Bridging the gap to the IDE: a Jetbrains Plugin

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Hi,

I hope this is the right place to share this announcement and it is something of interest to the community. We do a bunch of different Jetbrains Plugins and for a different project I was working with Penpot Designs and getting them done up for a website and I thought it would be nice to have the information directly in the IDE instead of in a browser window, so I got started on building exactly that.

Let me introduce Flexible for Penpot. It runs in your Jetbrains IDE and it allows you to connect to your Penpot account via the official API and choose which design it should connect this project to. In a side tab you then see all of the design tokens, components, colors etc..

Link to the plugin page: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/34826-flexible-for-penpot

You can

  • generate a CSS, SCSS etc file from the tokens or from the color and font information
  • see a preview of a component and its properties including all variations and which combinations are available combinations according to the design
  • get the ability to copy the CSS directly from a field in the IDE
  • get an information when a design token has been renamed or changed
  • on hover documentation for design tokens and such in your files
  • auto-complete for values
  • easy one click update of static color values to the penpot names that connect to the CSS

It is based on what I would most like to have when working as a front end dev with the designs and is informed a lot by the way I work and what Penpot API offers (which is a ton!).

we only released it today so I am sure there will be some bugs and missing features but we are very open to suggestions for how to improve the plugin and make it useful for people.
It is a subscription based product but there is a 7 day free trial and we also offer free versions to academy, open source etc. We use the Jetbrains system for those rebates but if someone feels like they should fit the criteria but for some reason do not, simply write me an email and I’ll get you sorted.

If you made it this far in the post: thanks for reading my rambling :slight_smile:

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