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.