Using a decent IDE and plugins

Using a decent text editor with the plugins that equip you to write well for Puppet is a really  good step toward better quality. There are quite a few options out there, and it's best to use whatever suits your own unique writing style. Personally, I have used Atom (https://atom.io) most successfully, and recently installed it locally on my workstation. I used Eclipse many years ago (this has also been known previously as Geppetto), which I in fact felt was unwieldy due to a large memory footprint. It's also nice to remain fairly handy with Vim, especially for working on the command line server-side, or if you use a Linux OS on your workstation. There's also TextMate, for an macOS X only editor that has all of Apple's look and feel.

Let's take a look at some of the various options for an Integrated Development Machine (IDE) available to us as Puppet developers.