Web Tools Weekly
What a Tool!

Issue #341  (Netmag Tools, Text Editors, Media, Git/CLI)01/30/20


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I've been fairly busy lately so I'll use this intro to link to a few of the things that I've worked on in the past few months that you might be interested in checking out.

First of all, as I've done for the last five years, Net magazine commissioned me to do their year-end 'new tools for the new year' feature, which appears in their February issue, if you'd like to pick up or order a copy of that.

I've also started to do some content for a website called CodeinWP. Most of their articles are WordPress-related, but they've started branching off into other front-end topics, so I've done a couple of things for them so far. A year-end tools roundup:

In that article I discuss a bunch of tools in detail with some interactive examples and demos, covering some of my personal favourites for the year.

I also started building a code snippets section for the same website. Some of the snippets include:

There's a bunch more on there, but I'll be adding others in the coming months, so be sure to check out their site for updates (main RSS feed is here).

Now on to this week's tools!
 

Text Editors, IDEs, Playgrounds, etc.

The New Tab Page You’ll Actually Use
The minimal new tab page you’ll actually use. Chrome and Firefox extensions available. sponsored 

Better Go Playground
If you want to learn or brush up on your Go language skills, this is a JSFiddle-like environment to help you do just that.

coc-markmap
An extension for coc.nvim to visualize your Markdown as mindmaps.

OpenAPI Designer
Create simple OpenAPI3 definitions in JSON format.

DB Fiddle
An online SQL database playground for testing, debugging, and sharing SQL snippets.

massCode
Free and open source code snippets manager. Helps you create, organize, and easily access your own snippets collection.

CodeMirror
A versatile text editor implemented in JavaScript for the browser that comes with a number of language modes and addons.

vim-colors-xcode
Xcode 11’s dark and light colour schemes for Vim.

PWABuilder
VS Code extension to seamlessly integrate key PWA components into your code base.

SynthWave '84
A Synthwave-inspired colour theme for VS Code, to satisfy your neon dreams.

preview-markdown.vim
Vim plugin that can preview markdown in Vim terminal.

Copilot for VS Code
JavaScript/TypeScript development tooling in VS Code.

Courses by Wes Bos (Master Packages!) on Sale for $97:
 

Media Tools (SVG, Audio, Icons, etc.)

OpenLayers
A high-performance, feature-packed mapping library that makes it easy to put a dynamic map on any web page and can display map tiles, vector data, and markers loaded from any source.

Wireframer
Create custom SVG-based text for including in mockups and wireframes. Download in .svg format or code.

Convert2Svg
Convert a raster/bitmap image to SVG (vector) format.

Maskable.app
Online tool to create maskable icons that allow you to specify a full-bleed icon that will be cropped by the user-agent to match other icons on the device (e.g. for Android devices).

Duotone
Upload a photo or search directly from Unsplash and convert the photo to a duotone image using your choice of colors.

Trace
Free tool to instantly remove the background from a photo.

OCR
This works really well. Upload an image and this tool wil display the text from the image in the right pane, selectable, copyable, etc.

Bootstrap Icons
Official icon library from the Bootstrap team, custom designed and built for the Bootstrap components and documentation.

Excalidraw
A whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch and export (PNG or SVG_ diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.

Sketchviz
Create and publish graphs built with Graphviz (software to build graphs representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks).

Line Awesome
A free alternative to Font Awesome that consists of ~1380 flat line icons that offer complete coverage of the main Font Awesome icon set.

Wveup
Service to turn your podcast or musical audio into engaging animated videos to promote your work.

Git, Github, and CLI Tools

Eternal Terminal
A remote shell that automatically reconnects without interrupting the session.

GitHub Compare
A better way to search and compare repos from GitHub side by side.

Stella
A quick interactive way to visualize a GitHub user's starred repos. It relies on GitHub's API while providing a clean gallery to browse the results.

Postwoman CLI
A CLI solution for Postwoman, the API request builder (alternative to Postman).

GitHub for Mobile
GitHub collaboration tools for Android (beta) or iOS (closed beta).

Haystack
Platform that aggregates activity in Git to help you visualize trends, identify blockers, optimize code reviews, and ship code faster.

RepoStats
Track downloads for your releases hosted on GitHub.

github-stars
Chrome extension to display GitHub stars in repository links.

First Commit
Online tool to instantly display the first commit for any GitHub repo. Great for doing research on early versions of popular tools!

git-quick-stats.sh
A simple way to access various statistics in a Git repository.

Jay
A terminal-based JavaScript REPL focused on increasing prototyping speed and productivity, and packed with modern REPL features while striving to maintain a familiar REPL vibe.

A Tweet for Thought

David Khourshid with a controversial tweet fixing bugs vs. working on open source software. There's a lot of truth to this, despite people's initial react to the mention of "CSS".
 

Got a Tool Suggestion?

Made something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @WebToolsWeekly (details here). No tutorials or articles, please. If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
 

Before I Go...

If you use or work on open source software, you might want to take part in the Open Source Survey (about 3 minutes of your time). I'm sure the data, when released, will be useful to those in the community.

Thanks to all for subscribing and reading!

Keep tooling,
Louis
webtoolsweekly.com
@LouisLazaris