That might come in handy with my CSS sugar I’m working on for sorting properties. I’ll definitely take a look into it.

Hi,

I’m a main developer of Zen Coding plugin (http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/).
There is a Python port of this plugin: http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/source/browse/#svn/trunk/python which powers TextMate and Coda bundles (check out download list: http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/downloads/list)

This port works excatly the same as Aptana does. Maybe you should use it with TEA?

Thanks for the tip!  I will definitely take a look, since I’d love to integrate the full features of Zen Coding.

You can drop me an email (see my profile) if you have any questions.

TEA beta 12 is out the door!  If you need to sort lines or want to play with zen-coding style formatting, then this is the release for you.

New Features
- Sorting commands.  Thanks to BloodDragon, TEA now offers four new commands to sort selected lines ascending, descending, random, or to just remove duplicates

- HTML->Expand Abbreviation.  Use this action, or the handy hotkey control-. (control-period) to access all of Zen Coding’s awesomeness.  The only Zen Coding technique that I haven’t been able to get working yet is item counting; otherwise everything in the Zen Coding Aptana video should work great (although obviously the automatic image widths thing at the very end won’t work, either).

Some things to note:

* The Insert Tag From Word action still allows you to use zen-style ID and class declarations.  I opted not to replace Insert Tag From Word with zen-coding because 1) zen’s tab stops are generally weaker when working with single tags, 2) zen coding can’t handle writing arbitrary attributes by hand and then selecting it all to turn it into a tag, and 3) zen offers abbreviations for CSS, XSL, and XML as well as HTML tag abbreviations.  When coding single tags, feel free to experiment between using Insert Tag From Word and Expand Abbreviation to see which one works the best for you.
* Although it is located in the HTML menu, Expand Abbreviations will function perfectly well for the CSS abbreviations that zen coding offers; just type the abbreviation in a CSS document and hit control-.

Let me know if you have any problems with Expand Abbreviations!  I’ve done cursory tests of all the zen functionality, but there may well be bugs or other issues persisting.

Great update, love that all the zen coding stuff is in there. Works really well!

Nice work! Is there anyway the hotkey for the zen code could be easily changed? (Tab to me seems like a key that could make it much more poweful?)

Hey Amadeus,

Unfortunately, there isn’t any really easy way to override Sugar actions with your own shortcuts; I’ve requested this from Jan, and if he doesn’t implement it I have some ideas how I might achieve it with TEA, but for the moment you’ll need to modify the XML inside the TEA for Espresso.sugar if you want to change the shortcut for Expand Abbreviation.  To do this:

1) Right click TEA for Espresso.sugar and choose “Show Package Contents”
2) Open TextActions/Actions.xml
3) Edit line 237 with your preferred shortcut

Tab alone won’t work (probably because it’s already used for things like codesense, snippets, etc.), but I did a quick test and `control tab` will work nicely (or numerous other shortcuts).

I picked control-. for the shortcut because (at least for HTML) Expand Abbreviations is essentially just a beefier Insert Tag From Word, so it made sense to have shortcuts close to each other.  I like the control-, shortcut because it’s really fast on most English QWERTY keyboards (left pinky on control, right middle finger on comma) and I think of the comma as the open bracket key (which makes sense to tie to HTML tag creation).

Control-. for Expand Abbreviation only really makes sense from a kinesthetic standpoint, though.  It’s otherwise pretty much non-sensical.  I considered using option-E or control-E (for “Expand”, like zen coding on Aptana), but that’s a more difficult shortcut to hit at speed without glancing down.

Thanks for the info!

Also sent you a PM about some other functionality/feature request stuff that is not necessarily relevant to this particular thread.

Cheers!

TEA beta 13 is out in the wild.  This is almost exclusively a bug fix release, so not too exciting.  If you’re planning on trying out my HTMLBundle.sugar, though, definitely install this first.

*Improvements*
- New method for choosing different snippets based on the active zone that’s far more intelligent than the old string-based identifier method; you can now use any syntax selector (or multiple selectors joined with commas) and TEA just Does The Right Thing.
- New $TOUCH variable for snippets that forces snippets that are nothing but whitespace to preserve the whitespace
- TEALoader now properly outputs over the alternate input, handles UTF-8 characters a lot better, and is just generally spiffier
- Zen coding action “Expand Abbreviation” now works properly with tab stops (used to stop at 2)
- Added early rudimentary support for $E_XHTML variable in snippets

And various minor bug fixes, mostly related to TEALoader, zen coding, and third party sugar snippet insertion.  Incidentally, zen coding counters are working fine, too.  I was testing with the wrong syntax.

Enjoy!  I’m getting really close to taking TEA officially out of beta; just need to add a preferences screen so that people can properly set things like $E_XHTML, and then I’m planning on freezing the features and calling it a real release. 

Great to see that you’re still working on the sugar Without it, I would probably not be using Espresso.

I just tried your HTMLBundle sugar (didn’t know it existed until now) and for some weird reason, the actions from it don’t show up in the HTML menu. I do see the snippets, but just not the actions. Any idea how I can fix this?

Without further ado, I’d like to present TEA 1.0b14.  This release offers numerous bug fixes and improvements to existing functionality, as well as adding easy-to-use TEA preferences for controlling some of the aspects of the Sugar.

New Features
- Full preference window. No more will you have to wonder whether you’ve got custom user actions enabled or not! Just open up Actions->TEA->Preferences… to see for yourself.  You can also adjust whether you’d like snippets to default to HTML or XHTML and add custom shell variables for use in third-party scripts.

Improvements
- Insert Tag From Word has been merged into Expand Abbreviation to reduce unnecessary complexity. You can still type a tag name with attributes, select it, and run it through Expand Abbreviation to have it translated into a tag (like the old Insert Tag From Word functionality), but now zen’s large library of snippets and shortcuts is always on hand. Whoopee!

- Wrap Selection In Tag will now function even if no text is selected (as it does in Textmate).

Bug fixes
- Fixed rare bug that could occur when trying to access actions before the document context was fully initialized
- Fixed tabs to spaces/etc. problems when working with non-unix line endings

Known issues

I decided to send beta 14 live even though there are some known issues because I wanted people to test the new preferences window and I’m unlikely to be able to work on TEA more this weekend.  Here’s the stuff I know needs fixing:

- XHTML preferences currently have very little affect (mainly because they don’t affect zen coding stuff). Before 1.0 is released, zen coding will respect the XHTML preferences and TEA will attempt to determine if a document is HTML or XHTML (only falling back to the default in the preferences if it can’t determine what it’s working with).

- When you add a new variable to the custom shell variables, the new row currently isn’t automatically selected.

- The example text for the XHTML self-closing string currently doesn’t refresh when the field is empty.

Let me know if you have any feedback, find any bugs, or have any requests!

Congrats on the release!

I am not seeing any preference item after installing though :(.

Derek Reynolds - 01 June 2009 05:21 AM

I am not seeing any preference item after installing though :(.

Hmm, that’s strange.  You’ve verified that:

1) You only have one copy of TEA in the App Support/Sugars folder, and it’s beta 14?
2) You’re looking for the Preferences window in Actions->TEA->Preferences…?
3) You have a text document open (otherwise the menu item will be grayed out)?

It’s working great for me, but if there’s some difference between my computer and everyone else’s that’s causing it not to work elsewhere, I’d definitely like to figure that out ASAP. 

Thanks a bunch guys ^^