We talked a lot with our in-house web developer team, researched the topic for hours and hours and finally put together the DebugMe* list of front end web developer tools which can be useful for every web dev out there.
*Our bug tracking and visual feedback giving solution is not on the list because we are more humble than that, however you should take a look at it and maybe give it a try. DebugMe will make your life easier especially if you are a web developer, a web designer or a project manager.
Are you a web developer or a designer? This tool will make your life and workflow a lot easier
Front End Web Developer Tools
Alertify.js
AlertifyJS is a javascript framework for developing pretty browser dialogs and notifications. It’s not only provides a replacement for default browser dialogs, it makes it super easy to create your own. A must have front end web developer tool.
Alfred
Alfred is an award-winning app for Mac OS X which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys and keywords.
AlloyUI
AlloyUI is a framework built on top of YUI3 (JavaScript) that uses Bootstrap (HTML/CSS) to provide a simple API for building high scalable applications.
AngularJS
AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop.
Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface. Great tool for every front end web developer.
Your team, your code, connected. Bitbucket offers distributed version control that makes it easy for you and your team to collaborate.
Web sites are made of lots of things — frameworks, libraries, assets, utilities, and rainbows. Bower manages all these things for you. Front end web development is a lot harder without it.
A modern, open source text editor that understands web design.
A tool to explore and find colours. Features controls for swatches in schemes, change of hue, lightness, saturation, export as .less or png.
Want a better issue tracking workflow and seamless project management with it? Watch the video
A tool that makes your code beautiful. As simple as that.
Use this utility to compress your CSS to increase loading speed and save on bandwidth as well.
CSS Lint is an open source CSS code quality tool. It will hurt your feelings
(and help you code better).
A CSS redundancy analyzer that analyzes redundancy.
An interactive CSS playground and code sharing tool. Dabblet saves to Github gists and offers many conveniences for CSS editing.
JavaScript performance test suite named after the Dromaeosaurs.
A framework for creating ambitious web applications. Should feature in every front end web developer’s toolkit.
Create your icon fonts in seconds. Make your website faster.
A tool to build custom fonts with icons.
Foundation is a family of responsive front-end frameworks that make it easy to design beautiful responsive websites, apps and emails that look amazing on any device.
Full featured HTML framework for building iOS & Android apps.
GitHub is how people build software. With a community of more than 10 million people, developers can discover, use, and contribute to over 26 million projects using a powerful collaborative development workflow.
A little pause from all the front end web developer tools. Are you working remotely? Get the Most out of Your Remote Team with Slack, Cloud9 and DebugMe
The Grunt ecosystem is huge and it’s growing every day. With literally hundreds of plugins to choose from, you can use Gruntto automate just about anything with a minimum of effort.
HTML5 Boilerplate helps you build fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites. Kick-start your project with the combined knowledge and effort of hundreds of developers, all in one tool.
Look up HTML5, CSS3, etc features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are.
The IcoMoon app lets you build and use your own icon sets in different formats including SVG, icon font or simple PNG/CSS sprites.
Every JavaScript project you should be looking into with examples, categories, install commands, CDN links, project and author stats
jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers.
jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library. Whether you’re building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.
JSHint is a community-driven tool to detect errors and potential problems in JavaScript code and to enforce your team’s coding conventions. It is very flexible so you can easily adjust it to your particular coding guidelines and the environment you expect your code to execute in.
Interested in more articles for front end developers? Front-End Libraries and Frameworks – Which to Choose?
Test your JavaScript, CSS, HTML or CoffeeScript online with JSFiddle code editor.
json2html is an open source javascript library that uses JSON templates to convert JSON objects to HTML.
Light Table connects you to your creation with instant feedback and showing data values flow through your code.
LiveReload monitors changes in the file system. As soon as you save a file, it is preprocessed as needed, and the browser is refreshed. Even cooler, when you change a CSS file or an image, the browser is updated instantly without reloading the page.
Meteor is a complete open source platform for building web and mobile apps in pure JavaScript.
Modernizr makes it easy for you to write conditional JavaScript and CSS to handle each situation, whether a browser supports a feature or not.
Normalize.css makes browsers render all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards. It precisely targets only the styles that need normalizing.
A designer tool for creating color combinations that work together well.
A tool that speeds up CSS layout debugging using outlines.
PhantomCSS takes screenshots captured by CasperJS and compares them to baseline images using Resemble.js to test for rgb pixel differences. PhantomCSS then generates image diffs to help you find the cause.
QUnit is a powerful, easy-to-use JavaScript unit testing framework. It’s used by the jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile projects and is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code, including itself.
Responsinator helps website makers quickly get an indication of how their responsive site will look on the most popular devices. It does not precisely replicate how it will look, for accurate testing always test on the real devices.
A handy tool for responsive design testing.
This tool has been built to help with testing your responsive websites while you design and build them. You can enter your website’s URL into the address bar at the top of this page (not your browser’s address bar) to test a specific page.
RetinizeIt is perfect for web designers and front end web developers who need to slice UI-elements from PSDs for iOS or Retina-ready websites.
Sass is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world. It’s CSS with superpowers.
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. And it’s huge. They just reached the ten million questions mark.
Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose.
You’ll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance. Sublime Text 3 is currently in beta. Try it!
A browser extension that finds all the fonts on a page.
Are you planning to go full stack? What to Consider When Becoming a Full Stack Web Developer or Web Designer
TypeWonder helps users check or test Google Font on their website without actually changing anything on the live website.
Vue.js is a library for building modern web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.
WebStorm is a lightweight yet powerful IDE, perfectly equipped for complex client-side development and server-side development with Node.js.
Using What Font Is you can identify the font you are looking for!
Wordmark.it is designed to help with the font selection process by quickly displaying previews of any text with the fonts installed on your computer.
Yeoman helps you to kickstart new projects, prescribing best practices and tools to help you stay productive. To do so, the guys behind the tool provide a generator ecosystem. A generator is basically a plugin that can be run with the `yo` command to scaffold complete projects or useful parts.
UPDATE
We are receiving a lot of useful feedback mentioning tools that you think should be on the list. So we decided that we’re going to constantly update the post with these new additions.
Gulp is the streaming build system, a task runner which uses Node.js. You can build system automating tasks with it such as minification and copying of all JavaScript files or static images, etc. Awesome front end web developer tool.
React is an open-source JavaScript library for creating user interfaces that aims to address challenges encountered in developing single-page applications.
Browserify lets you require (‘modules’) in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.
A bundler for JavaScript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets.
The compiler for writing next generation JavaScript. Should be used by every front end web developer.
PostCSS is a tool to transform CSS with JavaScript plugins.
cssnext is a CSS transpiler that allows you to use the latest CSS syntax today. It transforms new CSS specs into more compatible CSS so you don’t need to wait for browser support.
Visual Studio 2015 is a rich, integrated development environment for creating stunning applications for Windows, Android, and iOS, as well as modern web applications and cloud services.
Compatibility tables for support of HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other technologies in various browsers.
npm is the package manager for Node.js. It was created in 2009 as an open source project to help JavaScript developers easily share packaged modules of code.
ECMAScript comes with many shorthands for common datatypes, which saves you time and makes your programs much more readable.
Atom is a text editor that’s modern, approachable, yet hackable to the core — a tool you can customize to do anything but also use productively without ever touching a config file.
Materialize is a modern responsive CSS framework based on Material Design by Google.
JSPM is a package manager for the SystemJS universal module loader, built on top of the dynamic ES6 module loader.
Helium is a tool for discovering unused CSS across many pages on a web site. The tool is JavaScript-based and runs from the browser. Helium accepts a list of URLs for different sections of a site then loads and parses each page to build up a list of all stylesheets. It then visits each page in the URL list and checks if the selectors found in the stylesheets are used on the pages. Finally, it generates a report that details each stylesheet and the selectors that were not found to be used on any of the given pages.
