[Go Make Things] A better linter

By rahmat hidayat

Friday, May 16, 2025

​ Need front-end help but don't need a full-time employee? I now offer subscription front-end engineering. Ship faster and build better systems. Pause or cancel any time. For years, JSHint has been my linter of choice. I like the defaults, and it basically works well out-of-the-box without any configuration. But I've had to use Typescript a lot more lately, and JSHint doesn't work with it. In year's past, I've used ESLint, but I kind of hate it. It just requires far too much configuring and fiddling for my liking. I recently learned about Biome, and I've been absolutely delighted with it. Biome combines the functionality of ESLint and Prettier. It runs absurdly fast. It requires basically no configuration. The out-of-the-box defaults are that good. And if you still use Sublime like I do, the LSP integration for Biome can show linting errors in real time, suggest fixes, and automatically insert comments instruction Biome to ignore certain lines. I do include a tiny biome.json config file in my projects. Here's what it looks like… { "$schema": "./node_modules/@biomejs/biome/configuration_schema.json", "javascript": { "formatter": { "quoteStyle": "single", "lineWidth": 120, "indentWidth": 4, "trailingCommas": "es5" } }, "files": { "include": ["./path-to-source-directory"] } } This tells Biome to… Use the default config settings included with the install. Use single quotes for JavaSCript. Allow a max line width of 120 (an increase from the default). Indent with 4 spaces (in my case, as a tab). And always use trailing commas when possible. It also lints only files from the source directory (skipping build directories, Node Modules, and so on). I create an NPM script to run my linter, but you can manually run it in the command line like this… npx @biomejs/biome lint You can also have it automatically transform and prettify you code with this command… npx @biomejs/biome lint --write This will automatically fix easily fixable errors, reorder ESM imports, and more. Learn more about subscription front-end engineering. Ship faster and build better systems. Cheers, Chris ​ Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser.​ ​

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