Of course, we already extensively use our browser dev tools to work on websites. Yet I find myself replicating the stuff I do in the dev tools, on to my text editor – making this a two-step process. Elijah Manor recently wrote about the rich TextMate-like features in Chrome Dev Tools and that made me think about what the future of browser dev tools would be.

Wouldn’t it be super cool if we had a button to “Save changes to files” and all the relevant resources files get updated?

Yeah I know it may sound far-fetched at the moment since many people now use things like LESS, CoffeeScript, et al, which require compiling. But the majority of front-end developers use vanilla CSS and JavaScript – and this would be a huge time-save.

With the awesome tools coming out with each new build of Google Chrome Canary, it seems plausible to think that this may actually be part of the roadmap for Chrome Dev Tools.

Update (2013/01/02)

In newer builds of Google Chrome (along with the introduction of source maps), this has started to become a reality. This is nicely demonstrated by Remy Sharp.