(UPDATE: Here’s the evolution of this topic from Paul Irish. Excellent developer tools are being developed all the time. Paul Irish on Web Application Development Workflow)

Here’s a great video collecting ways to be efficient by Paul Irish. He’s promoting something called Yeoman which is a web dev bootstrapping project.

Highlights include:

• LiveReload (changing a file on the desktop and the browser refreshing for you (!!!)
• Inline JavaScript linting with Sublime
• SourceUrls for compiled coffeescript in developer tools
• Many ways to test: in browser, on command line, post push, in the cloud for every device….

Yeoman does a ton of stuff, although there are other ways to accomplish those same tasks: compress images, auto-update external libraries, minification

Sublime Text 2 alone is a huge leap forward as far as tooling goes. I just started using it and I don’t know how I ever lived without it.

With ZenCoding you type:

.test-zen>h1+p

and it becomes

<div class="test-zen">
<h1></h1>
<p></p>
</div>


Wahoo!

The video has a huge amount of “stuff.” Adopting these tools and changing one’s habits takes effort, but doing so is definitely a level up.