Lucian Marin
Speed up web development
These are a couple of tips and tricks about how to speed up your web development process. Most of us use basically the same tools: Django or Ruby on Rails, Sass, Git and a nice text editor like Sublime Text, TextMate or Coda.
A text editor with plugins support
I highly recommend using Sublime Text because it is not only very fast and has a robust set of features, but because of its plugins support. You have to install Package Control which is a plugin package manager with an interactive user interface. You also get a repository of plugins with a web based interface. Here is my list of plugins:
- Tag
- Sass
- Smart Match
- TrailingSpaces
- SideBarEnhancements
- SublimeOnSaveBuild
- Soda Light 3 theme
Build Sass on file save
You can set up Sublime Text to build Sass when saving .sass or .scss files. You will need the SublimeOnSaveBuild plugin and a build system for Sass. Make sure you run gem install sass before setting up a new build system that looks like this:
{
"cmd": ["sass", "-C", "$file:$file_base_name.css"],
"shell": false
}
Fish shell with inline Git status
Fish is an interactive shell that can coexist with bash and preserve your existing PATH settings. Autocomplete isn’t the only magic feature — it also comes with Git status support, but you have to set that up. You have to add the config details to the ~/.config/fish/config.fish file.
# Fish git prompt
set __fish_git_prompt_showdirtystate 'yes'
set __fish_git_prompt_showstashstate 'yes'
set __fish_git_prompt_showupstream 'yes'
set __fish_git_prompt_color_branch yellow
# Status Chars
set __fish_git_prompt_char_dirtystate '⚡'
set __fish_git_prompt_char_stagedstate '→'
set __fish_git_prompt_char_stashstate '↩'
set __fish_git_prompt_char_upstream_ahead '↑'
set __fish_git_prompt_char_upstream_behind '↓'
# Add git to fish prompt
function fish_prompt
set last_status $status
set_color $fish_color_cwd
printf '%s' (prompt_pwd)
set_color normal
printf '%s ' (__fish_git_prompt)
set_color normal
end
FTP from command line with LFTP
If you want rapid deployment over FTP, I recommend installing the lftp command line tool. It has a mirror function that works pretty well for Jekyll powered sites and blogs. I use it every time I want to push the local changes of this blog to the live site.