Windows alternative to CodeKit that is free?

[Geoff Selby]

I’ve been using CodeKit for all of my LESS and JS compiling/minifying needs while doing my frontend development lately. I love it, and it was well worth the $28. But now I am looking for a Windows alternative. Don’t worry, I’m not switching back to Windows. Just something I could recommend to my fellow developers that use Windows. I found Prepros which looks great and is highly recommended, but it’s not free or open source. I personally don’t care, but I know people who wouldn’t use it because of that….. any others I haven’t found yet?

[chrisburton]

I liked Compass.app better than Prepos (more than half the cost).

[Senff]

I personally prefer Prepros over Compass.app. :)

I don’t think you’ll find a Codekit alternative for Windows that is free, really.

[Geoff Selby]

Thanks guys!
A friend of mine pointed me towards Koala which is cross-platform and open-source. After looking into it, I can say it is pretty nice. Not quite as many features as CodeKit, but still a great free and open-source app. I’ve already recommended it to about 6 other developers and they seem to like it, too.

[theacefes]

I work in a .NET environment so I don’t need to use another LESS app to convert, but Crunch is another simple option.

[connorblikre]

+1 for Koala; it’s super simple to use.

I also like WinLESS for its simplicity, but all it does is LESS compiling, no javascript minification.

[nixnerd]

I don’t use any of these things but I hear good things about Koala. Although, I could be wrong but Koala doesn’t have the photo compression feature.

[nixnerd]

A few things to add to my last comment:

1. I don’t know that I really believe in “lossless” JPG compression. I read an article about a month ago that said it’s hogwash. Plus, I can usually see a difference in quality when I use these tools.

2. PNG does compress quite nicely. Those photos lose A LOT of extra weight… like 80%. *I could be wrong but my understanding is that PNG files have a lot of embedded meta data that you don’t need. Therefore, by cutting all that out, they get quite small.

3. Again, I don’t think Koala has that feature but you can get a command line utility like ImageMagick and batch compress/resize/rotate all your photos at once.

[ElijahFowler]

I personally like Prepros myself, there is a free version and a Pro version. While other solutions might work, no other has Autoprefixer, which is beyond amazing to have work in tandem with the preprocessor.

[victoriaRuiz]

Based on the suggestions in this post, I just downloaded Koala. It looks great so far. To update your comments, it compiles SASS and does have autoprefixer. It minifies Javascript, but does not compress images. So far, a nice little tool.

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