A while ago when I first began my journey into ExpressionEngine development I created a list of ExpressionEngine Clips for Coda that I frequently used and shared them with the ExpressionEngine community on the Forums. Now that I have taken look back and now fully understand the power that Coda Clips can offer, I decided to revisit my original set ExpressionEngine Clips.  

So What Exactly are Clips?

If you are unfamiliar with clips they are an extremely useful feature that Panic has provided inside of Coda. Clips are essentially "snippets" of code that you can reuse to speed up your time for habitual coding tasks.

Each clip can be assigned to a group and that group can be assigned globally (used for every site) or they can be site specific and Panic provides a simple way to invoke these clips by providing an easy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI).

However, Panic did not stop there. They decided to build in tab triggers for each clip. This speeds up access to these extremely useful clips without having to invoke the clips GUI.

Accessing Clips Using Tab Triggers

Accessing the clips from tab triggering is as simple as it sounds. You simply type the defined trigger name (i.e htaccess) and hit the tab key.

This will grab the clip and place it where you have the cursor in the file and that's that. 

The ExpressionEngine Clips Cheat Sheet

So now that I have explained a little about clips here is my contribution. Every clip I have entered has a trigger assigned to it. Now, I could expect you to go into the clips manager and find them yourself but that just seems like it would be a huge waste of time and I wouldn't want to do myself.

So here is a quick cheat sheet that covers what clips are provided and their assigned trigger keyword for quick reference.

Espresso Users Don't Feel Left Out!

Now, there are a few Espresso users out there that will argue that Espresso is just as useful as Coda (when I say a few I literally mean a few - I count myself in that as well) and I'm going to shed some light on you "non-believers". 

Espresso also has the clips functionality built in, however they are called snippets. Snippets, like clips, also have the tab triggering functionality built in, however, there is currently no easy way (in fact I haven't found one at all) to export, or import, snippets from Espresso. 

Hopefully some future updates from MacRabbit will solve this dilemma. As soon as this update is available from MacRabbit I plan on "porting" my current set of Coda Clips to Espresso Snippets. 

Final Thought...

Coda Clips are an extremely useful tool when you spend a lot of your time in front of the computer doing development related work. I hope everyone finds this useful and it helps you speed up your development time.

I would also like to take a moment to thank Luke Dorny for providing input on this set of clips.

If you have any ideas or additions please let me know below and I will add/correct them (and provide credit where credit is due).

Posted by Justin Long on January 20, 2010

Jason thanks for the clips I will be able to add some of these to the clips that I have created. Now I just need to add tab triggers to mine and I will be set

Posted by Shad on January 20, 2010

Howdy - looks interesting, but I’m getting a ‘Page not Found’ on the cheat sheet pdf link?

Posted by Jason Hudnutt on January 20, 2010

Shad, thanks for the notice. I fixed the URL and the link should work now!

Justin, Do you mind sharing some of your useful clips?