Last Updated: 2013-03-19

I am the co-organizer of the Twin Cities JavaScript users group known as JavaScriptMN.  At one of our recent meetups (2012-05-31), we were set to have 30 minutes of discussion and/or lightning talks on the theme of “tools and libraries that you couldn’t live without”.  While the goal of the theme was to point out the most valuable tools and libraries available, our main speaker for the night was missing in action and so we continued discussing tools and libraries for the entire duration of the meetup.  I’ve put all the suggestions together into a composite list and categorized them all, though the order of the categories themselves is definitely a bit askew.

Please note that this is not intended to be a list of the best tools/libraries in each category but rather providing a small set of those available.  The reason behind this is that many of them are still actively in development (the coverage tools are a good example), and so I don’t want to only list the single option that I feel is best at this point in time as it may be eclipsed by one of its listed competitors (or something totally new!) in the near future.

My intent is to keep this blog post up-to-date as time marches on, so be sure to keep a link to it handy (or just to my main blog page, as I’ve made this post “sticky” as well).  Now, on to the list!

• WebStorm (or PhpStorm, if you’re into that kind of thing)
• SublimeText2
• Cloud9
• Brackets
• Visual Studio + Resharper 6+
• vim