Anton Kovalyov and Paul Irish have been working on an awesome fork of JSLint, the tool by Doug Crockford that finds errors in your JavaScript code. The project started because they thought that JSLint was getting a bit too opinionated, and they wanted it to become more community friendly. So, they forked JSLint, and created JSHint, The (Gentler) JavaScript Code Quality Tool!

JSHint is a fork of Douglas Crockford’s JSLint that does not tyrannize your code. It is designed to detect errors that actually break your code while skipping things that, according to Crockford, “are known to contribute mistakes in projects”. In other words, JSHint is a fork of JSLint for the real world. The most important difference is that JSHint is developed and supported by the JavaScript developer community and not by one very opinionated person.

JSHint works in the browser as well as in environments like Node.js and Rhino, and has many options so you can control what errors you want to see. Anton is a developer at Disqus (which we use for our commenting system here), and he told me that the team at Disqus is already actively using JSHint.

The code is open source and available on Github, and the website contains the documentation and web version of the tool. If you use JSHint and think that it is too strict, you can use Github Issues to describe the gripes you encounter. JSHint looks awesome, and I can’t wait to see where the community takes it! Great work, guys.