@Luke I can suggest looking into Panic’s Nova and Polypane. The first has a browser tab inside the editor with live reloading, the other is a browser customized for developers. Neither has quite what you’re after but may be useful?
@Okay yeah, codekit is great. A smart app. I would just like the preview to change based on what css I type. Without having to save. Seems like a particular use case. Local file overrides in browser dev tools gets close.
@murtaugh CSSEdit and Espresso managed it perfectly for over a decade. I think if the rules weren’t valid it skipped over them and you could live edit styles on any website. It was surprisingly satisfying and fast to design in the browser.
@Luke I would be surprised if Panic's excellent Coda app doesn't have something built in that could “live refresh" as files are updated, right @cabel ?
@cdevroe Coda is in the past. Panic’s Nova is the new hotness. Which is why I was wondering last week if Panic could integrate Espresso’s live updating preview while typing, not just on save.
@soundclamp I did find that you can map resource files to local files, but the process is not straightforward, there is hardly any documentation on this, and there are no yt videos talking about it. Which means… Dunno.
@beep Wouldn't it be nice? I used to do little quick edits like that in-browser, but it's just not productive at scale or long term.
As much as people love Visual Studio Code, I really don’t. BBEdit or Nova for me. And for typing out CSS, Espresso just doesn't know what is proper css anymore.
@Luke@beep Nova has a preview side window with split pane? I use this with non-dynamically generated pages, or take HTML output and point to the CSS I'm modding and it shows changes live (or perhaps with a save)
@Luke with Coda I had it connected to my online dev version of my “CMS”. I haven’t been able to get that working (online or locally) in Nova, mostly due to I have so much dev cruft from years of trying and using things. (I know, containers)
@vanderwal oh I am familiar with this problem.
What would be interesting would be to publish your changes locally, then go make css changes, save them, then “republish” any css and html changes. Something. Hmmm.
@Luke I have used that workflow with git with grabbing the CSS from git to work on it locally with a set of pages that point to it and refresh. When done I commit it back to git and do a pull request to bring the updated CSS back to where it should be. Then trigger a script to grab it and drop it into place on my site.
I don’t have git running on my hosting server. But, I also do this infrequently enough that I don't remember my workflow the next time and come up with a new way.
@vanderwal ah, so my idea wasn’t bonkers at all! Good to hear.
Yep, I also know that feeling. If I devd sites everyday I’d update my workflow for sure. Yeesh. Thanks, T.
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