My Developer’s Toolbox

After a moment of pause & introspection, I realized I tend to be wordy and long-winded.  So rather than have a paragraph or 5 of WHY and HOW, I will just make a list and go from there.

IDEs, tools, things

• WebStorm – for all things non-Adobe related, this is my JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc. IDE of choice.
• Flash Builder – for all things Adobe, this has been a great tool for years, built on Eclipse with plugins for SVN, Git, etc.  Love it.  I won’t be going further into anything Flex/Flash related unless requested.
• Sublime Text 3 – shell scripting, quick looking files, XML, has a super neato feature where you can actually edit multiple lines simultaneously.
• Git – at first I was very weirded out by Git. It had all the familiar vernacular as SVN (branch, tag, merge, commit, etc.) but the meanings were different. After taking a nose dive into it, I LOVE it.  Super easy to use, the command line is easy enough that I rarely use…
• Source Tree – this is a Git GUI for Mac.  Somethings are better left to the command line, but for those edge cases, I like this app.
• GitLab – not a tool per se, but an alternative to Github with private, free repos.
• Github – free, publicly hosted Git repos.
• Gist – this is Github’s flavor of a pastebin with the ability to fork it.  You are starting to see many stackoverflow posts utilizing this to debug/debate code
• Mou – a markdown editor/viewer app for Mac.

javascript-specific

• node js – server-side js, powerfully simple with an ever-growing ecosystem.
• npm – stands for node package manager, a command line API that comes installed with node for fetching node package resources.  Powerful stuff folks.
• bower – a npm module that sorta does the same thing as npm, but client-side-oriented. Better-put, it’s a resource management tool.
• require js – an asyncronous dependency loading library based on AMD.  I’m not a big fan of the AMD API as it seems verbose compared to CommonJS’s API but it’s a great utility for keeping your code modular and it’s easy to debug with.
• browserify – a npm library that allows you to build an app much like require does, using the CommonJS’s API, but rather than loading things async, it traverses the dependency tree and compiles a single javascript file for use in the browser.  I’ve only begun to realize it’s potential as it also allows access to many node.js modules out of the box.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few.  But this is my toolbox overall.  How does your toobox compare?