Sublime Text–My New Love

SublimeText3A week ago I wrote about my new editor: Sublime Text. As I explained then, I bought Sublime Text because I wanted a light-weight text editor with good support for code snippets.  My initial impressions were that Sublime Text

 

 

  • Is Fast
  • Has great support for snippets
  • Has great plug-ins
  • Has very weird support for Projects
  • Has terrible documentation

After a week of using it 8 hours a day, I can affirm all of these findings. What has changed, however, is that I was turned on to two great resources for learning how to use Sublime Text well, and they have made all the difference in Sublime Text going from a good editor to a great one.

The first is a free video tutorial from tuts+ called Perfect Workflow in Sublime 2.  It is well worth the time to watch and is filled with useful techniques and tips and tricks.  The course moves along briskly and the presenter is excellent.

The second is an excellent e-book named Sublime ProductivityOne advantage of the book is that it is fully up to date on Sublime 3 and there are a lot of cool new features in 3. The book isn’t free, but Josh Earl, the author, is working hard on it, and asks you to pay what you can afford, starting at $19.00. 

Watch the first or read the second, or do both.  In either case, the increase in your productivity and your satisfaction with the product will be stunning. 

Among the things I learned are that there are quick ways to create a lot of snippets; it is easy as pi to create keyboard shortcuts; projects really are weird in Sublime; you can get Sublime to layout your contents any way you want but it won’t necessarily be obvious how to do it; multi-select can save you a great deal of time; and much more.  If you like to tinker with your editor, then Sublime will put you in heaven; if you don’t, that’s ok,  it works pretty great right out of the box.

I can honestly say this is the first new editor I’ve been excited about in years.  While nothing comes close to Visual Studio for an Integrated Development Environment, Sublime Text is fantastic for HTML5 and JavaScript (etc.) programming.  

Highly recommended.

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
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