Finding an IDE

IDE's are entirely up to the preferences of the developer. So while I might suggest Sublime Text (and I do), some might prefer Eclipse, Netbeans, or Webstorm. You could skip the pain of hunting down support tools for ionic or AngularJS, and just build the app with Notepad++. Because unfortunately from what I can tell, support for Ionic itself is a little sparse as far as IDE's go. Cordova is typically readily supported, but intellisense is another story. It's all strictly quality of life enhancements, so assuming you know how to deploy the app through the ionic command line, you really don't need a fully fledged IDE.

Sublime Text 2 in Action

So to simplify things, let's start with getting Sublime Text. It has an unlimited evaluation license, so if you like it, you should buy it. Once you have that installed go get the package control plugin.

Now you can get the ionic tools using the package controller from the Preferences Controls, just click Package Control: Install Package and type Ionic Framework in the search box. Click it and restart Sublime. Do the same for AngularJS.

If you're a big fan of Visual Studio because you happened to get a copy through Dream Spark, and have been developing on it since, there's hope.

Visual Studio 2013 has a few plugins and templates available for Ionic via online templates, it also provides an emulator (Ripple) if you download the Cordova tools . You could then package it with either Visual Studio or Ionic. Visual Studio gave me too much trouble and I don't see the point in jumping through hoops if a simple command in the Git Bash will do it.  So I'll just show you how to do it that way.

In the next episode.