@types

Definitely Typed is definitely one of TypeScript's greatest strengths. The community has effectively gone ahead and documented the nature of nearly 90% of the top JavaScript projects out there.

This means that you can use these projects in a very interactive and exploratory manner, no need to have the docs open in a separate window and making sure you don't make a typo.

Using @types

Installation is fairly simple as it just works on top of npm. So as an example you can install type definitions for jquery simply as:

npm install @types/jquery --save-dev

@types supports both global and module type definitions.

Global @types

By default any definitions that support global consumption are included automatically. E.g. for jquery you should be able to just start using $ globally in your project.

However, for libraries (like jquery) I generally recommend using modules:

Module @types

After installation, no special configuration is required really. You just use it like a module e.g.:

import * as $ from "jquery";

// Use $ at will in this module :)

Controlling Globals

As can be seen, having a definition that allows global leak-in automatically can be a problem for some teams. So you can choose to explicitly only bring in the types that make sense using the tsconfig.json compilerOptions.types e.g.:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "types" : [
            "jquery"
        ]
    }
}

The above shows a sample where only jquery will be allowed to be used. Even if the person installs another definition like npm install @types/node its globals (e.g. process) will not leak into your code until you add them to the tsconfig.json types option.