VS Code with code ligatures

Code ligatures are these cool things I just found out about recently that replace text to symbols. For example: '!=' turns into '!='. That pretty cool.

Now, if you're not seeing the equal symbol with a slash across it, that just means you haven't installed correct font for code ligatures - FiraCode. Click here for install instructions.

With the font installed, time to activate this for VS Code, you'll have to modify your settings.json - either your users or your workspaces settings.json.

FYI, most editors and IDEs are supported except for a few; most notable are Eclipse and Sublime which are not supported yet. Huh....

To open settings.json, from the File menu choose Prefereneces, Settings or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl +,. Add these lines and restart VS Code.

    "editor.fontFamily": "Fira Code",
    "editor.fontSize": 14,
    "editor.fontLigatures": true

You might have to wrap the "Fira Code" font with extra apostrophes like

"'Fira Code'".

if it doesn't work.

Read up more about code ligatures.

4 code editors you should be looking at (and none of them is Atom)

1. Notepad++. I like it because its snappy and an outright replaced to notepad on Windows systems. It also have a bunch of plugins for everything. My favorite use of Notepad++ is to view and format JSON, It's also a pretty capable source code editor with line numbers and color highlighting for a lot of languages.
   
   

   

   Notepad++



2. Brakets. This free code editor is geared towards JS and HTML5 scripters - frontend people; it has this cool feature called "live html" where you connect Brackets to a live server and "edit" the site live. It also has a lot of plugins, I especially like the color/swatch plugin where when you edit CSS colors, it pops up a color selector helping you pick the right shade of blue or whatever. It's also nice that it understands CSS dialects like Less and SaSS.
   
   

   

   brackets.io



3. Lighttable. Although its sort of still in the dev stages it's quite stable on my ElementaryOS machine. It HAS GOT TO BE the coolest IDE I've seen and use.  Lighttable has this killer feature where it cross a REPL with a source editor giving you the feel that you are editing running code. It also has this notion that a file is not the smallest unit of organization but a function is. Did I mention that it's free?
   
   

   

   Lighttable



4. Netbeans 8. Aside from being free, Netbeans has got to have the some of the best toolsets for Java development found on a single IDE. It has wizards for all of Java world's coolest libraries like Hibernate, Spring and Swing. It also has killer support for web technologies like AngularJS, HTML5, Less and SaSS. Aside from that, Netbeans also has built in support of workflow units like Maven, Git and Mercurial. It also has a pretty lively plugin ecosystem making able to support other languages not just Java like Ruby with Rails.
   
   

   

   Netbeans

Code fasta, Fasta, FASTA with zen coding

Zen wunz go fasta!

If you're familiar with Warhammer 40k Orks, then the reference should be appropriate otherwise, WHOOOSH!

What is this zen coding BS then, you might ask? Well, zen coding is something Google came up with to write out HTML faster. Zen is not a technique mind you but rather an editor plugin for your favorite IDE allowing you to write in abbreviations and then expanding it to completed code.
You can basically write shit like this:

div#page>div.logo+ul#navigation>li*5>a

And have it expand to this:

<div id="page">  
     <div class="logo"></div>  
     <ul id="navigation">  
         <li><a href=""></a></li>  
         <li><a href=""></a></li>  
         <li><a href=""></a></li>  
         <li><a href=""></a></li>  
         <li><a href=""></a></li>  
     </ul>  
 </div>

We should be able to see the convention quite easily and as you can see quite convenient in handling with repetitive code. Unless, of course you're someone who like's typing, then that's another thing altogether.

This also works on Less and Sass code among other things. And it also comes as Netbeans plugin which is very nice. Other implementations are also available.

Checking out Brackets editor

So the guys over at WeAreKiss told me to check out Brackets. Brackets is this new open-source code editor built with the web for the web. I'm trying it out to see if it lives up to its slogan (or "hype"). Don't expect much of it just now since its sort of in "Alpha". Think experimental build. Using it though isn't really a hassle you just download it, unpack and find the binaries and run with it.

Brackets Code Editor

I have been running Brackets for a few hours now and it's pretty nice to use when editing JavaScript, CSS (Less format) and HTML5. Not everything was that smooth though. I had a rough time figuring out the preview thing with this.

I like the jsLint add-on. It comes handy when I'm editing JavaScript files although it will nag to no end about how terrible my JavaScript is. ;)

But there's one thing, I wish Brackets had and that's a concept of a "project" folder like in inotai's inType editor.

Other than that, let's see how it goes in a week or so.