"...you can develop TypeScript code using the online playground tool or Visual Studio 2012. But this is not it! You can also use Sublime Text, Vim or eMacs as the team has kicked off work on syntax files for these popular editors JavaScript developers love to use. And as the specification is public, anyone can create their own syntax files for other editors as well."
It's open source and they've had a node.js package for some time. The VS integration is just icing on the cake, if you like that sort of cake. As a side benefit, there are interface definitions for many popular libraries, like jQuery. So you get IDE support for those, with types, where applicable.
EDIT: to add, I like the idea of typescript (it's a much smaller step than compared to something like Dart). But their tooling is all around Visual Studio, which ties you to Windows. I don't dislike Windows, but I want my development tools to be cross platform (which is why I like Sublime Text, Eclipse, and similar tools).
This seems a little disingenuous. I bet Intellij already has great support, but the top link you give there for Sublime Text, emacs and vim doesn't really give anywhere near the level of support you get in Visual Studio. Literally just syntax highlighting! In Visual Studio you get at least error highlighting/completions/code generation/navigation/refactoring.
There are definitely attempts to bring the language service to other editors but when I tried them last (just before the 0.9 release) they seemed either featureless or very slow. If someone can recommend one for sublime/emacs/vim that they actually use I'd be very appreciative!
EDIT: related thing that annoyed me: the language service is part of the TypeScript repo but as far as I can see from there is no official documentation on how to go about leveraging it for other editors! I admit I can kind of understand this until the language is less of a moving target. The best way to get started for now seems to be looking at third party efforts like https://github.com/clausreinke/typescript-tools.
> This seems a little disingenuous. I bet Intellij already has great support, but the top link you give there for Sublime Text, emacs and vim doesn't really give anywhere near the level of support you get in Visual Studio. Literally just syntax highlighting! In Visual Studio you get at least error highlighting/completions/code generation/navigation/refactoring.
It's a little disingenuous to expect environments that are typically more text editor than IDE and much more lightweight (Sublime, Vim, Emacs) to have all the features of an IDE with as new as TypeScript is. Much of those features require much more work than they would to implement in Intellij or Visual Studio, which have great APIs for building plugins with those sort of features[1] even for the community[2].
Sorry for the poor choice of word on my part, I admit I was using "disingenuous" incorrectly there. I just thought the description of sublime/emacs/vim having "great" support for TypeScript might give someone the impression that something beyond syntax highlighting was supported.
I don't doubt that it's more work to support more than syntax highlighting, but that doesn't change the fact that the support in those editors is sub-par when compared with lots of other languages. For example I can install SublimeLinter and have basic error reporting for python code, or SublimeJEDI and have code completion and go to definition.
I work at Microsoft (unrelated to TypeScript) and I think it's an entirely reasonable question to raise any time a generally useful technology escapes from the lab of a company that is also a platform provider.
To answer your question: Yes! TypeScript is quite portable indeed. I have run it with Visual Studio, I have run it with Node.js, and even a JScript interpreter.
I think he was asking "why are you concerned about this" because there is absolutely no indication that they intend to force Visual Studio with TypeScript.
It is just a general concern, not derived from this particular announcement. As marshray says the company has commercial interests in making people pay for their tool chain, so it's only healthy to be a bit sceptical when they free a standalone tool.
I hope to be able to use TypeScript for years to come, it solves the problem of opt-in types in JavaScript.
They'll keep making VS the best environment for it but all the tools are open source and written in typescript itself so unlikely it will be Windows only anytime soon.