I’ve been working on refactoring some JavaScript code over the last couple of days. One of the biggest pains in this endeavour is the lack of a decent editor. I’ve been checking out a few editors, and the space for this is pretty disappointing.

Visual Studio works well enough for pure editing, but what’s really missing is some sort of navigation mechanism. My current source file is pretty large – it’s about a thousand lines of Javascript code and because it’s JavaScript that needs to get downloaded to the client there’s not much in the way of ‘documention’ breaks that usually break up source code for better readability. More importantly though there’s not even a class or function view, which would be so helpful. This file contains about 5 classes with 50 or so methods and making changes in this environment is a bit of a pain.

I downloaded and played around with a third party editor from C-Point which is actually reasonably decent. It has good syntax highlighting, limited Intellisense and most importantly a primitive function browser. It does statement completion for global functions which is about all you could expect <s>. It doesn’t do anything for classes and object oriented syntax though.

It also has debugging functionality, but I haven’t been able to get it to work on my machine. Looks like it uses the Microsoft script debugger, so this is not likely going to be an improvement of what we can already do with Visual Studio  (and yes that experience sucks, although it’s still better than the FireFox alternatives).

This C-Point tool is decent and quite usable – it’s better than VS’s JavaScript editing, but the UI is a little quirky. So question to the many resourceful people out there: Has anybody found a good JavaScript environment that provides something resembling an end to end experience or at the very least a full editing experience with the things we take for granted in Visual Studio.