What’s Next: WebStorm 2021.1 Roadmap
What a year we’ve all had! Just like you, we’ve had to adapt to new circumstances while continuing to work on our day-to-day tasks. Over the last couple of months, we’ve released WebStorm’s third and final major update of 2020, conducted more customer interviews, and finalized the roadmap for the upcoming 2021.1 release.
Before we dive into our plans for the next release, we’d like to give a big shout-out to all of our Early Access Program users. Your valuable feedback really helps us improve the product. As usual, the most active EAPers received free one-year WebStorm licenses.
Now let’s take a look at our plans for WebStorm 2021.1. Please note that we can’t guarantee that all the improvements listed below will be included.
The main focus of the next release is going to be quality. We want to dedicate the majority of our efforts to addressing known issues and performance problems. Some of the key areas we’ll be focusing on include:
- Further improvements for Apple Silicon support. WebStorm can already run natively on Macs with the new Apple M1 chip. We’re working on fixing the remaining issues.
- More advanced settings for font typography, including the ability to choose font variations.
- Per-project plugins. We plan to polish the functionality we introduced during the 2020.3 EAP and finally turn it on in the next release.
- Enhanced documentation for HTML and standard JavaScript symbols with help of rich MDN documentation.
As always, we’ll continue to make WebStorm more helpful for working with the frameworks and technologies it supports:
- We’ll keep improving the support for Tailwind CSS, which was introduced in v2020.3.
- Some enhancements will touch upon Vue, including support for CSS modules and TypeScript type checking.
- For Angular, we plan to implement a long-awaited feature – the ability to extract Angular components.
- Our collaboration on a popular Svelte plugin has moved to a new level. The creator of this plugin, Tomasz Błachut, recently joined our team, and we’ll be developing it as a collaborative effort.
- We also have some big plans for another popular plugin – JS GraphQL. Last year we took over maintenance of it and made some improvements. In 2021, you can expect major contributions to further improve the quality of the plugin.
Lastly, we are continuing to implement new features for Code With Me, our new service for collaborative development and pair programming. The list of planned improvements includes telephony support for pair programming directly in the IDE, rename refactoring, and a new feature for following a user in a side tab.
That’s about it. Stay tuned for information about the upcoming start of the Early Access Program for 2021.1!
The WebStorm team
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