Okay, I just recently found out about this amazing Notepad++ plugin and I am beyond in love with it! I had tried using Zen Coding but for some strange reason it didn’t work. It could have been me, to be honest.

The plugin works very simply by creating shortcuts to cut the development time. These shortcuts are simple snippets of code which come very handy when creating sample layouts.  When it comes to creating my theme I have found that it has helped me in thinking about how to think semantically for the web.

The way Zen Coding works is pretty straight forward and I love it for that. You input a string of text that you want, expand it and all the markup is done for you.

Sample of the before expansion
Before expansion.

It works a little like math, at least it looks like it to me. Still trying to understand the syntax but it looks fairly simple and I love a small challenge. When you go to expand you have to make sure that you are on the last character or it will expand everything up to where the cursor is at.

After expansion
The markup after expansion

I’m going to have plenty of fun with this one. 🙂