Coding with Sublime Text 2
Friday, September 9th, 2011
Sublime Text 2 is pretty freaking awesome. In light of that awesomeness, I’ve opted to share with you fine folks some of the reasons why and how to make it even more awesome. While you read, be sure to head on over to the Sublime Text 2 page and give it a download if you haven’t.
Why so awesome
Here’s the quick and dirty down-low:
- Sleek Chrome-style tabbed interface. So hot, smooth, and fast
- Built-in fullscreen support, even outside of Lion. Coding has never been so serene.
- Ability to use TexMate bundles. I never got into TextMate, but it’s extensive collection of bundles makes customizing Sublime Text uber easy. Also, in 99% of cases as soon as you add them they become active. Hotness.
- Indent guides make commenting code not so necessary and make everything much more readable.
- Code navigator is pretty slick, not functionally, but visually. It’s nice to have a bird’s eye view of your code—helps you spatially organize files.
- Snippets make autocomplete more useful and uber customizable. Not happy with the default ones? Edit them or make your own like we did.
There are a boatload more useful features, but that’s what has made this a compelling editor for me. While there is no FTP built-in, CSS editor, Terminal, or fully OS X style sidebar, Sublime Text 2 is still a very promising and unbelievably fast application.
Making it better
With so much awesomesauce out the gate, it’s difficult to find ways to improve Sublime Text 2, but there are ways to make it better for each user. Here’s what I’ve made use of.
- Install the Soda themes (I prefer Dark) to unify the interface.
- And if you use Soda, be sure to check out the Tomorrow Theme set to make your code look awesome as well.
- Lastly, don’t forget about installing any other TextMate bundle you need. It all works seamlessly.
- As a bonus: if you’re not happy with that icon, change it! I suggest the Flurry Textmate icon or the Less.app replacement icon. Both look great.†
So get out there and download that shiz. Sublime Text 2 is free to evaluate, but after awhile you’ll easily see why paying the $59 is worth it. Enjoy!