Jetbrains product suggestion: Standalone structured text editor
I work with a lot of designers and copy editors other non-programmers who can't produce well-formed and valid structured text files by hand using the rudimentary tools they have available to them. TextMate and Coda and the like don't cut it, but designers don't know there's anything better. You can coerce JEdit to support some of this with enough plugins, but it's a usability disaster (overly complicated, no native OS integration, etc) and it's still missing a lot of Jetbrains functionality.
I would love to be able to point these people to Jetbrains, but all the project-based Jetbrains IDE's are way too complicated for non-programmer use.
Any chance of a Jetbrains standalone structured text editor for common formats like xml, json, html, css that doesn't have the project system or any hint of programming languages? All it needs is the standard Jetbrains schema-aware editing features, autocomplete, autovalidation, structure view, etc. It would just open files and edit them. No project setup, no webapp infrastructure choices, no server setup, no project structure viewer on the left, no knowledge of directory structures beyond resolving relative links.
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WebStorm fits your description :)
On 12/12/2011 7:06 PM, Willis Morse wrote:
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Have you actually tried WebStorm? Its project management system contains of a single action, "Open Directory", where you need to select the directory containing the files you need to edit. And the only programming language it supports is JavaScript, which is required for JSON editing (our JSON support is part of the JavaScript plugin).
If that's too complicated, I'm afraid we can't help. An editor which only allows opening single files and does not have the ability to see the list of files in a directory would simply be considered crippled.
Well look at that. Webstorm is exactly what I'm looking for. I played with PHPStorm a while ago, and I guess I assumed that Webstorm had the same project-based focus. I have Idea and AppCode, but I'm going to pick this up too just for the simpler workflow.
It's getting tough to keep track of the difference between all these Jetbrains products. Not that I'm complaining, keep them coming.
Sometimes all you need is a quick edit. A swift double click on a file to make a small change. This is especially useful when editing files in different and unrelated locations.
All the editors I've tried before, though some may have been very good, were always missing something. If it's not a workflow issue it's am extensibility issue. If not that then it's an auto completion issue, and so on.
I believe Jetbrains can change this for me like you did with your incredible ide's. I too hope this becomes a new product
You have to choose one: either it's a tool that allows quick edits or it's a tool that provides autocompletion. You can't have IntelliJ-quality autocompletion without spending the resources on IntelliJ-style indexing, and requiring IntelliJ-style project configuration.
The Microsoft text editor Visual Studio Code is an example of one such editor attempting to find that sweet spot between IDE and text editor for the exactly these things.
Jetbrains, in my opinion, is far better at the execution of these great features and could really make an impact in this field. It would definitely be voted best editor by many standards (even though you can't beat the Vim community)
Feel free to add your suggestions to related issue: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-5939