You should never hire trust a programmer who doesn't admit to being profoundly lazy. Given this proclivity towards sloth, programmers love to utilize code snippets and other forms of shorthand to reduce the number of keystrokes to complete an operation. Any editor targeted towards developers will contain such tools. This is all good and swell, but if you use more than one editor, you can often end up confusing your commands. Emmet is a plugin that is available for quite a few editors and, therefore, allows you to use the same syntax across your various editors.
ul>li.item$*5
will generate:
<ul>
<li class="item1"></li>
<li class="item2"></li>
<li class="item3"></li>
<li class="item4"></li>
<li class="item5"></li>
</ul>