Suggestions – CSS Editor Plugin

1) Let’s add line numbers please to cm options starting at line 114 in editor.js – (lineNumbers: true)
2) The code folding plugin would be nice too =)
3) Let’s make the left side and lower bottom panes resizable please, I often prefer to work with more code visibility and being able to drag up/down, left/right as needed would be simply awesome.
4) Would be nice to have save button inside the expanded/basic css editor views and you can pass the click event back to the original hidden button after updating the cm instance.
5) Would be nice to toggle between basic/advanced views. Right now you can only toggle from advanced to basic but not vice versa if you click the basic icon first.
6) I also like the selector drop down in the basic view but I very rarely actually use the basic editor. The main convenience I see this plugin offering is quick access to the “actual” rules which is still handy in the advanced view, i.e. select from drop down and use scrollTop to go directly to that element and do a quick element flash on the rule itself.
8) This would also be nice in that when you click an element in the live view using the live selector capability, it would be nice if the matching rules in the advanced css left view pane could be highlighted to find quickly where to add additional rules or modify the selector.
9) How do we apply styles to other pages? Right now, the live view only shows the front page. This is fine for development when starting out with a “style template” type page where you are going to build out styles for all website elements but once a site is live it provides limited convenience.

Lastly, I realize this would be a pretty significant redesign but I believe to have the most flexibility would be to change how the plugin currently stores the styles into the database and then outputs it to the front end via an inline style tag. This is great for the needed “live” functionality but when not logged into admin its best to enqueue styles properly using wp_enqueue_style method which wordpress does by default with the theme and/or child themes style.css.

One approach might be to read from style.css and populate the db field to be used for the textarea that your cm instance uses. When logged in as admin, we write to the db which uses the inline style tags as it does now in addition to keeping past revisions. However when we save we also save over the theme style.css which already loads on the front end and was already loaded as the original site origin css to begin with. This way other tools that use that stylesheet can also be used such as the wordpress css editor for chrome dev tools. Also, we rarely have to worry about stylesheet hierarchy since most themes make sure the style.css is loaded further down the wp_head chain of events. Every time we go to the css editor it is always up to date gathering the “read” data from the styles.css…if anything should happen to that file and it doesn’t load up as desired, we simply restore from our db history and save it again.