I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder”, but I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve my coding productivity and get the most out of my time, especially when writing code or managing projects. I recently discovered Plop, a micro-generator framework, and now I wonder how I ever managed without it!

Self-billed as a _“micro-generator framework that makes it easy for an entire team to create files with a level of uniformity”, _even as a single developer I have found Plop to be one of the most useful tools in my development arsenal, not just for saving time — it definitely does that — but also for improving productivity.

With roughly 170,000 weekly installs at the time of writing, Plop is hardly an unknown entity, but somehow it had still managed to avoid my radar until fairly recently. However, upon first use I was immediately impressed by both it’s sheer simplicity and it’s power to enhance my coding productivity and it has quickly become one of my go-to tools.

What is Plop?

Put simply, Plop is a tool to generate new files using templates that you define. Once configured, it takes nothing more than a short console command to produce a file (or an entire folder worth of files) complete with customised boilerplate ready for you to start hacking away.

Of course, the magic is in the template files that you have created and these can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. They are written using handlebars and matched to the command line arguments using a config file written in JavaScript.

It really doesn’t get much simpler.

It’s worth pointing out that although Plop is configured using JavaScript, it is not limited to producing .js files. It can be used to generate literally any type of text based file, so whatever your programming language of choice may be, Plop can help.

#javascript #developer-tools #coding #programming #plop #software-development