Building your own IDE

So, recently, I've been dabbling a bit in node.js / javascript. This has led me to the conclusion that these monolithic IDE's we use every day, are a Bad Idea (i'm looking at you eclipse). Because of the bloatedness of IDEA/eclipse/netbeans for javascript / HTML development I went back to basics. Basically building my own IDE using smaller, more specialized components. So, my basic setup is as follows:

• Sublime Text 2 - text editor and syntax highlighting
• jslint - Lint tool for Javascript code. It's basically a syntax checker, together with a bit of static analysis
• npm - this is the node package manager. Think maven. It can also run your tests
• guard - this is a ruby gem I use to watch for file changes. It can execute arbitrary commands whenever a file changes
• libnotify/notify-send - libnotify is used to make popups on the desktop

Right, so those are the pieces. How do they fit together though? Well, easy. Guard is setup to watch my source/views and tests. Whenever any of these changes, the complete test suite is run using npm, and the output is received as JSON. I then parse the JSON to create a popup on my desktop, which instantenously gives me the results of the unit tests. This works so well that I haven't really touched the browser in the last week to test my javascript code. Here's the code for the test running/popup: Here's my guard file: The popups look really nice. They are also quite customisable (depending on your notify backend). Try

notify-send "Test" test

on your PC to see what it does. Anyway, first post! Here's an example of the popup: