Increasing productivity in JetBrains IDEs

Every software engineer goes through a lot of IDEs and editors (Eclipse, Netbeans, Sublime, Atom, Brackets, …) and all of them have their bottlenecks: performance, insufficient error highlighting, code completion, refactoring methods or high memory usage.

Currently, I mostly develop in JavaScript in WebStorm IDE and occasionally use Atom Editor for small edits. When I tried WebStorm for JavaScript development, I loved it. I still enjoy the most refactoring and autocomplete features without any configuration.

I found John Lindquist’s video Webstorm tips & tricks very beneficial, because you can find how to use live templates, AceJump plugin and extract methods. I also installed the Key Promoter plugin, which reminds you of the keyboard shortcut for an action that you perform with your mouse. This is a very useful way to learn those keyboard shortcuts. One of my must have plugin is also BrowseWordAtCaret, which highlights other appearances of selected words in source code.