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I've been using LESS and CoffeeScript substantially lately, and wondering what would be the best method of monitoring. Currently I use LESS.app, which works great, but I don't think there's a solution for CoffeeScript out there. So, I fall back to CLI. Which isn't entirely inappropriate considering some of the path commands go to different directories, rather than compiling side by side. Also, I imagine running LESS.app over a network (SSH into a different box) won't be fun, even though the growl notifications are nice.

I'm thinking instead I'll just run the CS and LESS watch commands in Node.s script registered to node-forever. node-forever has bit me in the butt once before leaking memory.

So, what are others out there doing? Ideas?

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1 Answer 1

I don't think anyone has yet built something like LESS.app for CoffeeScript. But CoffeeScript's command line interpreter does include watch functionality:

coffee -cwo js coffee

will continuously compile everything from the coffee directory into the js directory, recompiling whenever something changes. (Note that it does not detect new files.)

I created a command line utility called Jitter that does the same thing with a slightly nicer syntax:

jitter coffee js

Jitter also has a couple of other nice features; notably, it detects new files and provides Growl notifications if your CoffeeScript contains a syntax error.

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