Some quick rants.
CSS is almost as bad as PHP when it comes to naming. Most flex related properties are prefixed with flex-; but some aren't (align-items, etc) so you now have tons of non prefixed properties that actually only work within a very specific context (vertical-align, etc) and there are no compilers to tell you which combinations don't make sense or whether you have redundant properties.
IE11 has tons of bugs with flexbox; I had to remove a flexbox layout earlier because of that crappy browser (it ignores explicit/inline width/height set on flex children).
Otherwise it's a great tool if used sparingly (heavily nested flexbox elements with lots of special properties start to become a bit hard to follow)
I was using VS Code earlier today and used vertical-align in some case where it didn’t make sense and VS called it out. Such things do exist!
But I agree with your points. Despite its flaws, it is probably the best thing out there for creating visual layouts from code.
Webstorm is absolutely incredible. Everyone should try it. Seriously, `cd your-app && brew cask install webstorm && webstorm .`
Best IDE ever. Better than emacs. And I've loved emacs for a couple years, and Vim for 10 years before that. Webstorm even comes with a Vim plugin.
IntelliJ is really rocking it. Webstorm for webdev, Cursive for clojure (https://cursive-ide.com/), PyCharm for python (https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/)... every one of those IDEs feels amazing out of the box.
It sounds dumb, but just try it. You'll get hooked on Webstorm and never want to go back. Example: press shift twice. It pops up a "Search Everywhere" box, and you can type filenames, symbol names, actions (Rename, etc)... it's basically helm M-x, but way better.
You won't ever feel like "CSS names are bad!" because you won't ever need to remember anything. Want to center something? Just type "align" and usually webstorm pops up autocomplete with the right thing. And that's true in every context: https://i.imgur.com/jCAAesF.png
All of these IDEs are specializations of IntelliJ IDEA (https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/#section=mac). They specialize it for web and call it WebStorm, for Python and call it PyCharm, etc. But all the plugins and settings work in all the IDEs, so really the underlying awesomeness is IDEA.
At this point I trust IDEA enough to know that if I open any codebase, I can start navigating it right away. Doesn't matter if it's C++, ocaml, or VueJS. Typing shift-shift will always let me jump to definitions.
Yeah it costs money, but $13/mo is super reasonble. Dropbox was similarly impactful on my life, and that was $10/mo.
>a "Search Everywhere" box, and you can type filenames, symbol names, actions
>Just type "align" and usually webstorm pops up autocomplete with the right thing
VS Code does both of these things, and is FOSS
It's not so much that it has X feature or Y widget, but rather that the whole ecosystem feels cohesive. With emacs you sort of cobble together your configurations until you're happy with it, and that's very powerful -- it's why it's so successful. But there's something to be said for having "awesomeness out of the box". It's why Spacemacs was so popular.
I hear you about FOSS. I was reeeeally hesitant to throw my time into yet another closed source clusterfuck. I grew up as a gamedev, and back in 2000 that meant you had to use Visual Studio. All of my VS skills are now completely obsolete. And whenever I ran into VS issues, I couldn't debug it since it was closed source.
Two things convinced me IDEA is probably worthwhile:
1. They're partially open source. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community You can build that from source and run it, so you can at least see how most of the system is architected. You won't be able to extend some of the closed-source plugins, but you get some of the benefits of FOSS.
2. Their tooling is their primary business model. When Microsoft lost their VS monopoly, Microsoft didn't die. JetBrains' sole focus is making the tooling ecosystem work; they're the Adobe of tooling.