Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

Development Tools

Posted by Peter Vann
Peter Vann
36,427 Points

This is not a question, but something of a tip/recommendation for any Mac users out there...

Again, for any Mac users out there, I highly recommend checking out Dash:

https://kapeli.com/dash

(Unfortunately, it is only available for the Mac, but there are similar programs for Windows as well)

It's a handy little program that serves two main purposes:

1) It's a repository for documentation for just about any programming language imaginable, and keeps that documentation available even if you are offline.

2) (And this is really what I mostly use it for) It is a snippet manager (a.k.a. a text expander)

What is a snippet manager/text expander?

It is a program that allows you to associate short abbreviations with long blocks of text that you need to retype frequently. Many modern code/text editors offer similar functionality, but the real beauty of Dash is that it will expand text ANYWHERE ON YOUR SYSTEM that you can place a cursor and type (with the exception of password fields, I came to find)

One tip: begin your abbreviations with a backtick, to lessen the likelihood of accidentally expanding text.

For Example, for use in the forums, I have made two abbreviations that I use constantly:

(backtick)ss

Prints out

I hope that helps.

Stay safe and happy coding!

And

(backtick)js

Prints out

(```javascript

```)

(Without the parens, of course, I had to use them for it to display it right in the markup, if you can imagine!?! LOL)

(Note: I had to write the abbreviations with (backtick) instead of an actual ` because otherwise it just expands the text!?! LOL)

I hope that helps.

Stay safe and happy coding!

(See - I just used it again!?!)