Chris Coyier: The Tools I Use

The latest in our series “The Tools We Use” features Chris Coyier of CodePen fame.

CodePen: I built it because I needed it, and now it’s grown up into something so much more. I’ll spare you the sales pitch and suffice it to say, it allows you to write front end code and experiment extremely quickly.

Sublime Text: My code editor of choice outside of CodePen. It’s so damn fast and configurable, it’s hard for me to get away from. Although the competition from Code and Atom are strong. I can feel more experimentation coming on.

Git Tower: There are some things I just prefer having a UI for, even though there are lower level ways to work with the tool that many developers prefer. Me, I like my git with a UI and Git Tower fits the bill here with just enough, but not too much, command abstraction. The next two tools are in this same wheelhouse.

Local by Flywheel: Spin up local WordPress sites super quickly. Or really, any kind of PHP/MySql/Server thing. The one-click SSL trusting thing is a killer feature.

CodeKit: Just do all my linting, preprocessing, and optimization with an absolute minimum amount of configuration.

Sketch: My quick design tool of choice. Although I can see an upcoming switch to Figma as I’m a pretty big fan of brower-based tools.

Slack: It’s silly how good Slack is at facilitating communication. It’s hard to imagine doing it any other way. I prefer using the dedicated app, just like the next two tools.

Mailplane for Gmail: Satisfies my preference for a browser-based email client with my desire to have a dedicated app on desktop.

Paws for Trello: Same, for project management. Although most of that tends to happen in GitLab these days.