Comment by itsmonktastic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by itsmonktastic | Hacker News Reader

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This seems a little disingenuous. I bet Intellij already has great support, but the top link you give there for Sublime Text, emacs and vim doesn't really give anywhere near the level of support you get in Visual Studio. Literally just syntax highlighting! In Visual Studio you get at least error highlighting/completions/code generation/navigation/refactoring.

There are definitely attempts to bring the language service to other editors but when I tried them last (just before the 0.9 release) they seemed either featureless or very slow. If someone can recommend one for sublime/emacs/vim that they actually use I'd be very appreciative!

EDIT: related thing that annoyed me: the language service is part of the TypeScript repo but as far as I can see from there is no official documentation on how to go about leveraging it for other editors! I admit I can kind of understand this until the language is less of a moving target. The best way to get started for now seems to be looking at third party efforts like https://github.com/clausreinke/typescript-tools.

> This seems a little disingenuous. I bet Intellij already has great support, but the top link you give there for Sublime Text, emacs and vim doesn't really give anywhere near the level of support you get in Visual Studio. Literally just syntax highlighting! In Visual Studio you get at least error highlighting/completions/code generation/navigation/refactoring.

It's a little disingenuous to expect environments that are typically more text editor than IDE and much more lightweight (Sublime, Vim, Emacs) to have all the features of an IDE with as new as TypeScript is. Much of those features require much more work than they would to implement in Intellij or Visual Studio, which have great APIs for building plugins with those sort of features[1] even for the community[2].

[1] http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IntelliJIDEA/Custom+...

[2] http://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin?pluginId=5055 (The third party Lua plugin for Intellij for example)

Sorry for the poor choice of word on my part, I admit I was using "disingenuous" incorrectly there. I just thought the description of sublime/emacs/vim having "great" support for TypeScript might give someone the impression that something beyond syntax highlighting was supported.

I don't doubt that it's more work to support more than syntax highlighting, but that doesn't change the fact that the support in those editors is sub-par when compared with lots of other languages. For example I can install SublimeLinter and have basic error reporting for python code, or SublimeJEDI and have code completion and go to definition.

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