Hey folks,

I finally found the time to finish initial testing and get TEA for Espresso 1.2 beta out the door.  You can download it here:

http://onecrayon.com/downloads/TEAforEspresso1.2b3.zip

Please let me know if you run into any problems with it, or have any comments about the changes!

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s different:

- Support for the latest zen coding improvements.

- Revamped preferences screen. You can now specify your preferred language for zen coding snippets, among other things

- Reorganized menu items and some changed shortcuts to be compatible with the latest Espresso core shortcuts. If you use Select Word or Select Line a lot, note that these shortcuts in particular have changed thanks to changes in the core Espresso shortcuts. Also, I’m aware how bad the select word shortcut is, so any suggestions would be welcome. Jan has used just about every modifier-W shortcut that’s available in the core app, so I’m running out of ideas.

- A bunch of bug fixes.

This is an early beta, so I’m hoping folks can try it out and let me know what works and what doesn’t.

Bumped the version up to 1.2b2; there was a stupid oversight in the first beta that prevented zen coding from working at all. *facepalm*

Awesome - thanks Ian! Downloading now, I will let you know if I run into any problems!

Thanks for this Ian.

Okay I’ve tried zen coding in html files and it just works great. The problem is when I try to do the same on a CSS file. If I try to write “d:b” the auto-completion is always inserting “direction” property first. So I need to press ESC when the properties list shows and then I can write “d:b” + Ctrl + ,. Of course this is not a great workflow and I would like to keep the auto-completion, but not when zen coding is enabled.

Hey Jonatan,

Unfortunately the conflict between zen coding and Espresso’s autocompletion isn’t something that I can do much about inside of TEA.  This is one of the things that we’ll have to figure out how to handle in the core app.  It’s definitely something on my list of things that I need to work on, though, so hopefully we’ll have a fix in a future update.

I’m pretty confused with how the sugar works. I have a 721kb version of the sugar in my ~/Library/Application Support/Espresso/Sugars folder that works fine (but it presumably an older version.) I’m not sure where I got it from, though. All the other versions of the sugar I’ve seen are significantly smaller in filesize and don’t seem to do anything when I replace that file with them.

So, some comments on the Zen-coding feature of TEA that I’ve used with the current stable version of TEA:
- Expand Abbreviations seems to be noticeably slower than some other implementations (TextMate)
- Any chance we could get the additional features of the Zen-coding spinoff Sparkup? They seem to be quite useful and just expand the current Zen-coding support
- F1 is a pretty unintuitive keyboard shortcut on a MacBook since the function key modifier must be used. It’s more awkward that whatever the previous combination was. Command-E, or Ctrl-E otherwise, would be preferable, I’d think.

Since you’re using the F1 shortcut, you apparently downloaded Serge’s unofficial fork of the TEA project (which he published on Smashing Magazine). I recommend you switch to the version available in this thread.  After you have replaced the old TEA in your Application Support folder (which you’ll have to do by hand; Espresso won’t do it properly if you double click the Sugar file), you’ll need to relaunch Espresso.  You can double-check that you’ve got the right version running by opening up the Espresso preferences and switching to the Advanced tab (the TEA prefs there will have the version number near the bottom of the window).

The implementation of Expand Abbreviation should be exactly as fast as anywhere else.  What you are probably running into is the delay during the first invocation of any TEA action that occurs while the Python interpreter fires up.  After the first action, things should be pretty close to instantaneous unless you’re doing things like tabs to spaces on huge amounts of text. I’m working on a way to get rid of this delay completely, but it’s going to take a bit of time to finish.

What additional features does Sparkup offer that zen coding doesn’t? Their examples all appeared to be supported by zen coding except for the esoteric support for moving backwards up the selector chain.

The Espresso Expand Abbreviation shortcut is control-, (control-comma).  Command-E is not an available shortcut, because it is used by “Find with selection”, but you can change the shortcut to whatever else you want using the System Preferences Keyboard pane if you don’t like control-comma.

Bumped the beta to version 1.2b3:

* No more conflict between Wrap With Tag and Select Word, although the Select Word shortcut has been forced into the seriously weird zone
* Custom user snippets synched with zen coding should now function properly in XML documents
* Switched to using the default system version of Python regardless of custom Python installs to hopefully cut down on errors for those who are using upgraded versions of Python without PyObjC

Does this Sugar enable me to do something like this:

div#container>div#main>ul#nav>li*4>lorem

When was “lorem” introduced to zen coding? This includes zen coding v0.6, but I know he’s recently been adding a lot of features to the bleeding edge versions.

Not entirely sure, just winging it.  Watching a screencast by Jeffrey Way and he mentioned in his comments that he uses that code, which he said was zen coding.  He was doing so within Espresso.

TEA for Espresso ships with Espresso, so if lorem is a standard supported zen coding abbreviation, then you should be able to just use it.  You might need to update to the TEA beta linked above to get access to some of the more advanced zen coding features.

You can try it for yourself with the Actions->HTML->Expand Abbreviation command (shortcut is control-comma).

is there anyway of changing that shortcut?

You can change shortcuts using the System Preferences Keyboard pane.

have added a new Tea and it’s got F1 as the shortcut. 

Are you saying I need to open up System Preferences to change a shortcut in Espresso?

Ah, in that case you are using a fork of the project created by the zen coding creator.  I recommend downloading the beta version above instead.  And yes, I am saying you need to open up System Preferences to change the shortcut in Espresso. Alternatively, you can modify the shortcut in the sugar’s XML files, but people typically find it easier to do it via System Preferences (and that way it will stick if you update the Sugar).