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Background

I just finished a small HTML5 project in cloud9 IDE. My project is composed of an index.html file, 3 JavaScript files, and a custom styles.css file.

I know I cannot document HTML and CSS, but since the core of my project is the JavaScript within it, I would like to document it.

Research

For this reason, I searched on how to use JavaScript documentation generator tools like JSDocs, Docco, Dox and Esdoc. I also read articles on the matter (comparison between JavaScript documentation tools) and I even gave a look at Naturaldocs.

Problem

The main problem here, is that (as far as I understand) these tools (with the exception of Naturaldocs) all produce beautiful HTML and Markdown pages based on the documentation that my files already have. They read the comments I added and then they generate a document based on it.

This is not what I am looking for.

What do I need?

I am looking for something like the comment feature of the pluggins Ghostdoc and Atomineer where you press a combination of keys and the pluggin documents your entire document with boilerplate code, saving you from that hassle.

Final notes

I installed all the previous tools (except Naturaldocs) using npm. Perhaps I missed something, but I didn't find any tool that does what Ghostdoc and Atomineer do, and I can't install any of these pluggins in the ACE editor that cloud9-ide uses (afaik).

TL;DR

Does anyone know of a way to document JavaScript files in the Cloud9 IDE?

Flame_Phoenix
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2 Answers2

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Unfortunately, after researching, I concluded that there is no tool to automatically generate documentation based on JavaScript code. You have to document everything manually, and then pick one of the many existing tools to generate an HTML page or something similar.

I ended up using JSDoc, since its documentation standards are easily accessible and relatively well documented.

Hope this helps someone else coming from the same background I came from.

Additionally, I also created a feature request on the official forums:

Hopefully someone will see it and make something out of it.

Flame_Phoenix
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1

there is no plugin for ace, but there are cli tools like http://smartcomments.github.io/, you could use it on cloud9 too.

a user
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