Have you heard of this yet? If you are a web developer and you haven't heard of this, check it.

How it works

Quoting the developer here on the Aptana forum: (begin quote)

I've just released a first beta for Aptana Zen Coding — a new way of hi-speed writing of HTML-code.
The idea of this project is to use CSS-like syntax (like modern JavaScript frameworks do) for writing large code blocks. For example:

div#content.wide.column>h1+ul#nav>li.item$*5>a

would be expanded into

<div id="content" class="wide column">
<h1></h1>
<ul id="nav">
<li class="item1"><a href=""></a></li>
<li class="item2"><a href=""></a></li>
<li class="item3"><a href=""></a></li>
<li class="item4"><a href=""></a></li>
<li class="item5"><a href=""></a></li>
</ul>
</div>


with just a single keystroke. (end quote)

Demo

Here's a quick demo of how this works:

How to install Zen Coding on Aptana

So I'm an Aptana/Eclipse guy and initially didn't know how to get this set up. Now that I've got it working I wanted to post a quick tip that I hope will save someone some time and hassle.

First, go download Zen Coding. You'll want to snag the version labelled "Zen Coding for Aptana v0.3" on the downloads page. Next, create a new project:

Name the project Zen Coding (or whatever you want to name it). Create a new folder inside your new Zen Coding project, name it "scripts". Unzip the contents of the Zen Coding download into this scripts folder. You should have something that looks like this:

Now you'll want to open the Scripts view in Aptana. Go to Window > Show Aptana View > Scripts. Now click the refresh icon and make sure you have a folder called Zen Coding. You should be good to go now. Note you might need to restart your workspace (I did).

Next issue I ran into was a problem with the keyboard shortcut. It seems my CMD+E was already bound to a different command. To remedy this I went to Eclipse > Preferences. On the sidebar expand General and select Keys. Find the CMD+E and click the Unbind Command. Hit Apply and you might want to restart your workspace again. Check out Aptana for more info on modifying shortcuts.

Next I had to update the Expand Abbreviation.js script in our new project. Change the "Key:" value at the top (it's commented out) to be M1+E. Check out Aptana for more info on Key Metadata.

By the way, Zen Coding will work with TextMate, Coda, NetBeans and Espresso.

Conclusion

I just started working with this, so I'll have to report back later when I get a chance to really hammer it out. I'm guessing I'll have to change the shortcuts for the other functions. I love this already for the same reason I love jQuery, dead simple css selectors. All you're doing is creating css selectors and Zen Coding does the rest.