I use two different IDE's based on what I'm doing. My primary IDE is Visual Studio, whereby I use Chirpy to mash and minify my code. It works flawlessly and I love it. Problem is that when I'm not on my Windows box, I don't have access to it.

When not using Visual Studio, I'm usually writing Javascript apps in Webstorm on my Macbook Pro. Here in lies the problem. I haven't found a Webstorm plugin or any other app that I can configure to watch my scripts and mash/minify them.

How do you Mac users mash/minify your JS and CSS at design time with minimal effort?

I use two different IDE's based on what I'm doing. My primary IDE is Visual Studio, whereby I use Chirpy to mash and minify my code. It works flawlessly and I love it. Problem is that when I'm not on my Windows box, I don't have access to it.

When not using Visual Studio, I'm usually writing Javascript apps in Webstorm on my Macbook Pro. Here in lies the problem. I haven't found a Webstorm plugin or any other app that I can configure to watch my scripts and mash/minify them.

How do you Mac users mash/minify your JS and CSS at design time with minimal effort?

• javascript
• ide
• css
• macos

5 Answers 5

For those who have now updated to WebStorm 6, this functionality is in-built. Simply go to File (or whatever the Mac equivalent is) -> Settings -> File Watchers and define a file watcher for the type of file you need to watch.

The relevant help documentation is here - http://www.jetbrains./webstorm/webhelp/using-file-watchers.html

You could use YUI Compressor without Command Line with these little Apps:

• http://www.webmaster-source./minimus/ – free
• http://www.matmartinez/delivery/ – free

I'm neither a Mac nor Webstorm user, but this might still be relevant.

For javascript I use the closure piler as part of an upload script to minify. It doesn't monitor the files, it runs when I run the upload (a bash file).

If you wanted to keep it all in the IDE, it looks like Webstorm has an Ant plugin http://plugins.intellij/plugin/?webide&id=4526 that you could use to execute the closure piler.

If you can find a mand line css minifier then you could put that in the Ant script as well.

I use lessc and uglifyjs to concatenate and minify my css and js files. Here's a makefile from Twitter Bootstrap that I used a modified version of:

https://github./twitter/bootstrap/blob/master/Makefile

It's simple since all I do is type make in the mand line whenever I want to pile.

I use Minify. It's on the Mac App Store.

I developed it to support my own workflow. minifyapp.