Hide Right Pane” button in the toolbar. Click on the “Add Item to Toolbox” button and add a new command. Now go to town making your new command look like mine:

Now, that Command string isn’t quite correct – the right bit is chopped off in the screenshot. It should read:

wine /opt/jslint/jsl.exe -conf lint.conf -process %F

You can make the string smaller by including jsl.exe’s directory in your path, or by running Windows and removing wine from the equation. =)

I understand that the Parse Output string is a little confusing (and chopped-off too), but don’t worry about it. It should be filled in automatically and work by default. If it DOESN’T though, here’s the string for you to copy-paste:

^(?P<file>.+?):(?P<line>\d+):(?P<content>.*)$

Simple as that!

Yeah, but what does it do?