If you are a developer, you know the struggle of choosing the right tools for your projects. Opting for the right editor or IDE is a great hassle if you don’t have your facts right. In software development, Emacs and WebStorm are two very common names, both tools supporting Node.js Development. However, the question arises of which of these two tools you should consider while starting your Node.js project.

Let’s find out!

But first, here are the basics.

What is Emacs?

Emacs is one of the oldest-used text editors. It is an excellent lightweight text-editing tool specially designed for the POSIX operating system. It is also available for Windows, Linux, macOS, etc. Further, the first Emacs was released in 1976. Although many versions of Emacs exist, the most popular ones are GNU Emacs and XEmacs.

Pros of Emacs

• Different built-in modes providing functionality for different programming languages and file types.
• Excellent built-in support for different version control systems such as Git, CVS, SVN, etc. 
• It also offers a seamless autocompletion feature. 
• Emacs highlights multiple kinds of syntax in separate colors so the code is more readable and easily understandable. 
• It includes comprehensive documentation.

Cons of Emacs

• It can be challenging for programmers who are not proficient in Lisp programming. We can say that Emacs has a steep learning curve. 
• Lacks in the native user interface.
• The usage can slow down the machine or the device you’re working on due to the provision of comprehensive resources.

Why Emacs?

One of the most significant of those is auto-completion. The truth of a dynamic scripting language like JavaScript is that on multiple occasions, there is no relevant completion accessible as there is an excessive vagueness or the code has improper structure.

Emacs basically tokenizes most of the words in each buffer of a similar kind, for example, each JavaScript buffer, and takes a gander at the characters you have begun to type and attempts to discover a match. It is nothing but a fact that often in the event that you type around three characters of a word, it will offer you around 3-5 choices of words starting from those three characters. This radically improves the speed as you don’t need to type complete words to get going.

Something else Emacs is commendable at is Vim emulation. While WebStorm's Vim copying is good too, it does encounter bugs frequently. These incorporate bugs like keys not enlisting, entering abnormal states where you seem somewhere between the normal and insert mode and a peculiarly delicate mouse choice that consistently appears to place you in visual when you didn’t ask it to. Also, some propelled highlights like macros, once in a while, work directly for rarely work. It also fails to copy things on the system clipboard, which Emacs does as a matter of course. Also, large file editing or micro-driven refactoring is better done in Emacs.

What is WebStorm?

WebStorm was developed by JetBrains. It is simply an IDE or Integrated Development Environment. Further, it becomes an excellent choice for developers and programmers to debug and write code efficiently. WebStorm makes automation work and development tasks a piece of cake for you. 

Pros of WebStorm

• Seamless support for languages like JavaScript, React, HTML, Node.js, Angular, Vue, etc. 
• Provides multiple built-in developer tools to debug client-side applications. 
• Offers a plethora of themes and plugins to build the environment per your requirements.
• WebStorm lets users enjoy features like safe code refactoring, error detection, code completion, etc. 
• It also provides a feature of Live Edit wherein users can code and fetch errors in real-time.

Cons of WebStorm

• WebStorm is an excellent choice for web development. However, it may not be best suited for mobile or app development. 
• It is a paid tool. Although it provides a free version for the full version, you must have a license. 
• You must have a significant amount of storage on your device, as it consumes quite a lot.

Why WebStorm?

Although Emacs is great, a few things lie out of its scope and just cannot be done right with it. Disparagingly, a few of the peskiest things that Emacs can not do can be done by WebStorm, making it a great choice for developers.  One of the major aspects of this domain is debugging. The basic debugger in Node.js is terribly slow. WebStorm emerges as a great alternative in this case. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that this debugger is enough to make a developer opt for it over anything else for major JavaScript development. Though Emacs does have an inbuilt editor for debugging, it fails to work with the default Node.js debugger. Even if it did work, it would’ve been taken back by the utterly sluggish performance of the default debugger.

Definition and Symbol lookup is another incredible component of WebStorm. While Emacs can discover definitions and symbols in a solitary document through Tern, WebStorm can review your entire task and discover a definition, or if nothing else, give you a very pruned rundown of contenders to look over. This makes exploring through code exponentially quicker and diminishes the strain of setting and exchanging between documents.

Testing integration is the last enormous success for WebStorm. When utilizing the most well-known JavaScript testing systems, Jasmine and Mocha, WebStorm removes the need to run individual tests, entire test files, and entire test suites with only a few keyboard shortcuts.

If we join this last component with debugging and code navigation between documents, WebStorm becomes an astounding TDD tool. Emacs can be inconsequentially set up to run an entire test suite but not individual tests for any of the regular JavaScript testing frameworks. While this is possible in Emacs, too (such integration exists for Ruby's RSpec tools), nobody has contributed to the opportunity to make it work.

Emacs vs. WebStorm for Node.js Development

Similarities

There are a few features shared by both Emacs and WebStorm. Firstly, both can connect to external code quality tools such as ESLint. They can connect to these tools and provide real-time code analysis and bug spotting. Secondly, either one of the tools can provide a deep analysis of JavaScript mode.

WebStorm has its exclusive JavaScript analysis engine, whereas Emacs has its own js2 mode. Both aid in finding the bugs and issues in the code, like finding a function that does not return a value and can perform minor tasks such as extracting variables too. Lastly, both tools greatly support smart auto-completion.  Emacs does this through Tern, an open-source JS code analyzer with which various editors can connect. On the other hand, WebStorm does it using its own engine, which, in addition, parses JSDoc comments and TypeScript descriptor documents.

Head-to-head Comparison: Emacs and WebStorm for Node.Js Development

Summary

Like every other app development tool, Emacs and WebStorm, have their own advantages and disadvantages. A significant disadvantage is automated refactoring. Automated refactoring is an incredibly tricky problem in a dynamic language. Neither Emacs nor WebStorm can go beyond extractions or simple variable renames. It can make refactoring across files a wearisome, error-prone process. Similarly, both tools lack generating code for JavaScript. Either of the tools supports expanding developer-defined templates but nothing else.

WebStorm appears to be at least trying a bit in this regard. Presently, it can generate a method that you call in code, but only into the same file you are in, and it will often call the method wrong. A developer must consider all the points before choosing the right tool and beginning the development to utilize the features to their utmost capacity.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is WebStorm good for web development?

Yes, WebStorm is considered one of the best choices for web development. However, you must also know that it may not be as good for app or mobile development as for web development. 

2. Is WebStorm better than Vscode for web development?

Both WebStorm and Vscode are good options for web development. However, the final decision depends on the user’s needs and requirements from the tool. Also, one advantage of Vscode is that it is available for free, which isn’t the case with WebStorm. 

3. What compiler does Node.js use?

Node.js uses the Google V8 engine. 

4. Does anyone still use Emacs?

Yes. Many software developers use Emcas to date. It is highly useful and enrolls new features every now and then.