Here’s the Deal

JSLint vs JSHint

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When comparing JSLint vs JSHint, the Slant community recommends JSLint for most people. In the question“What are the best plugins for Sublime Text?” JSLint is ranked 18th while JSHint is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose JSLint is:

Since it's relatively old (it was made in 2002) and made by Douglas Crockford, considered a JavaScript God by many JavaScript programmers. It was created to enforce what in Crockford's experience are the good parts of JavaScript. This means that it's considered by many the best way to enforce the highest standards in JavaScript.

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Common Questions

What are the best plugins for Sublime Text?

What are the best JavaScript linting tools?

Pros

Pro
Enforces a very high standard

Pro
No setup required

JSLint comes preconfigured and ready to be used.

Pro
Customizable ruleset

Since it's creation, JSHint was created to be a more configurable version of JSLint (it's actually a fork of JSLint itself). Every rule is configurable through a configuration file.

Pro
Comes with support for many librariers

JSHint supports libraries like QUnit, NodeJS, jQuery, Mocha out of the box.

Pro
Basic ES6 support

Basic ES6 support is included.

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Cons

Con
Highly opinionated

JSLint has a very strict, dogmatic ruleset that cannot be changed or warnings turned off. So much so that rarely any code will pass JSLint tests. It's reasonable to evaluate if all warning are worth changing.

Con
Difficult to know which rule is causing which error

Since you can't edit the rules and it's not programmed in a way to display the rule that's being broken, it's difficult to understand which rule has been broken.