Last week we looked at the advantages of Panic’s Coda as a text editor. However I neglected to point out my favorite feature of Coda, which has changed the way I code.

Zen Coding is a plugin that is a fork of the now defunct TEA for Coda project. The Zen Coding plugin is now available on many of the most popular text editing applications including Coda, Notepad++, and Espresso. So this should not be seen as a Coda feature but something that you could begin to use even if you don’t use Coda.

Zen Coding lets you type shorthand abbreviations for commonly used lines of code that significantly increases your functional typing speed. For instance, if I was creating an unordered list with the style class “mylist” with 6 list items, I can just type:

ul.mylist\>li\*6

And Zen Coding will expand it to:

<ul class="mylist">
<li></li>
<li></li>
<li></li>
<li></li>
<li></li>
<li></li>
</ul>

The conventions used for the abbreviations are simple and logical commonly using the format of your CSS. Give Zen Coding a try and you will be amazed at how quickly your coding speed improves. This video will give you a glimse of what you can expect when you start to use Zen Coding in your workflow.