Kurt Hurst

I have been using MacRabbit's Espresso for about two years now. It it a great all-in-one editor. It is great tool for web development. Espresso helps you keep your files organized, has a clean interface, is extendable with custom sugars and code snippets, and has a built in ftp capabilities so you can publish right from the app.

The one thing that I have wished Espresso had was the ability to open files, folders and projects right from Terminal. (I admit it. I am a geek, but this really can be a time saver.)

When I am starting a project, it is much quicker for me to create the needed files and folders in Terminal than to use my use the Finder to create new Folders and then open some other application to create the css, javascript and html files needed for the project. It takes a fraction of the time to open terminal and use a few commands like mkdir and touch to create the needed files and folders.

After I have created my project, I have always wished I could open my new project right from Terminal but never knew how to make it work. Textmate comes with this functionality built in. In Terminal you just type:

mate ~/path-to-your-file/yourfilename.html

Textmate opens the file and your ready to start coding straight away.

I did a little digging online and found a site with instructions for getting this up and running with Espresso, but I couldn't get it working. So I decided to press on through and figure it out for myself.

Taking some tips for the article and a basic understanding of Terminal I was able to figure out another method to accomplish the same thing.

Here are the steps:

1. Open Terminal, navigate to your home folder and check for .bash_profile

cd ~
open -e .bash_profile

2. If TextEdit opens the file, skip to step 4. If you get an error message that the file does not exist, we need to make it.

touch .bash_profile

3. Now that we have crated the file we need to pen and Edit .bash_profile to create the Espresso command.

open -e .bash_profile

4. Enter the following text in the file

alias esp="open -a Espresso"

5. Save the file and close TextEdit.

6. Quit Terminal

Your done. Now the next time you open Terminal, you will be able to open files quickly and easily with Espresso.

Let's give it i try.

We are going to create a new web project on our Desktop that includes the basic files and folders for every website.

Open Terminal and Navigate to your Desktop

cd ~/Desktop

Create the main folder for your new project.

mkdir mySite

Navigate into your main folder and create folders for images, css and javascript.

cd mySite
mkdir img
mkdir css
mkdir js

Create your index.html file

touch index.html

Now lets navigate into our css folder and create our main css file

cd css
touch styles.css

Now lets navigate into our js folder and create our scripts.js file

cd ~/Desktop/mySite/js
touch scripts.js

Open your new project in Espresso

esp ~/Desktop/mySite

Congratulations. You have just started a new project by creating all your basic files and folders and launched your project in Espresso all from Terminal. I hope this quick tip can shave a little time off of your workflow. Let me know what you think. Or if you have some time saving tips that help speed up your web development.

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