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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

I really don't see the value of having the compile toolchain in your editor. If you are making a serious front-end project, you will have created a gulp/grunt based workflow so that anyone with node installed can compile it. If you rely on Codekit's features, surely you're locking people into that editor?

Is it really so hard to open a command window and run a single command?

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You grossly underestimate the number of solo/freelance web developers out there who just want to get to work on the project itself, instead of learning and setting up all those things (which may be overkill for their one-person project).

"Effort vs. Result" is an important metric, and Codekit lets you just "get it done" without needing to learn how to install and set up grunt or gulp, node (edit: and uglify-js, bower, image optimization tools, sass, less, stylus, compass, etc).. It just works.

And when Codekit becomes no longer appropriate then one can spend the time required to learn and configure grunt/gulp.

Is not like configure grunt or gulp is rocket science. If you are a solo/freelance that code to get the job done, 5 to 10 minutes of your time just for configure a grunt/gulp is not a massive lost of production time, also you get more control over what you want. Don't make it look like you would spend days trying to setting up that workflow when on reality it just take less than 10 or even 5 minutes for the avarege folk. Is really learning new things that scary, because for my understanding we as developers/designers need to learn new things every day so what is the hue?

You're being specious here and you know it.

Sure it wouldn't take days to set up, but for someone who has never done it before, it will absolutely take more than 5-10 minutes to correctly set up and test node with grunt/gulp (and all the other tools you might need: less, sass, compass, uglify-js, bower, etc) to replace the various worklows that Codekit provides easily and painlessly.

Again I am not saying there's anything wrong with grunt/gulp, but as I said, "effort vs. result" is an important metric, and if a tool like Codekit gets me the same results faster and easier than spending time learning how to install and configure grunt/gulp and all the tools they automate, then that's a win for me.

To each their own though..

First of all, i don't know anything about my supposed speciusness (if that is not a word, then i just made it and you get it). But i would say that you are "effort vs result" matran is being a little over dramatic in this context. Setting up the workflow (grunt or gulp) would take minutes with a little "effort" from you hand, with the only cost being your time. Also we should take into account that not every "cool" people owns a MAC nor have the means to pay for the GUI tool that would like take time to get familiar with, you see what i did there didn't you?. "To each their own though..", i couldn't agree more. Cheers

I completely agree with you. And you might even not spend 5-10 minutes if you can find a Yeoman generator that suits your needs :-)

While I agree that Grunt isn't rocket science, for purely front-end developers who aren't familiar with build tools, it can be quite challenging to get started initially. In order to start using Grunt you'd have to...

1. Install Node

2. Figure out how to use npm and package.json

3. Install the Grunt cli.

4. Install local Grunt.

5. Figure out exactly which Grunt plugins you need and install those.

6. Create the basic scaffolding of your Gruntfile, hoping that the references you use aren't outdated.

7. Figure out exactly which options each of your Grunt plugins need.

8. Do some debugging when you got something wrong in one (or more) of the steps above. Problem is, since this is your first time setting it up, you don't know which step you got wrong.

For someone unfamiliar with the Node & Grunt ecosystems, this could easily be a multi-day project. If you're simply putting out some static brochureware sites, then it might make a lot more sense to just pay for a GUI tool to handle a lot of this stuff for you.

For some people it is, I used to use CodeKit too (and I've used the beta) but at the moment I prefer using Grunt/Gulp, it provides me with more control over the building and others can use it easily by doing npm install.

But I assure you that there's definitely a market for tools like this.

Yes, a GUI is easier to use for some people than a command line.

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