Make programming casual
Sometimes you need something boring and simple as a list of all months in a year. When I run into these type of problems I directly think "that is just 1-2 lines of ruby/python/php code.". So why should I write down all months by hand? It would be much faster to write:
date("months").range(1, 12)
Rather than "January February March April May June July August October September November December".
The problem is that it take too long time to open the console, write php -a and then start typing date() just to realize that you have forgotten the letter code for months. So you need to look it up, and well it might just take 30 seconds. But 30 seconds it way to much. In 30 seconds you had written all the months (at least if you have a WPM +24).
What if we just could use some shortcut like AltGr + Enter and then write:
month().range(1,12)
Then press enter, and then get the result copied to our clipboard? That would be great.
And what if we also could write:
month().days()
...and voila! We just got every single day in this month copied to our clipboard.
But why stop at such simple tasks? Why not bring it to the next level?
Integrate the command prompt in explorer
Think how powerful it would be to combine GUI + CLI. Why do we need to separate these things? Here is a quick sketch of how it could be implented:
Then we could write things like:
//Prepend all .css files with "_", then append them with .scss
files().filter("*.css").rename().prepend("_").append(".scss");
//Copy all .scss files to the clipboard
files().filter("*.scss");
//Copy a file to the clipboard
file("word.doc").content()
//Resize all *.jpgs to 250x200 and saveas *oldFileName*-thumb.jpg
files().filter("*.jpg").resize(250, 200).saveAs().removeExtension().append("-thumb.jpg")
//Zip all files, upload to some cloud service
files().zip().uploadTo("google-drive")
//Convert some file to a PDF file
file("word.doc").convertTo("pdf")
//Search for !important in files, replace with nothing.
search("* !important*").dir("css").filter("*.scss").replace("");
Wouldn't that be awesome?
