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Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

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11–20 of 295 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#12
My last experiment was with bulma css and vanilla javascript (typescript) with web components for components that needed custom/complex interactions. Nice thing with this approach is that you can "just" render the web components with the backend's template engine as if those were your normal html tags. Because of typescript, a build step was required. For this I used esbuild (esbuild itself didn't do the type checking so I ran tsc with --noEmit and --watch next to it).

Didn't get that far with that project to see how it works when the code base scales. I would probably pick the same setup for my next greenfield project.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#14
Just use some simple CSS framework that you like/are used to plus maybe jquery if you need more than vanilla javascript.

This will get you a looong way and you don't even need npm for it.. just copy the minimized files into your source folder.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#16
Really tired to find all kinds of modules for different function.

So even though I had bad experience with AngularJS, I still decided to learn Angular instead of React and Vue several years ago.

But if you only have some small projects, TypeScript is not better than JavaScript.

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#17
I often use plain HTML and a classless CSS (e.g. Water.css[0]) for personal projects.

This way it's easy to write and maintain. Looks okay. Fast feedback cycle during development. No need for build steps. Works in browsers without JavaScript. Works well on desktop and mobile devices.

Highly recommended if suits your needs.

[0]: https://watercss.kognise.dev/

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#18
Take a look at Pinegrow [0] (I'm the author). It is a desktop app that lets you visually work with standard HTML & CSS files and supports frameworks such as Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS or just plain old CSS. There are also more advanced features, for example live SASS compilation, components, interactions and even exporting WordPress themes and blocks.

[0] https://pinegrow.com

Re: Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

#20
post #4

I just read that you didn't want to troubleshoot html, css and js, so my goto toolkit for simple UIs might not fit your bill, but hear me out :) At work, when I do internal tools, they are usually well received. They also pass just below the threshold of having their looks be judged. They're not ugly, because they're almost not there. Very plain HTML: HEAD+TITLE, H1, H2, UL, OL, A, IMG, INPUT, BR, TABLE, P Javascript…

I do this for internal science stuff at my work. The scientists love it. Simple and fast.
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