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My Top Sublime Text 2 Plugins

260 points by phatbyte 14y ago

VoiceOfWisdom 14y ago
I believe on 1, you meant for the title to be Sublime Code Intel.
- benaiah 14y ago
  No, the plugin's name is Sublime CodeIntel (without the space). That's what it is in both the repository and package manager.
  - garg 14y ago
    It originally said SublimeLinter instead of Sublime CodeIntel
maebert 14y ago
#1 should be SublimeCodeIntel, not SublimeLinter - otherwise thanks for this list, I didn't use Emment before but will certainly give it a spin.
- phatbyte 14y ago
  You are totally right, fixed, thanks :)
  - maebert 14y ago
    You're welcome, sir!
- Osiris 14y ago
  I've never gotten that plugin to work well with my PHP code. Code complete is awful. I've switched over to PhpStorm for PHP code because it has static analysis and refactoring.
  - blindhippo 14y ago
    It's worked intermittently for me in PHP but overall it's really buggy. I've had some luck using the branch version which you can grab here: https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeCodeIntel https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeCodeIntel
pearkes 14y ago
If you write Go, definitely check out GoSublime[1]. It's very powerful and gives you an IDE like environment inside Sublime Text 2. [1] https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime
- lunixbochs 14y ago
  sublimelint (not Linter) also has a decent wrapper around Go's checking.
- swdunlop 14y ago
  Seconded; GoSublime gives you a nice REPL for Go's build and test commands, package completion and linting. It is the second Sublime Package I install, after Package Control and before my own Antiki.
javajosh 14y ago
It's spelled "Emmet" (docs.emmet.io) and it's more widely known as "Zen Coding". (I asked the author about the name change and forgot why now - some sort of trademark dispute).
- phatbyte 14y ago
  Fixed the typo, thanks for hint ;)
- dubcanada 14y ago
  I dont know if I would call it zencoding. Zencoding is a different package entirely. Emmet is kind of version 2 of zencoding. But for as far as you should concern yourself they are two different plugins.
- nobleach 14y ago
  Yeah, it seems like Emmet removed one of my favorite features with Zencoding. I could hop into a string of HTML attributes and hit "." or "#" and it would create a new attribute of class="|" or id="|" respectively, and place the cursor in between the quotes.
  - javajosh 14y ago
    Uh, I use Emmet every day, and it certainly does have that feature. Perhaps your expansion hot key is different.
    - nobleach 14y ago
      I never had to use a hotkey in the past. I do for regular expansion, and I haven't looked into why koans stopped working, but I imagine that is hotkey related.
togasystems 14y ago
I just started using CTags for php development. It allows you to move to class and function declarations. Great for large projects and unknown code. Link to plugin: https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags
- beefsack 14y ago
  I've always struggled to get SublimeCodeIntel to work under Linux, and when I've seen it work, it's not very good. CTags is absolutely fantastic though, I live and die by it in large code bases. It's backed by ctags on the system too, so it has an impressive list of supported languages.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
SideBar Enhancements is on my "avoid" list. If I remove it, even after restarting Sublime, the context menu for the sidebar is permanently empty.
- brandoncor 14y ago
  Same thing happened to me. I had no choice but to re-enable it since I didn't want to reinstall Sublime Text itself.
  - ksherlock 14y ago
    https://github.com/titoBouzout/SideBarEnhancements/issues/18 https://github.com/titoBouzout/SideBarEnhancements/issues/18
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      Thank you thank you thank you!
stared 14y ago
A nice selection (for me (i.e.: I use): Package Manager, SublimeLinter, SublimeCodeIntel, Git). Additionally, as a scientist, I use a lot (and like a lot) https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools.
swah 14y ago
I think we might get ST3 soon - there haven't been updates for half an year now.
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  He earned a 6 month holiday considering the workrate he put in on those early builds, and the amount of cash he must have made in the intervening time. It's not like the thing is riddled with outstanding issues.
  - swah 14y ago
    Its true. I expect and would pay around 50 USD again for it, though.
- Benferhat 14y ago
  I'd love to see that, too! Jon's been putting out updates way too fast [0] to be able to keep that up forever, though. The API[1] is good enough that generations of plugins could be considered future versions. I'm glad it's successful enough that he can afford a vacation. [0] https://www.sublimetext.com/dev https://www.sublimetext.com/dev [1] http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/api_reference.html http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/api_reference.html
  - kemayo 14y ago
    Speaking as the developer of the Git plugin on that list, the only thing I feel is missing from the API is a way to add colors or labels to filenames in tabs and the sidebar. Otherwise it's been pretty great.
JonnieCache 14y ago
If you use a dark color scheme, you should install a theme that has a similarly dark background for the sidebar. The "Soda Dark" theme goes well with the default color scheme. (The ui theme is separate from the syntax highlighting color scheme, you don't have to use the text colors seen on the github examples) https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/ https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/ In terms of plugins, apart from the ones mentioned here, Quick File Creator is indispensable: https://github.com/noklesta/SublimeQuickFileCreator https://github.com/noklesta/SublimeQuickFileCreator Not a plugin, but if you haven't realised it yet, know that the multiple cursors each come with their own separate clipboard. Learning how to combine this with the move and select by word and the parenthesis-movement commands is what will make the vim users eventually respect you. Oh and you can hack your language syntax definition files to make more things apart from function definitions turn up in the function browser. This is especially useful for ruby DSLs, sinatra etc.
- wesbos 14y ago
  I've created a theme + colour scheme called cobalt2 http://wesbos.com/cobalt2-theme-sublime-text-2/ http://wesbos.com/cobalt2-theme-sublime-text-2/
  - purephase 14y ago
    Great theme, installed!
  - dubcanada 14y ago
    This may seem like a funny question, but how do you find staring at blue all day long? It just seems like too much of a single colour too me.
    - wesbos 14y ago
      I love it! White burns my eyes out and black is too dark for me. Blue is for my eyes and I think it looks great.
    - groovy2shoes 14y ago
Kaivo 14y ago
You can also check Tuts+ free tutorial about ST2. It contains a list of interesting plugins (most of them mentionned in this article) alongside others I find quite useful. https://tutsplus.com/course/improve-workflow-in-sublime-text-2/ https://tutsplus.com/course/improve-workflow-in-sublime-text...
rlander 14y ago
SublimeREPL should be on this list. It's an interactive repl inside ST, much like emacs inferior lisp mode, for any language with a repl.
- stared 14y ago
  Yes, it's useful and nice (maybe except for keybindings): SublimeREPL - run an interpreter inside ST2 (Clojure, CoffeeScript, F#, Groovy, Haskell, Lua, MozRepl, NodeJS, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, shell or configure one yourself) https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL
benatkin 14y ago
If you bring Sublime into a unix environment, please make it add line endings. This is what vim and emacs do by default. https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/Newline-at-End-of-File-Support https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/Newline-at...
- notJim 14y ago
  This is interesting. I guess it's so that if you cat a file, it doesn't clobber your cursor? I've always noticed that git will say "No new line at end of file", but I've never really known if that's a bad or good thing, or why it matters.
  - bingaling 14y ago
    Some unix tools (I can only recall Vixie cron at the moment) won't read the last line in a file if it isn't terminated with a newline.
  - benatkin 14y ago
    When someone opens up a file created with Sublime Text 2 with vim or emacs and saves it, it clutters the commit messages. It's clutter whether the file contains other changes or not. It still shows up in diffs unless you suppress whitespace.
    - notJim 14y ago
      I would argue that the person with their vim set up to create that clutter is to blame here. If there's no objective reason to fix it other then "well, this is what vim does", then fix vim.
      - codygman 14y ago
        If i'm not mistaken, it is the lack of inserting a newline on sublimes part that is to blame here. It doesn't just break vim, but other software such as cat, git, etc.
kaolinite 14y ago
If you want to read Hacker News whilst inside Sublime, check out my plugin: https://github.com/dotty/HackerNews-SublimeTextPlugin https://github.com/dotty/HackerNews-SublimeTextPlugin (or alternatively, search "hacker news" in package control).
lunixbochs 14y ago
For everyone using SublimeLinter - I'm curious if you've tried sublimelint (the parent project) recently and if there's any reason you chose SublimeLinter over it.
frewsxcv 14y ago
I don't want to start a flame war; I don't consider myself a die hard vim user: What are reasons why I should switch to Sublime Text 2?
- grimgrin 14y ago
  If you're not a die hard vim user but do enjoy vim navigation/insertion styles then you may want to try out Sublime's Vintage mode: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html
  - JonnieCache 14y ago
    You can find the dev branch of the vintage plugin here: https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage Also see https://github.com/SublimeText/VintageEx https://github.com/SublimeText/VintageEx which adds the vim command line.
  - ieatshortppl 14y ago
    Uh, I'm in the same boat as the person you responded to and I am still confused. What are the advantages of sublime over vim (rather than ways that Sublime can emulate vim)?
  - notJim 14y ago
    I tried this after learning vim, and it seemed to suffer from an uncanny valley problem. Once you get into the flow of things, you'll start treating it like vim, and then when something suddenly behaves slightly different or doesn't work at all, it's very disruptive. I can't think of a specific example right now unfortunately, as that was a while ago, but it happened regularly.
  - nshankar 14y ago
    It does not support Vim's wonderful vit, vat tools. Perhaps none supports like Vim. My fav for HTML/div editing.
- notJim 14y ago
  I switched to vim a year ago, and I fucking love it. The one thing I miss from ST2 is column editing/multiple cursors. Column editing fulfills the same kind of need as basic usage of vim macros, I think (i.e., applying some kind of sequence of edits to multiple rows), but it's visual and you get instant feedback (across all rows), which makes it easier and something you can sort of feel out iteratively. For example, supposed I have a row like (making up these names as I go, and suppose the list is longer): Controller_Section House_Model Person_To_Category_Selector and I want to insert after the first underscore the word class, so I'd get Controller_Class_Section and so on (this is a contrived example, but one has to do these kinds of things sometimes.) In vim, I think I'd record a macro, but I'd probably forget some parts (like moving to the next line at the end) and have to undo and whatnot (could use a regex too, but that's a bit harder--I'm practicing recently to be able to do it more effortlessly.) In ST2, what you do first is create a cursor at the beginning of each row (option + down arrow on OS X.) Then you move ahead one word (Opt + Right arrow on OS X.) Now the cursor is right before the underscore, even though the underscore is in a different position on each row. You can see that it's in the right place on each row, so it's hard to make a mistake, and if you need to do something more complicated, that remains true. Then, you just type _Class, and it types live on each row, once again making it so you get instant feedback, and it's hard to make a mistake. That to me is the biggest actual advantage of ST2 over VIM, but there are other reason to not switch, like vim's steeper learning curve (when most of us are already busy, and learning other stuff at the same time), and the fact that some people prefer the mouse, which behaves strangely in vim.
rglover 14y ago
Has anyone switched from Coda (2) to Sublime Text? I've consider using ST but haven't dug in enough to know the differences.
- dubcanada 14y ago
  I find Coda to have too much stuff. I don't want something that has a bunch of fancy icons and I have to scroll left/right to find my files and has 15 different areas all with extra garbage you don't need (such as the entire right bar which is mostly useless too me). However the project control part of Coda is amazing. So it's a matter of how experienced web developer and what exactly do you do? If you do mostly HTML/CSS/JS, then Coda is for you. If you do mostly other stuff hardcore JS, ruby, php, lua, blah blah blah. I'd say sublime.
  - LukaD 14y ago
    It's also a matter of which OS you use. :) ST is cross platform and it's great to have a good text editor available when you have to use Windows.
- kposehn 14y ago
  I did, with a short stint in TextMate. ST has really been a joy to work with on Mac and after a little while getting a feel for it I'd never go back. It especially is great for ruby/html/css. Give it a shot :)
flexterra 14y ago
You might also want to try (my plugin) BrowserRefresh: Save the file you are working on and refresh your browser (or many browsers) with one keystroke. http://gcollazo.github.com/BrowserRefresh-Sublime/ http://gcollazo.github.com/BrowserRefresh-Sublime/ #ShamelessPlug
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
taitems 14y ago
I would avoid Prefixr like the plague as it's broken to the point of being destructive, and not maintained. Installed it today before I saw this post, stopped using it immediately. https://github.com/wbond/sublime_prefixr/issues/4 https://github.com/wbond/sublime_prefixr/issues/4
slurry 14y ago
Not to go all Stallmanesque here, but doesn't it bother you to use a proprietary text editor when there are so many excellent free/open-source ones around?
- dkulchenko 14y ago
  Not at all. Speaking for myself here, but while I much prefer open source to proprietary software, I find Sublime Text 2 blows any other editor I've used out of the water and I'm not going to not use it just because it's proprietary (same reason I use OS X, Photoshop (versus GIMP), etc).
  - jasonm23 14y ago
    The "problem" with Emacs and Vim is their out the box state is a bit daunting, if you allow a little time to get used to and configure Emacs, it'll blow the shit out of any editor you've ever used. ... Grab ocodo/emacsd from GitHub, it's a very sublime like setup.
- notJim 14y ago
  This question really only makes sense to me from a Stallmanesque standpoint though (unless you don't have much money for some reason, in which case the financial considerations come into play.) Surely unless you have some ideological reason to pick a FOSS editor, you'll simply use the best one available.
  - slurry 14y ago
    Yeah maybe a bit, but to me full Stallmanesque would be avoiding proprietary software even when the free alternative is non-existent or significantly less functional. That is not the situation with text editors, unless I am missing something big that Sublime Text can uniquely do.
    - deelowe 14y ago
      The killer features in sublime for me are: + Multiple cursors + Column edit + JSON configuration files + Plugin support + Textmate themes + Python code base (easy to create plugins)
tednaleid 14y ago
Sublime Text 2 plugin writing is surprisingly easy via python. I recently wrote a plugin (SublimeJump https://github.com/tednaleid/SublimeJump https://github.com/tednaleid/SublimeJump) to let you jump to any visible character with a couple of keystrokes. It's similar to AceJump (emacs) or EasyMotion (vim) if you're familiar with those.
- mode80 14y ago
  I've been waiting for this! Thanks tednaleid.
dreeves 14y ago
The one thing holding me back from Sublime Text is fonts. I really want the Fixed 6x13 font (like xterms use) which requires anti-aliasing turned off. Does anyone know if that's possible in Sublime Text? Link to the xterm font: http://yootles.com/outbox/FixedMedium6x13.dfont http://yootles.com/outbox/FixedMedium6x13.dfont PS: It also needs the line spacing set to .8 which I've found a way to do in TextMate and Terminal.app.
- dkulchenko 14y ago
  Both are possible through Sublime's config file. See http://www.reddshift.com/2011/10/turn-off-anti-alias-for-sublime-text-2.html http://www.reddshift.com/2011/10/turn-off-anti-alias-for-sub... for how to turn off anti-aliasing, and https://gist.github.com/1149379#file-sublime-text-2-settings-json-L27 https://gist.github.com/1149379#file-sublime-text-2-settings... for line spacing.
purephase 14y ago
The bracket highlighter is awesome. So simple, yet powerful. I've been using it for the past 20min and I'm not sure how I survived without it. ;)
Gigablah 14y ago
I used SublimeCodeIntel some time ago and while it worked as advertised, I ended up having to remove it since it was causing ST2 to hang especially on large codebases.
humbyvaldes 14y ago
LiveReload is one of my favorites https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2 https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2
martinced 14y ago
What's the fuss with multiple cursor? Emacs has these too (of course) but seriously WTF!? Who programs in languages so mediocre that there are repetition everywhere and that working is so repetitive that having multiple cursors actually helps? Do you really have to enter the same thing so often that having "multiple cursors" makes you more productive and is considered a "killer feature"!? All I see is that if you need that you have way too much repetition in your "code". I don't like repetitive stuff. That's what computers are good for. That's what I do as a programmer: I carefully craft my tools so that all the stupid repetitive tasks are done by my programs (or by my programmable text editor).
- CognitiveLens 14y ago
  For programming, I don't find the multiple cursor thing very useful, but for markup (especially html), it's extremely useful, particularly when working with legacy systems that don't have very powerful server-based building of HTML from templates. In these cases, HTML can be very repetitive, and grabbing a set of <li>s that you want to add a class to is as simple as highlighting the first <li>, hitting Cmd-D a few times, and then editing them all at once.
- goostavos 14y ago
  Whoa, whoa, whoa... hey, buddy, calm down. Some people liking the ol' multi-cursor does not scream volumes about about their programming style, or "mediocre" language of choice. You sir, are just being ridiculous. I'll say this about multi-cursor, it is one of those things that until you have it, you don't know you missed it. When I first tried sublime my thought pattern went "Wha? Multi-cursor? When will I ever use -- Oh my god how did I live without this!?" Simple use case that comes to mind: quick refactorings. I'm a believer in self documenting code, so I'm often changing the names of my function calls as I get deeper into the domain of the problem. With Sublime Text, I highlight the function in question, spam `ctrl + d` a bunch of times to set the multicursors in position, and from there, I'm free to type away whilst the multicursors edit my entire document.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not just trolling. Multiple cursors can be useful for doing things like quick renames, which itself is already useful in a general text editor that is used with many different file formats. However, for me, they are often more useful because you can pick out general patterns of text/symbols and do the same thing to all of them. Want an extra <th></th> just after each <tr> in four lines of an HTML file? No problem. Want to split a list of function parameters onto separate lines when they don't fit on one any more, or the other way around? No problem. Sure, in many cases you could do these things with a find-and-replace as well, but that might involve making a selection to limit the scope of the replace operation, setting up some sort of regex to make sure you only find the copies of the original text you actually want, setting up another regex to do the replacement without disrupting anything else nearby, and so on. Using multiple cursors is often much more efficient.
mambodog 14y ago
I found SublimeCodeIntel to be unreliable, so I use SublimeCTags[1]. I've also bound mouse3 to navigate to a function definition in my User .sublime-mousemap file: { "button": "button3", "count": 1, "press_command": "drag_select", "command": "navigate_to_definition" } However, it doesn't work as well for OO code. [1] https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags
visarga 14y ago
Does it have decent SFTP out of the box or as a free plugin? I'd like one of those persistent SFTP browsers, not the default one which does not follow the principle of least astonishment - it uses a custom interface where I have to select the SFTP server every time I want to open another file and there is no multiple selection. It looks like an original UI design invented by a programmer with no UI design experience, reinventing the wheel.
- testrecord 14y ago
  http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp
AlexanderZ 14y ago
If you are using Rails, have a look at this plugin: http://say26.com/rails-file-switcher-plugin-for-sublime-text-2 http://say26.com/rails-file-switcher-plugin-for-sublime-text... It allows you to switch between your models, controllers and views really fast.
hybrid11 14y ago
Live reload is also an awesome plugin, it automatically refreshes the content in your browser when it changes. https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2 https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2
stinos 14y ago
I really like the general way of working with SublimeText, but there's one major reason I simply cannot use it for the job: it is terribly slow with large files. One of the things we have to do often is open a >10mb logfile on a cifs share and quickly search through it. It takes ST2 over 10seconds to open the file. The same for each refresh of the file. Even wordpad on Windows loads the file faster, so there seems to be something quite off at the core side of things.
- ditoa 14y ago
  I have the same issues regarding load speed on large files. I am a long time UltraEdit user and it is the fastest editor on Windows for working with large files that I have found. Unfortunately UltraEdit has a pretty awful UX compared to modern software. It is still very much a Windows 9x app which kind of sucks. Also it has some annoying as hell Unicode issues which is why I ended up switching to Sublime Text for 99% of my work and just keep UltraEdit around for those one a month moments.
  - stinos 14y ago
    well I'm using Notepad++ atm and it's fast as well. It also has the awesome feature (Opera also has it) that you can close tabs by doubleclicking them. Once you get used to that it's extremely hard to not use it everywhere..
    - mobweb 14y ago
      OS X has CMD+W which also can be used almost everywhere, including Sublime Text, to close a tab.
      - stinos 14y ago
        yes I know. Practically everything under Windows uses Ctrl+W as well for closing tabs/windows.
- mobweb 14y ago
  This also bothers me. It gets even worse when using a linter plugin. Sometimes when I open a complex file (for example a huge minified JS library), the whole editor will just crash because of the linter plugin. :/
whytookay 14y ago
These are all really cool, and I look forward to checking them out! On a side note: Does anybody know of a plugin for ST2, or another editor that works well for coding that allows for a semi-transparent/transparent background? (for Windows) I've been searching for the last few weeks to no avail, and was hoping that somebody here might have encountered something.
zvrba 14y ago
Does it support REPL for various interpreters? (emacs has ESS for R, SLIME for LISP, surely others.) I couldn't find anything about this in the docs (just quick browsing) and nothing was apparent in the menus after I've tried to install it. So.. just asking, not trying to start a flame war :)
- drcongo 14y ago
  https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL
xedarius 14y ago
Does anyone know of a plugin that allows Sublime to handle XML files correctly? By correctly I'm mainly talking about auto-formatting and generally understanding how XML is indented. Thanks
SeanDav 14y ago
I tried using ST2, but it lacks one basic feature that is essential to me. It will automatically update a loaded file with any changes made externally. This is fine, except when you don't want it to do this and then discover there is no way to toggle this behaviour. It should just be a simple configuration option but until it is added then this is a deal breaker.
- mobweb 14y ago
  I just tested this because ST has notified me in the past when an item was changed, see: http://i.minus.com/jVzFslpF9xhuo.png http://i.minus.com/jVzFslpF9xhuo.png BUT it seems that this doesn't always work. I just tested with a newly created file and for some reason there was no warning, it just reloaded the file.
  - jackmoore 14y ago
    I believe you can undo the update with ctrl+z
chesh 14y ago
Why I love ST2: multi-platform, fuzzy search, plugins, multiple cursors, JSON config files. My setup: - Package Control plugin: the very first thing you should setup after installing ST2 (it should really be a part of ST2) - Next step sync config files over Dropbox to get exactly the same editing environment from Win, Mac, and Linux - move the /User folder under "Sublime Text 2/Packages" over to Dropbox/ST2/User - in Win goto CMD and from the %APPDATA%\Sublime Text 2\Packages folder enter: mklink /D "User" "path to\My Dropbox\ST2\User" - in Mac OSX/Linux goto the Packages folder (you can find the location under >Preferences>Browse Preferences) and enter: ln -s pathto/Dropbox/Sublime\ Text\ 2/User ./User - the fantastic thing with this setup is that in any new machines, Package Control will automatically take care of installing any missing plugins - Keybindings: tons of customizations to suit what I am used to and work across all OS's - Theme: Soda Dark - Colors: Made of Code - My favorite plugins: Alignment, Bracket Highlighter, Emmett, FileDiffs, SublimeCodeIntel, SublimeLinter, Tag ST2 is the best investment I have made in software apart from open source.
- unwiredben 14y ago
  Thanks for the tip on linking the config folder to Dropbox. That's super effective!
mikevm 14y ago
Sublime is a very cool editor, but since you can't debug in it, I guess it's only useful for web developers.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  How does this comment make any sense? For one, web developers debug too. Javascript, PHP, Ruby, whatever. Second, you can very much debug in Sublime (whatever that means). Do you mean something like an integrated debugger, like say XCode/VS have? A lot of developers use external tools for that, like gdb et al, depending on the language. Tons of developers of any kind use sublime, from C to Go.
  - mikevm 14y ago
    Oh yeah, I meant stepping through code. I'm used to debugging in IDEs (Eclipse, Visual Studio), so command-line debugging using GDB is a major pain in the ass.
darkmuck 14y ago
Why should I switch when jEdit does mostly just fine and its OSS?

260 points by phatbyte 14y ago

VoiceOfWisdom 14y ago

I believe on 1, you meant for the title to be Sublime Code Intel.

benaiah 14y ago
No, the plugin's name is Sublime CodeIntel (without the space). That's what it is in both the repository and package manager.
- garg 14y ago
  It originally said SublimeLinter instead of Sublime CodeIntel

maebert 14y ago

#1 should be SublimeCodeIntel, not SublimeLinter - otherwise thanks for this list, I didn't use Emment before but will certainly give it a spin.

phatbyte 14y ago
You are totally right, fixed, thanks :)
- maebert 14y ago
  You're welcome, sir!
Osiris 14y ago
I've never gotten that plugin to work well with my PHP code. Code complete is awful. I've switched over to PhpStorm for PHP code because it has static analysis and refactoring.
- blindhippo 14y ago
  It's worked intermittently for me in PHP but overall it's really buggy. I've had some luck using the branch version which you can grab here: https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeCodeIntel https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeCodeIntel

pearkes 14y ago

If you write Go, definitely check out GoSublime[1]. It's very powerful and gives you an IDE like environment inside Sublime Text 2. [1] https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime

lunixbochs 14y ago
sublimelint (not Linter) also has a decent wrapper around Go's checking.
swdunlop 14y ago
Seconded; GoSublime gives you a nice REPL for Go's build and test commands, package completion and linting. It is the second Sublime Package I install, after Package Control and before my own Antiki.

javajosh 14y ago

It's spelled "Emmet" (docs.emmet.io) and it's more widely known as "Zen Coding". (I asked the author about the name change and forgot why now - some sort of trademark dispute).

phatbyte 14y ago
Fixed the typo, thanks for hint ;)
dubcanada 14y ago
I dont know if I would call it zencoding. Zencoding is a different package entirely. Emmet is kind of version 2 of zencoding. But for as far as you should concern yourself they are two different plugins.
nobleach 14y ago
Yeah, it seems like Emmet removed one of my favorite features with Zencoding. I could hop into a string of HTML attributes and hit "." or "#" and it would create a new attribute of class="|" or id="|" respectively, and place the cursor in between the quotes.
- javajosh 14y ago
  Uh, I use Emmet every day, and it certainly does have that feature. Perhaps your expansion hot key is different.
  - nobleach 14y ago
    I never had to use a hotkey in the past. I do for regular expansion, and I haven't looked into why koans stopped working, but I imagine that is hotkey related.

togasystems 14y ago

I just started using CTags for php development. It allows you to move to class and function declarations. Great for large projects and unknown code. Link to plugin: https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags

beefsack 14y ago
I've always struggled to get SublimeCodeIntel to work under Linux, and when I've seen it work, it's not very good. CTags is absolutely fantastic though, I live and die by it in large code bases. It's backed by ctags on the system too, so it has an impressive list of supported languages.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

SideBar Enhancements is on my "avoid" list. If I remove it, even after restarting Sublime, the context menu for the sidebar is permanently empty.

brandoncor 14y ago
Same thing happened to me. I had no choice but to re-enable it since I didn't want to reinstall Sublime Text itself.
- ksherlock 14y ago
  https://github.com/titoBouzout/SideBarEnhancements/issues/18 https://github.com/titoBouzout/SideBarEnhancements/issues/18
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Thank you thank you thank you!

stared 14y ago

A nice selection (for me (i.e.: I use): Package Manager, SublimeLinter, SublimeCodeIntel, Git). Additionally, as a scientist, I use a lot (and like a lot) https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools.

swah 14y ago

I think we might get ST3 soon - there haven't been updates for half an year now.

JonnieCache 14y ago
He earned a 6 month holiday considering the workrate he put in on those early builds, and the amount of cash he must have made in the intervening time. It's not like the thing is riddled with outstanding issues.
- swah 14y ago
  Its true. I expect and would pay around 50 USD again for it, though.
Benferhat 14y ago
I'd love to see that, too! Jon's been putting out updates way too fast [0] to be able to keep that up forever, though. The API[1] is good enough that generations of plugins could be considered future versions. I'm glad it's successful enough that he can afford a vacation. [0] https://www.sublimetext.com/dev https://www.sublimetext.com/dev [1] http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/api_reference.html http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/api_reference.html
- kemayo 14y ago
  Speaking as the developer of the Git plugin on that list, the only thing I feel is missing from the API is a way to add colors or labels to filenames in tabs and the sidebar. Otherwise it's been pretty great.

JonnieCache 14y ago

If you use a dark color scheme, you should install a theme that has a similarly dark background for the sidebar. The "Soda Dark" theme goes well with the default color scheme. (The ui theme is separate from the syntax highlighting color scheme, you don't have to use the text colors seen on the github examples) https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/ https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/ In terms of plugins, apart from the ones mentioned here, Quick File Creator is indispensable: https://github.com/noklesta/SublimeQuickFileCreator https://github.com/noklesta/SublimeQuickFileCreator Not a plugin, but if you haven't realised it yet, know that the multiple cursors each come with their own separate clipboard. Learning how to combine this with the move and select by word and the parenthesis-movement commands is what will make the vim users eventually respect you. Oh and you can hack your language syntax definition files to make more things apart from function definitions turn up in the function browser. This is especially useful for ruby DSLs, sinatra etc.

wesbos 14y ago
I've created a theme + colour scheme called cobalt2 http://wesbos.com/cobalt2-theme-sublime-text-2/ http://wesbos.com/cobalt2-theme-sublime-text-2/
- purephase 14y ago
  Great theme, installed!
- dubcanada 14y ago
  This may seem like a funny question, but how do you find staring at blue all day long? It just seems like too much of a single colour too me.
  - wesbos 14y ago
    I love it! White burns my eyes out and black is too dark for me. Blue is for my eyes and I think it looks great.
  - groovy2shoes 14y ago

Kaivo 14y ago

You can also check Tuts+ free tutorial about ST2. It contains a list of interesting plugins (most of them mentionned in this article) alongside others I find quite useful. https://tutsplus.com/course/improve-workflow-in-sublime-text-2/ https://tutsplus.com/course/improve-workflow-in-sublime-text...

rlander 14y ago

SublimeREPL should be on this list. It's an interactive repl inside ST, much like emacs inferior lisp mode, for any language with a repl.

stared 14y ago
Yes, it's useful and nice (maybe except for keybindings): SublimeREPL - run an interpreter inside ST2 (Clojure, CoffeeScript, F#, Groovy, Haskell, Lua, MozRepl, NodeJS, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, shell or configure one yourself) https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL

benatkin 14y ago

If you bring Sublime into a unix environment, please make it add line endings. This is what vim and emacs do by default. https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/Newline-at-End-of-File-Support https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/Newline-at...

notJim 14y ago
This is interesting. I guess it's so that if you cat a file, it doesn't clobber your cursor? I've always noticed that git will say "No new line at end of file", but I've never really known if that's a bad or good thing, or why it matters.
- bingaling 14y ago
  Some unix tools (I can only recall Vixie cron at the moment) won't read the last line in a file if it isn't terminated with a newline.
- benatkin 14y ago
  When someone opens up a file created with Sublime Text 2 with vim or emacs and saves it, it clutters the commit messages. It's clutter whether the file contains other changes or not. It still shows up in diffs unless you suppress whitespace.
  - notJim 14y ago
    I would argue that the person with their vim set up to create that clutter is to blame here. If there's no objective reason to fix it other then "well, this is what vim does", then fix vim.
    - codygman 14y ago
      If i'm not mistaken, it is the lack of inserting a newline on sublimes part that is to blame here. It doesn't just break vim, but other software such as cat, git, etc.

kaolinite 14y ago

If you want to read Hacker News whilst inside Sublime, check out my plugin: https://github.com/dotty/HackerNews-SublimeTextPlugin https://github.com/dotty/HackerNews-SublimeTextPlugin (or alternatively, search "hacker news" in package control).

lunixbochs 14y ago

For everyone using SublimeLinter - I'm curious if you've tried sublimelint (the parent project) recently and if there's any reason you chose SublimeLinter over it.

frewsxcv 14y ago

I don't want to start a flame war; I don't consider myself a die hard vim user: What are reasons why I should switch to Sublime Text 2?

grimgrin 14y ago
If you're not a die hard vim user but do enjoy vim navigation/insertion styles then you may want to try out Sublime's Vintage mode: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  You can find the dev branch of the vintage plugin here: https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage https://github.com/sublimehq/Vintage Also see https://github.com/SublimeText/VintageEx https://github.com/SublimeText/VintageEx which adds the vim command line.
- ieatshortppl 14y ago
  Uh, I'm in the same boat as the person you responded to and I am still confused. What are the advantages of sublime over vim (rather than ways that Sublime can emulate vim)?
- notJim 14y ago
  I tried this after learning vim, and it seemed to suffer from an uncanny valley problem. Once you get into the flow of things, you'll start treating it like vim, and then when something suddenly behaves slightly different or doesn't work at all, it's very disruptive. I can't think of a specific example right now unfortunately, as that was a while ago, but it happened regularly.
- nshankar 14y ago
  It does not support Vim's wonderful vit, vat tools. Perhaps none supports like Vim. My fav for HTML/div editing.
notJim 14y ago
I switched to vim a year ago, and I fucking love it. The one thing I miss from ST2 is column editing/multiple cursors. Column editing fulfills the same kind of need as basic usage of vim macros, I think (i.e., applying some kind of sequence of edits to multiple rows), but it's visual and you get instant feedback (across all rows), which makes it easier and something you can sort of feel out iteratively. For example, supposed I have a row like (making up these names as I go, and suppose the list is longer): Controller_Section House_Model Person_To_Category_Selector and I want to insert after the first underscore the word class, so I'd get Controller_Class_Section and so on (this is a contrived example, but one has to do these kinds of things sometimes.) In vim, I think I'd record a macro, but I'd probably forget some parts (like moving to the next line at the end) and have to undo and whatnot (could use a regex too, but that's a bit harder--I'm practicing recently to be able to do it more effortlessly.) In ST2, what you do first is create a cursor at the beginning of each row (option + down arrow on OS X.) Then you move ahead one word (Opt + Right arrow on OS X.) Now the cursor is right before the underscore, even though the underscore is in a different position on each row. You can see that it's in the right place on each row, so it's hard to make a mistake, and if you need to do something more complicated, that remains true. Then, you just type _Class, and it types live on each row, once again making it so you get instant feedback, and it's hard to make a mistake. That to me is the biggest actual advantage of ST2 over VIM, but there are other reason to not switch, like vim's steeper learning curve (when most of us are already busy, and learning other stuff at the same time), and the fact that some people prefer the mouse, which behaves strangely in vim.

rglover 14y ago

Has anyone switched from Coda (2) to Sublime Text? I've consider using ST but haven't dug in enough to know the differences.

dubcanada 14y ago
I find Coda to have too much stuff. I don't want something that has a bunch of fancy icons and I have to scroll left/right to find my files and has 15 different areas all with extra garbage you don't need (such as the entire right bar which is mostly useless too me). However the project control part of Coda is amazing. So it's a matter of how experienced web developer and what exactly do you do? If you do mostly HTML/CSS/JS, then Coda is for you. If you do mostly other stuff hardcore JS, ruby, php, lua, blah blah blah. I'd say sublime.
- LukaD 14y ago
  It's also a matter of which OS you use. :) ST is cross platform and it's great to have a good text editor available when you have to use Windows.
kposehn 14y ago
I did, with a short stint in TextMate. ST has really been a joy to work with on Mac and after a little while getting a feel for it I'd never go back. It especially is great for ruby/html/css. Give it a shot :)

flexterra 14y ago

You might also want to try (my plugin) BrowserRefresh: Save the file you are working on and refresh your browser (or many browsers) with one keystroke. http://gcollazo.github.com/BrowserRefresh-Sublime/ http://gcollazo.github.com/BrowserRefresh-Sublime/ #ShamelessPlug

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

taitems 14y ago

I would avoid Prefixr like the plague as it's broken to the point of being destructive, and not maintained. Installed it today before I saw this post, stopped using it immediately. https://github.com/wbond/sublime_prefixr/issues/4 https://github.com/wbond/sublime_prefixr/issues/4

slurry 14y ago

Not to go all Stallmanesque here, but doesn't it bother you to use a proprietary text editor when there are so many excellent free/open-source ones around?

dkulchenko 14y ago
Not at all. Speaking for myself here, but while I much prefer open source to proprietary software, I find Sublime Text 2 blows any other editor I've used out of the water and I'm not going to not use it just because it's proprietary (same reason I use OS X, Photoshop (versus GIMP), etc).
- jasonm23 14y ago
  The "problem" with Emacs and Vim is their out the box state is a bit daunting, if you allow a little time to get used to and configure Emacs, it'll blow the shit out of any editor you've ever used. ... Grab ocodo/emacsd from GitHub, it's a very sublime like setup.
notJim 14y ago
This question really only makes sense to me from a Stallmanesque standpoint though (unless you don't have much money for some reason, in which case the financial considerations come into play.) Surely unless you have some ideological reason to pick a FOSS editor, you'll simply use the best one available.
- slurry 14y ago
  Yeah maybe a bit, but to me full Stallmanesque would be avoiding proprietary software even when the free alternative is non-existent or significantly less functional. That is not the situation with text editors, unless I am missing something big that Sublime Text can uniquely do.
  - deelowe 14y ago
    The killer features in sublime for me are: + Multiple cursors + Column edit + JSON configuration files + Plugin support + Textmate themes + Python code base (easy to create plugins)

tednaleid 14y ago

Sublime Text 2 plugin writing is surprisingly easy via python. I recently wrote a plugin (SublimeJump https://github.com/tednaleid/SublimeJump https://github.com/tednaleid/SublimeJump) to let you jump to any visible character with a couple of keystrokes. It's similar to AceJump (emacs) or EasyMotion (vim) if you're familiar with those.

mode80 14y ago
I've been waiting for this! Thanks tednaleid.

dreeves 14y ago

The one thing holding me back from Sublime Text is fonts. I really want the Fixed 6x13 font (like xterms use) which requires anti-aliasing turned off. Does anyone know if that's possible in Sublime Text? Link to the xterm font: http://yootles.com/outbox/FixedMedium6x13.dfont http://yootles.com/outbox/FixedMedium6x13.dfont PS: It also needs the line spacing set to .8 which I've found a way to do in TextMate and Terminal.app.

dkulchenko 14y ago
Both are possible through Sublime's config file. See http://www.reddshift.com/2011/10/turn-off-anti-alias-for-sublime-text-2.html http://www.reddshift.com/2011/10/turn-off-anti-alias-for-sub... for how to turn off anti-aliasing, and https://gist.github.com/1149379#file-sublime-text-2-settings-json-L27 https://gist.github.com/1149379#file-sublime-text-2-settings... for line spacing.

purephase 14y ago

The bracket highlighter is awesome. So simple, yet powerful. I've been using it for the past 20min and I'm not sure how I survived without it. ;)

Gigablah 14y ago

I used SublimeCodeIntel some time ago and while it worked as advertised, I ended up having to remove it since it was causing ST2 to hang especially on large codebases.

humbyvaldes 14y ago

LiveReload is one of my favorites https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2 https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2

martinced 14y ago

What's the fuss with multiple cursor? Emacs has these too (of course) but seriously WTF!? Who programs in languages so mediocre that there are repetition everywhere and that working is so repetitive that having multiple cursors actually helps? Do you really have to enter the same thing so often that having "multiple cursors" makes you more productive and is considered a "killer feature"!? All I see is that if you need that you have way too much repetition in your "code". I don't like repetitive stuff. That's what computers are good for. That's what I do as a programmer: I carefully craft my tools so that all the stupid repetitive tasks are done by my programs (or by my programmable text editor).

CognitiveLens 14y ago
For programming, I don't find the multiple cursor thing very useful, but for markup (especially html), it's extremely useful, particularly when working with legacy systems that don't have very powerful server-based building of HTML from templates. In these cases, HTML can be very repetitive, and grabbing a set of <li>s that you want to add a class to is as simple as highlighting the first <li>, hitting Cmd-D a few times, and then editing them all at once.
goostavos 14y ago
Whoa, whoa, whoa... hey, buddy, calm down. Some people liking the ol' multi-cursor does not scream volumes about about their programming style, or "mediocre" language of choice. You sir, are just being ridiculous. I'll say this about multi-cursor, it is one of those things that until you have it, you don't know you missed it. When I first tried sublime my thought pattern went "Wha? Multi-cursor? When will I ever use -- Oh my god how did I live without this!?" Simple use case that comes to mind: quick refactorings. I'm a believer in self documenting code, so I'm often changing the names of my function calls as I get deeper into the domain of the problem. With Sublime Text, I highlight the function in question, spam `ctrl + d` a bunch of times to set the multicursors in position, and from there, I'm free to type away whilst the multicursors edit my entire document.
Silhouette 14y ago
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not just trolling. Multiple cursors can be useful for doing things like quick renames, which itself is already useful in a general text editor that is used with many different file formats. However, for me, they are often more useful because you can pick out general patterns of text/symbols and do the same thing to all of them. Want an extra <th></th> just after each <tr> in four lines of an HTML file? No problem. Want to split a list of function parameters onto separate lines when they don't fit on one any more, or the other way around? No problem. Sure, in many cases you could do these things with a find-and-replace as well, but that might involve making a selection to limit the scope of the replace operation, setting up some sort of regex to make sure you only find the copies of the original text you actually want, setting up another regex to do the replacement without disrupting anything else nearby, and so on. Using multiple cursors is often much more efficient.

mambodog 14y ago

I found SublimeCodeIntel to be unreliable, so I use SublimeCTags[1]. I've also bound mouse3 to navigate to a function definition in my User .sublime-mousemap file: { "button": "button3", "count": 1, "press_command": "drag_select", "command": "navigate_to_definition" } However, it doesn't work as well for OO code. [1] https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags

visarga 14y ago

Does it have decent SFTP out of the box or as a free plugin? I'd like one of those persistent SFTP browsers, not the default one which does not follow the principle of least astonishment - it uses a custom interface where I have to select the SFTP server every time I want to open another file and there is no multiple selection. It looks like an original UI design invented by a programmer with no UI design experience, reinventing the wheel.

testrecord 14y ago
http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp

AlexanderZ 14y ago

If you are using Rails, have a look at this plugin: http://say26.com/rails-file-switcher-plugin-for-sublime-text-2 http://say26.com/rails-file-switcher-plugin-for-sublime-text... It allows you to switch between your models, controllers and views really fast.

hybrid11 14y ago

Live reload is also an awesome plugin, it automatically refreshes the content in your browser when it changes. https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2 https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2

stinos 14y ago

I really like the general way of working with SublimeText, but there's one major reason I simply cannot use it for the job: it is terribly slow with large files. One of the things we have to do often is open a >10mb logfile on a cifs share and quickly search through it. It takes ST2 over 10seconds to open the file. The same for each refresh of the file. Even wordpad on Windows loads the file faster, so there seems to be something quite off at the core side of things.

ditoa 14y ago
I have the same issues regarding load speed on large files. I am a long time UltraEdit user and it is the fastest editor on Windows for working with large files that I have found. Unfortunately UltraEdit has a pretty awful UX compared to modern software. It is still very much a Windows 9x app which kind of sucks. Also it has some annoying as hell Unicode issues which is why I ended up switching to Sublime Text for 99% of my work and just keep UltraEdit around for those one a month moments.
- stinos 14y ago
  well I'm using Notepad++ atm and it's fast as well. It also has the awesome feature (Opera also has it) that you can close tabs by doubleclicking them. Once you get used to that it's extremely hard to not use it everywhere..
  - mobweb 14y ago
    OS X has CMD+W which also can be used almost everywhere, including Sublime Text, to close a tab.
    - stinos 14y ago
      yes I know. Practically everything under Windows uses Ctrl+W as well for closing tabs/windows.
mobweb 14y ago
This also bothers me. It gets even worse when using a linter plugin. Sometimes when I open a complex file (for example a huge minified JS library), the whole editor will just crash because of the linter plugin. :/

whytookay 14y ago

These are all really cool, and I look forward to checking them out! On a side note: Does anybody know of a plugin for ST2, or another editor that works well for coding that allows for a semi-transparent/transparent background? (for Windows) I've been searching for the last few weeks to no avail, and was hoping that somebody here might have encountered something.

zvrba 14y ago

Does it support REPL for various interpreters? (emacs has ESS for R, SLIME for LISP, surely others.) I couldn't find anything about this in the docs (just quick browsing) and nothing was apparent in the menus after I've tried to install it. So.. just asking, not trying to start a flame war :)

drcongo 14y ago
https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL

xedarius 14y ago

Does anyone know of a plugin that allows Sublime to handle XML files correctly? By correctly I'm mainly talking about auto-formatting and generally understanding how XML is indented. Thanks

SeanDav 14y ago

I tried using ST2, but it lacks one basic feature that is essential to me. It will automatically update a loaded file with any changes made externally. This is fine, except when you don't want it to do this and then discover there is no way to toggle this behaviour. It should just be a simple configuration option but until it is added then this is a deal breaker.

mobweb 14y ago
I just tested this because ST has notified me in the past when an item was changed, see: http://i.minus.com/jVzFslpF9xhuo.png http://i.minus.com/jVzFslpF9xhuo.png BUT it seems that this doesn't always work. I just tested with a newly created file and for some reason there was no warning, it just reloaded the file.
- jackmoore 14y ago
  I believe you can undo the update with ctrl+z

chesh 14y ago

Why I love ST2: multi-platform, fuzzy search, plugins, multiple cursors, JSON config files. My setup: - Package Control plugin: the very first thing you should setup after installing ST2 (it should really be a part of ST2) - Next step sync config files over Dropbox to get exactly the same editing environment from Win, Mac, and Linux - move the /User folder under "Sublime Text 2/Packages" over to Dropbox/ST2/User - in Win goto CMD and from the %APPDATA%\Sublime Text 2\Packages folder enter: mklink /D "User" "path to\My Dropbox\ST2\User" - in Mac OSX/Linux goto the Packages folder (you can find the location under >Preferences>Browse Preferences) and enter: ln -s pathto/Dropbox/Sublime\ Text\ 2/User ./User - the fantastic thing with this setup is that in any new machines, Package Control will automatically take care of installing any missing plugins - Keybindings: tons of customizations to suit what I am used to and work across all OS's - Theme: Soda Dark - Colors: Made of Code - My favorite plugins: Alignment, Bracket Highlighter, Emmett, FileDiffs, SublimeCodeIntel, SublimeLinter, Tag ST2 is the best investment I have made in software apart from open source.

unwiredben 14y ago
Thanks for the tip on linking the config folder to Dropbox. That's super effective!

mikevm 14y ago

Sublime is a very cool editor, but since you can't debug in it, I guess it's only useful for web developers.

pretoriusB 14y ago
How does this comment make any sense? For one, web developers debug too. Javascript, PHP, Ruby, whatever. Second, you can very much debug in Sublime (whatever that means). Do you mean something like an integrated debugger, like say XCode/VS have? A lot of developers use external tools for that, like gdb et al, depending on the language. Tons of developers of any kind use sublime, from C to Go.
- mikevm 14y ago
  Oh yeah, I meant stepping through code. I'm used to debugging in IDEs (Eclipse, Visual Studio), so command-line debugging using GDB is a major pain in the ass.

darkmuck 14y ago

Why should I switch when jEdit does mostly just fine and its OSS?