Friday, August 05, 2016

Alm TypeScript Editor


When I was reading TypeScript Deep Dive (recommended) I noticed a mention of an "alm" TypeScript editor. I'd never heard of it so I figured I'd better check it out.

The developer turned out to be the same as the author of the book - Basarat Ali Syed aka "bas". Who also turned out to be the the original developer of the atom-typescript plugin that I've been using.

Alm is a new project but it's moving quickly and is already full featured. And there's actually documentation :-) It has features like go to definition, find references, and even rename refactor. It also has some flashier features like dependency graphs and AST views. It has an outline side bar (alm calls it a Semantic View) which is a feature I really like in Eclipse and miss in Visual Studio. (We also have it in Suneido.)

The current "packaging" is a little quirky - you start it from a command prompt and the actually UI runs in Chrome. It would be nice to see it packaged with Electron, like Atom, but that's not critical.

You can use Chrome's Save To Desktop to open it as a "bare" window without the browser chrome, but you still have to start Alm first. No doubt there's a way to automate that. Or you can use "alm -o" which will open it in a tab in Chrome, and then use something like the Chrome extension Open as Popup.

I was interested to see that it was using the CodeMirror JavaScript code editor component which is what we have been using in the suneido.js project. But recently it changed to use the Monaco editor which was written for Visual Studio Code and recently released as a separate open source component. That makes sense because Monaco is written in TypeScript, and TypeScript was the original target language for Visual Studio Code.

Alm leverages the actual TypeScript compiler for source code analysis, which seems like the ideal approach.

I've only used it for a few days and I'm still learning my way around, but it looks like it will be my preferred editor for TypeScript.

No comments: