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Coming up in Ubuntu Precise (12.04 LTS) - HUD, the “intenterface”, per Shuttleworth’s definition. Looks like something having great potential if with the right flavor of voice input/control.

It’s definitely good to see a Linux distro is taking such a bold step making itself become more accessible to common users. Would be a shame though if this turns out to be a double whammy. Hopefully Shuttleworth also has something up his sleeve to get Ubuntu more visibility from the general consumers.

Due to some issues with inotifywait, if you are copying over a deeply nested directory tree, occasionally there may be a file or two left uncaught by our coffeemaker auto-compiler script.

Since a fix doesn’t seem to be trivial (expected events not being emitted by inotifywait at all), we are now providing --all as an optional argument to the script, which, as the name suggests, will traverse through your whole CoffeeScript directory tree, compiling every .coffee file on the way.

Below you may find the recommended way now on how to utilize coffeemaker:

How to Use It

1. Download the script (“coffeemaker”).
   
   
2. Put coffeemaker at the root of your working directory.
   For example: ~/project/coffeemaker
   
   Important:
   By default, coffeemaker is expecting the directory structure convention set by Express.js, namely you are having your CoffeeScript files under ./public/coffeescripts, and wish to output your compiled JavaScripts to ./public/javascripts; otherwise you’ll have to tweak some paths inside the script yourself.
   
   With enough demand we may consider making the pathnames as passable arguments to the script in the future.
   
   
3. Add coffeemaker into your Startup Applications; make sure absolute path is used:
   
   
   
   
4. Well that’s it! From now on this tiny script will execute automatically upon login, and keep a tight sync between your CoffeeScript and JavaScript folders throughout all kind of situations such as file/directory copy/move/creation/deletion/modification, etc. Directory tree structure is also aptly preserved.
   
   
5. It is recommended, however, that whenever some filesystem operations involving deeply nested directories have been commenced, or that you are about to do a commit, for extra safety you should fire up your terminal, navigate to your working directory and hit this following command to recompile your CoffeeScript directory tree at once:

   $ ./coffeemaker –all

About coffeemaker

• This script attempts to fix two of the major flaws of coffee –watch: new files and sub-directories aren’t being watched, and that it requires manual initiation and goes on to occupy one of your terminal tabs afterwards.
  
  
• Compiled JavaScript files are placed inside a separate output directory, with the whole directory structure preserved.
  
  

Be sure to leave me a comment if you think there are ways to further improve it, thanks! =D

Just a quick heads-up: If you are developing in CoffeeScript, now is quite not yet the moment to upgrade your Node.js to v0.6.0 because this will break coffee -c! Should be fixed in the upcoming CoffeeScript update - which is also why we are holding off our PPAs updates right now.

EDIT:

Please refer to the newest post on coffeemaker instead.

There was some feedback regarding our CoffeeScript autocompiler being “less than optimal” because it loops over the whole directory tree every once in a while, recompiling those files that haven’t changed at all during the process, which may cause some system overhead if you’ve got a pretty large project to maintain. Furthermore, the coffee –watch command is built upon Node.js’ fs.watchFile method - which relies upon inotify in turn.

Since Node.js isn’t really specialized in CPU-bound tasks, I believe we all would agree that it’s more efficient for our autocompiler to listen to inotify directly, rather than through two extra layers. So here it goes - the new Carefree CoffeeScript Auto-compiler.

Note that in order to take advantage of this new autocompiler, you will need to install inotify-tools:

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install inotify-tools

The script is expecting the directory structure convention set by Express.js, namely you are having your CoffeeScript files under ./public/coffeescripts, and wish to output your compiled JavaScripts to ./public/javascripts; otherwise you’ll have to tweak some settings inside the script yourself.

The rest is pretty much all the same - put the Bash script at the root of your Node.js project, and add it as one of your startup applications.

If you think this script is helpful to you, or can take some more improvements somewhere, please be sure to let me know =)