Technically speaking: Very very cool and impressive. Especially the real-time editing.
On the flip side, it is styled very much to mimic Chrome's own editor. And that makes me wonder. When or why would I use this over what is already built into Chrome?
Hi, thanks for the comment about the editing. The main problem this solves is that the Chrome Dev Tools/Firebug don't save your changes back to your source code. For people who do alot of front end development, they code some adjustments (sometimes many at once) but then have to 'recode' those adjustments in their css file. This is error prone and slow, and sometimes this has to be done dozens of times per day!
> the Chrome Dev Tools/Firebug don't save your changes back to your source code
Actually the Chrome DevTools can save your changes back to disk! It's not well known, and its fairly new so I don't blame ya.
Here's how it works: (1) make changes to styles as you do (2) you can click through to the Sources pane and live-edit styles there, just like a text editor. (3) Right click and save to disk. choose where to save the file (4) Make some more changes (5) Just hit ctrl-s (or cmd-s) to immediately save back to disk in the same location.
That's totally right and it's a very cool feature, although that will only help you if you are using Chrome. One of the things I wanted was for the product to work on any browser, and without any plugins.
If you use Firefox and any of these IDEs: (IntelliJ IDEA, RubyMine, PhpStorm, WebStorm, PyCharm), you can use CSS-X-Fire [1] to do precisely that (edit in browser, (optionally) reflect changes in IDE). Nevertheless it's a very good achievement for a JS-based app!
Agreed, is it possible to implement this as a hack ontop of the chrome's own dev tools? That all just implemented in html/css/js. Maybe you could override that.
Sounds super hard to me, but what you built looks super hard too :)
That's a really good question, one that I spent a lot of time thinking about before I started. Basically the way that they deal with changes to the page is fundamentally not suited to persisting the changes back to text. It would take a lot of hacking :)
On the flip side, it is styled very much to mimic Chrome's own editor. And that makes me wonder. When or why would I use this over what is already built into Chrome?