December 15th, 2008

CSS Tools Coda Plugin

I’ve been using Coda on a more consistent basis lately, primarily due to the inclusion of third party plugins. As I work, I’ll find myself missing a few features from TextMate bundles. Since it’s terribly easy to write your own Coda plugin, I’m going to make a consistent effort to write and maintain a small library of plugins over the coming months.

CSS Tools

My latest plugin finds its roots in an article I wrote not too long ago; CSS Organization Methods and Writing Style. In the article, I took a quick look at a small rift that brought up quite a bit of conversation in the Web community. There are two distinct camps, it seems, when it comes to people who write CSS. There is one side that writes their CSS properties on a single line, and another that will devote a line to each property in a selector. Personally I’m in the ’single line’ camp, but I absolutely understand why other authors prefer multi line.

I came up with a proposed solution; reformat your CSS. That tool uses CSSTidy to allow a simple transformation of your CSS formatting. It will retain any comments, and leaves all properties as written (instead of converting to shorthand, for example.)

Basically, CSS Tools brings that functionality to Coda. You’re able to convert a style sheet from single line to multi line and vice versa. You’re also able to compress your CSS if you’d like. Take a look:

CSS Tools plugin for Coda on Viddler

I plan on making the plugin more elaborate over the coming weeks, hopefully beefing up the template which handles reformatting, as well as providing more methods for compression, possibly the ability to include your own CSSTidy template for processing.

Download CSS Tools

Version 1.0.1
February 4, 2009 - Attempt to fix issues with plugin failing to execute commands
Version 1.0
December 15, 2008 - Initial release

 Comments

37 Comments

  1. Derek December 15th, 2008

    Appreciate you releasing this plugin. I haven’t committed to Coda 100% just yet, but at least your CSS Tools will be waiting for me when I do. I’m still missing cold folding. Is there a plugin out there for that yet?

  2. Sam Rayner December 15th, 2008

    Great work John, thanks a lot. This will come in very handy. Good luck fixing your JavaScript plugin too, looks like it would be just as useful!

    Derek, I don’t think code folding would be possible to implement properly as a plugin. It would really require an update to Coda’s chrome.

  3. Jonathan Christopher December 15th, 2008


    Author

    @Derek: I’m doing my best to fully commit. I’ve been a die hard TextMate user for quite some time, but editors (specifically for front end Web development) are making a lot of advancement lately and I’m trying to keep an open mind. I’ve got to believe Panic is working on an implementation of code folding, as the current plugin architecture, as Sam mentioned, won’t support anything like that (yet).

    @Sam Rayner: Thanks! I hope you (and other designers) find the plugins helpful, especially as more features are added.

  4. Ray Brown December 25th, 2008

    Wow. Great work! I can’t wait to use this with my CSS files, let alone the CSS files I get from the other guys in the office.

    Some use tabs, some use spaces, some write one-line CSS, and others use more space than you can shake a stick at. This will make my workflow so much easier to handle.

    Thanks again!

  5. Dorian December 26th, 2008

    wow, great plugin! now i have no reason to have Dreamweaver on my computer! Handing over unformated css it pretty embrassing.

    Just one thing. some of my css is layout as such:
    ul.nice-menu-down li.menuparent:hover,
    #header-region ul.nice-menu-down li.menuparent:hover,
    #header-region ul.nice-menu-down li.over
    {
    }
    gets formated into one line even with multiline. I assume multline means only the styles and not the tags. I really would love to keep the tags multiline.

  6. Eli January 2nd, 2009

    Great work - this will come in handy for me. +1 for multi-line selectors. Code folding will be a welcome addition to Coda!

  7. Matze January 12th, 2009

    The plugin looks great, but doesn’t work for me. After Double-Clicking the downloaded and unzipped file, the plugin is available in Coda. But nothings happens after clicking one of the four options… Other plugins work fine for me. Any suggestions?

  8. David January 12th, 2009

    @matze
    same problem here :/

  9. Jonathan Christopher January 13th, 2009


    Author

    @Matze, @David: The plugin does check to make sure that the saved file has an extension of “css” — do you happen to be working with an unsaved document?

  10. Matze January 13th, 2009

    No, I’m working with an .css-file on a server, connection per ftp (but I think coda is saving that file on the hd to edit it..right?)

  11. tom (dB) January 17th, 2009

    Great plugin, this will save me a lot of time, thanks.

    Just one note, when doing any form of reformat or compress the quotes on @import are removed.

    e.g.

    @import ’style-header.css’;

    becomes

    @import style-header.css;

  12. David January 18th, 2009

    no chance, it dosnt work.

  13. Jonathan Christopher January 29th, 2009


    Author

    Sorry to hear about the troubles people are having with this plugin! I’m going to hop back in the code, and start with some fresh installs of Coda to see if I can replicate the plugin blatantly not working. Thanks so much for the other reports, I’ll be sure to try and come up with some fixes. The plugin is based on CSSTidy so some of the formatting issues may take a bit to solve.

  14. Jesse M February 4th, 2009

    Hey Jonathan,

    Great work, on the plugins and content of your site.. always great to probe the minds of other developers! Greatly appreciated.

    As for the CSS plugin.. my whole team wants it,.. but we cannot get it to work. In the hopes of helping solve the issue, here are some specs of our working systems:

    Intel iMac 24″
    MAC OS X 10.5.6
    Coda 1.6
    Local files, all with .css extensions

    When selecting ‘Reformat > Single Line’ nothing happens,.. so, I tried selecting css text in the file.. no change.. none of the other menu options produce results, or errors for that matter, either.

    Thanks again!
    J

  15. Jonathan Christopher February 4th, 2009


    Author

    Terribly sorry about the plugin simply not working for a number of you. I’ve just now published what I hope is a fix for the issue. If anyone can check it out and see if their test case no longer fails that would be superb. Thanks in advance!

  16. Nils Hendriks February 10th, 2009

    Hi there, just downloaded and tried the plugin. Looks cool but there’s still some issues:

    - Above mentioned stripping of quotes around @import rules. (@import url(”reset.css”);)

    - the Curly brackets in @media screen, tv, projection {} rules are being stripped as well.

  17. federico Parrella February 16th, 2009

    many thanks, it’ really good

  18. Johnny March 27th, 2009

    very cool! thanks, man! :)

  19. Jess March 28th, 2009

    brilliant! can you create on for formatting HTML next? :)

  20. notha April 4th, 2009

    Does this work with coda 1.6.1 ? It doesn’t show up in the plugin list.

    mac 10.4.11 Tiger

  21. Jonathan Christopher April 6th, 2009


    Author

    Thank you very much for the feedback and notes on the plugin, I’m anxious to try and implement some of the much needed fixes and will post anything I’ve got as soon as I’ve got it!

    @notha: The plugin should definitely be working in the latest releases of Coda. Have you tried upgrading to 1.6.3?

  22. notha April 6th, 2009

    Using 1.6.3, it doesn’t show up in the plugin list even though it’s in the plugin folder

  23. notha April 7th, 2009

    The 1.0 version appears in the plugin list but the 1.0.1 does not.

  24. Dave May 1st, 2009

    I really like the idea of some of the compression features such as a situation where you have combined files and have multiple selectors that could be combined together. However somewhere along the line I was convinced that using camel back in my code had it’s advantages and I agree. Example:

    #thisDiv {
    your compression medium or high turns it into
    #thisdiv {
    which renders the file useless. I just downloaded and checked the newer plugin, same thing. If you could fix this it would be awesome.

  25. Julian May 24th, 2009

    Thanks so much for this!

  26. Jonas June 1st, 2009

    Works perfectly here.

    Only problem with compressing Wordpress css files is that the first lines of commented code are getting removed. Is there a way to leave those few lines there?

    Keep up the good work!

  27. Luke June 5th, 2009

    Awesome plugin, Jonathan.

    Question: There’s no license information associated with it. I’d like to make some modifications–would that be okay (I’d be happy to share my changes back to you &/or the community).

    Thanks, mate!
    -Luke

  28. hiro June 7th, 2009

    i looked for such a plugin - but now, it is not working. i’ve a G4 PowerBook and a Dua-G5 PowerMac - i tested the Plugin on the office-iMac (intel) and it worked. Why the plugin did not apear in the plugin-menu on PPC - or how can i get it work?

  29. CSS Tools Coda Plugin | Extra Future June 12th, 2009

    [...] Super useful Coda plugin, which uses CSSTidy. Can translate back to human-readable code for changes, then re-compress. [...]

  30. Phil Nelson June 12th, 2009

    Thanks for this. I nearly did started to write a plugin with these exact features, glad to find I didn’t have to.

  31. Phil Nelson June 12th, 2009

    Couple of notes, though: It seems to strip CSS properties that it doesn’t know, like -webkit-text-shadow. This is kind of a big deal for me.

  32. Dinis Correia June 14th, 2009

    Looks like great work, Jonathan - however, can’t get it to work on my (old) PowerBook G4.

    It is installed, apparently, but it doesn’t show up on the plugins menu.

    Is it Intel-only?

  33. 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design | CSS | Smashing Magazine June 25th, 2009

    [...] CSS Tools Coda PluginCSS Tools brings the power to reformat your CSS to Coda. With this tool you are able to convert a style sheet from a single line to multi-line and vise-versa and compress your CSS code if you’d like. [...]

  34. 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design | CSS | Smashing Magazine June 25th, 2009

    [...] CSS Tools Coda PluginCSS Tools brings the power to reformat your CSS to Coda. With this tool you are able to convert a style sheet from a single line to multi-line and vise-versa and compress your CSS code if you’d like. [...]

  35. Myfreepedia.com » Blog Archive » 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design June 25th, 2009

    [...] CSS Tools Coda PluginCSS Tools brings the power to reformat your CSS to Coda. With this tool you are able to convert a style sheet from a single line to multi-line and vise-versa and compress your CSS code if you’d like. [...]

  36. 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design « Tech7.Net June 25th, 2009

    [...] CSS Tools Coda PluginCSS Tools brings the power to reformat your CSS to Coda. With this tool you are able to convert a style sheet from a single line to multi-line and vise-versa and compress your CSS code if you’d like. [...]

  37. 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design | zbTech June 26th, 2009

    [...] CSS Tools Coda PluginCSS Tools brings the power to reformat your CSS to Coda. With this tool you are able to convert a style sheet from a single line to multi-line and vise-versa and compress your CSS code if you’d like. [...]

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