First of all, what is Zen Coding?

Zen Coding is an editor plugin for high-speed HTML, XML, XSL (or any other structured code format) coding and editing. The core of this plugin is a powerful abbreviation engine which allows you to expand expressions – similar to CSS selectors – into HTML code.

Source: zen-coding

In other words, Zen Coding will speed up and make you smile again, when creating HTML / CSS files.

To extend the editor’s basic functionallity, you can create an Eclipse Monkey script as described in the official documentation (download Zen Coding from code.google.com).

1. First of all, let’s create a new project in your workspace and call it “_extensions” (any other name will also do the trick). Inside, create a new scripts directory.

Create a new scripts directory in your Aptana project

2. After the download, extract the Zen Coding package contents to the scripts directory. That’s it – your Zen Coding extension should be ready and available from the Aptana’s “Scripts” menu. You can see the plugin in action here.

Zen Coding installed

Optionally, you can create your own snippets by editing the “my_zen_settings.js” file or remap keyboard keys to assign a Zen action. Every Zen Coding file has a “ * Key: …” value in the comments (somewhere around line 5) where you can change or assign your keyboard shortcuts.

A short list of basic keyboard mapping values:

M1 – Command
M2 – Alt
M3 – Ctrl
M4 – Shift

Read more about them here.

That’s it. Happy coding!