Hi there. I see that a VS Code plugin was created. I was hoping to request a potential Webstorm version as well. The main thing I’m hoping to achieve is the Diagnostic aspect of the plug-in in Webstorm, like the Linking GraphQL SDLs + JS Service Implementations example. Would this be possible at all for the roadmap?
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Webstorm is a proprietary IDE. I don’t think maintaining an extension for it makes sense in an open source project, since many contributors won’t have access to the tools to work on it.
JetBrains does provide licenses for OS software & for students free-of-charge
You have to be a core project contributor (have commit privileges on the repo) to get a no-cost license from Jetbrains unless you’re a student. That means most contributors won’t have access to a requisite tool to work on the software, and it also causes problems with testing any extension in CI / CD (because no-cost licenses only apply to individuals, not projects).
There are also licensing issues for writing extensions. IANAL but I don’t think you can use GPL-licensed packages for Webstorm extensions, and a lot of prominent libraries in the Javascript ecosystem are GPL licensed.
I used Webstorm for some time in the past. It’s a nice IDE. It was a little jarring to me that it won’t handle C / C++ (you have to buy a package that includes their separate CLion IDE for that) and it’s pretty limited on languages (no support for Forth, for example).
btw I saw in the dev environment thread that you’re a new poster on the forum - welcome! It’s a good community. If you haven’t joined the RW Discord, you might consider hanging out there 
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@WebstackBuilder Much appreciated! And thanks for the info regarding the pitfalls of developing a Webstorm extension. If RedwoodJS takes off and becomes rather popular, I feel like it might be beneficial down the line, but I understand now why it may not happen.
Personally I love Webstorm due to how it handles code refactoring, imports, and the VCS functionality is very comprehensive and easy to use. I feel like the refactoring aspect would not be overly useful in such an opinionated framework such as RW, but still I’ve come to find Webstorm to be extremely useful and all encompassing for web development compared to VS Code.
That being said, I come from using MeteorJS, so it was essentially only HTML, JS(X), TS(X), and CSS that would get edited in the IDE, so I’ve never had to use it for Python, PHP, or C/C++.
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One thing to consider (RedwoodJS folks) is that I’ve found if you separate out the vscode extension from the underlaying LSP well enough then Webstorm support (and vim, emacs, sublime, etc etc) comes at a pretty small cost which the OSS community will happily make and maintain
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