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Comment by aosaigh | Hacker News Reader

The killer feature here would be hooking this up to Netlify/Vercel etc. and having a 2-way-write. Every time you update something in the CSSPro editor, your codebase is actually updated and the site is rebuilt in the background. This would let you essentially design in the browser and avoid the tedious copy/paste, rebuild, reload cycle.

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This is what I’ve wanted for ages from browser dev tools. It’s now fairly standard to have hot refresh where the dev server uses websockets to control injecting changes and refreshing the browser when changes are made in the code files. I want to go the other way. If I tweak css in browser, have a way to write those changes back to the project. The real challenge would be traversing a change in browser css back to scss/less.

You can do this with Workspaces and it works well. Made a video on this here: https://moderndevtools.com/lessons/12

Chrome Dev Tools has had that feature (for css specifically, not transpiled languages) for years. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/workspaces/

We used to have full WYSIWYG editors in browsers as far back as the 90s (including deployment via FTP). Specialized editors just seem to have always been the preference for developers.

I wonder if there is a way to "export changes to git", such that you can download some sort of script (or apply some cherry-picked git changes) from an external source?

In this case, you would press "export changes to git" and then somehow apply them to your local repo, and bam, all the changes transferred without having to actually change any files.

One problem with this is that the changes in the browser are done on the distribution (bundled) files. Maybe using source-maps it could still be possible.

100% agree. This would be a killer integration in vercel preview deployments (a la comments feature)

Triplex has some of that 2-way sync for frontend to code: https://triplex.dev/docs/overview

How would that work with VCS?

After you make changes, if you like them, you can commit them.

The changes exist in the file system of wherever the server runs. Presumably in the repo if code. Run your git commands to see what is changed and select what to commit.

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