User:Riviera/Tern

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki
Image depicting Terns which represent text editors
Terns are also a type of bird.

Tern describes itself as a JavaScript code analyser for deep, cross-editor language support. It is evident that this software will facilitate with getting to grips with this programming language. For example, I didn’t know what Math.floor() meant. According to Tern this bit of JavaScript: ‘Returns a floating-point, pseudo-random number in the range [0, 1) that is, from 0 (inclusive) up to but not including 1 (exclusive), which you can then scale to your desired range’. Tern can also open a web browser and get the documentation for various parts of JavaScript code using the MDN web docs. Initially, I thought Tern was lacking in capabilities as it seemed unaware of many basic parts of the code. Then I realised it was necessary to set up a configuration file in my home directory. So I set up ~/.tern-config following an answer to this question on Stack Overflow. Tern turned out to be more sophisticated than I thought it was.

Tern illustrates that despite the differences between Gedit, Vim, Sublime and TextMate, it’s possible to make something which functions across all of these. As there are many editor plugins, options are left open, so more people will benefit from the code. This makes the JavaScript language more accessible as people can code from within editors which they may be more at ease with.

An image illustrating the Emacs plug-in for Tern.
Tern with Emacs. Note the autocomplete functionality and the informative prompt in the mini-buffer