Bootstrap (<a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/</a>) is really helpful. I am already using it in 3-4 of my projects and my friends are starting using it too.
A nice list, but I can't be the only person here that is trying to speed up my page-load time and reduce the number of development tools that I depend on. Which would make a smaller shortlist?
Great post .. quite a few new ones I haven't heard before. We were curating a similar list before a hackathon, and couldn't help wondering if there is a distro/vmware image that specifically targets web-dev - just ready to go with tools for @dot_cloud, appengine, heroku, all browser comparability testing - all rolled in. You know like backtrack, but for a web developer ... Anybody know if such a thing exists?
Google Chrome deserves an honorable mention here. I just found out yesterday that chrome's built-in debugger has stack traces. I've been debugging for years with firefox/firebug and forgot how helpful it is to actually know where the source of your bug is.
Misleading title, this is just a cool list of cool tools, most of which aren't particularly oriented productivity (anymore than any tool is). IMO productivity tools are ones that help you do your existing task in essentially the same way but faster.
These tools all work in different ways, but I would love if someone could write an app store for these (and others) to live in so we could one-click install and one-click uninstall dev tools locally. I'd definitely pay for that manager app, and it'd be way easier to give micro-donations to open source tools we use a lot.