Matthew Roach
🍔 🍟

My Sublime Text

my_sublime_text

Over the past few weeks I’ve added a few more packages to my Sublime Text work flow, it’s been a good while since I last added a package. I had got myself into a nice flow and was happy. But then I saw someone mention something about Sublime Text and I decide it was time to see if there where any new packages that might help with my work flow or speed up my development.

I’ve been using Sublime Text 2 for over two years now, and love it to bits, I have tried other editors and can not bring myself to move away, or spend the time to learn something new. I believe that the more time I spend within Sublime learning it’s little short cuts the better I’ll be, and then every now and then I’ll spend a bit of time seeing if there is anything else I should learn, or any other packages I should install. I don’t believe you can become an expert with your editor very quickly, but over time you will begin to gel with it and learn more about it, the trick for me is to every now and then spend some time learning something new with it.

As you may now if you are a sublime user, it’s a good editor straight out the box, but you really need the package manager for it to become it’s own, and for you to make it your own. It’s the first thing you should do after installing Sublime, even if its just for one or two packages.

I will not go into the basics of setting up Sublime and it’s settings, but I am going to talk about the settings I have, the packages I use, etc.

User Preferences

Listed below is a copy of my User Preferences ( Menu > Preferences > Settings – User )

{
  "auto_complete": false,
  "binary_file_patterns":
  [
      "*.jpg",
      "*.jpeg",
      "*.png",
      "*.gif",
      "*.ttf",
      "*.tga",
      "*.dds",
      "*.ico",
      "*.eot",
      "*.pdf",
      "*.swf",
      "*.jar",
      "*.zip"
  ],
  "color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme - Default/Monokai.tmTheme",
  "detect_indentation": false,
  "ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true,
  "folder_exclude_patterns":
  [
      ".git",
      "node_modules",
      ".sass-cache"
  ],
  "font_size": 8,
  "highlight_modified_tabs": true,
  "ignored_packages":
  [
      "Vintage"
  ],
  "line_padding_bottom": 1,
  "line_padding_top": 1,
  "overlay_scroll_bars": "disabled",
  "preview_on_click": false,
  "tab_size": 2,
  "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true,
  "word_separators": "./\\()\"':,.;<>~!@#$%^&*|+=[]{}`~?",
  "word_wrap": true
}

You may notice that I like my font_size small, I hate word wrap, and hate trailing white space, and yes I use tabs, but only indent by 2.

Packages

I use the package manager and have a bunch of packages installed to help with my development.

12 Packages to help with my daily development. A few of them are for syntax highlighting, so not sure if they count, but without out them it would be difficult.

The first two, ColdFusion and Enhanced HTML and CFML along with Sass are for syntax highlighting along with auto completion.

Grunt is quite a new package to me, and it’s one I wish I had found earlier, it means one less terminal window open for me and I can access all my grunt commands without leaving Sublime, and by using the keyboard. You can run any of your grunt commands, including the watch commands, and you can also kill running grunt tasks.

HTTP Requester is a package I sometimes forget I have installed. It’s a great little package for making HTTP Requests from within Sublime, take a few minutes to look at the documentation, it’s not just for basic HTTP Requests.

SideBarEnhancements is the first package I tell anyone who installs Sublime Text 2 to go get, in my eyes it contains everything that Sublime should do out of the box, it provides some basic right click menu action for the left sidebar of Sublime text, for example: New Folder/File.

SVN, is exactly what you might think. Subversion control from within Sublime, while I don’t use this greatly as I get a little nervous when committing file(s) without using a GUI to check my changes, it can come it very handy when I need to do an update or check the status of things. I use a Windows machine to develop on and getting SVN set up via the command line, and then through Sublime took me all evening one day, I should of documented it but never, but I might try and find the settings and things I did and document them. So bear in mind you might be in for a little bit of configuration and banging your head against the wall getting this package to work.

VCS Gutter, this again is a fairly new package for me. This package is a great enhancement to the Sublime interface. The basics of the package is it will provide your visual indicators in the gutter of an open file of it’s local state against the repository’s state. It requires SVN to be on your path and a diff tool to be available on your path, for me I have it set to do the diff check on save of the file.