As a developer, there is always the need of text editor for coding. Text editor plays the primary role in any developer’s day to day working. The project code is written, debugged and executed with the help of text editor. Choosing the perfect text editor is the challenging task. It requires experience, personal preference, and final judgment.
There are the various text editors on the internet like ATOM, Sublime Text, VIM, Notepad++, and Brackets etc. All editors have their own features and functionalities. It takes time to use all editors and then zero in on one piece of your loved editor.
Yes, I am in love with the sublime text editor. The sublime text is full of features text editor. It is fully customized and has great plugins and it is very simple to install in sublime text. This is an amazing piece of software and every programmer should know about it and its hidden features. Sublime is a clean, functional and fast editor. Not only it has incredible features but it has the support of various beautiful plug-ins, snippets and many other things.
I know there are already been many best articles and informative blogs are over the internet, but I just wanted to share my experience and the best part of sublime that I enjoy every day while am coding. I think every programmer should have knowledge about sublime to improve their coding skills and make there code well aligned.
Features
- Minimap :
Sublime Text shows you a miniature version of your entire file in the upper right-hand corner. You can show or hide it by going to the View menu. You can click and drag on the minimap to move around the file.
- Selection :
Sublime Text provides us multiple lines of the word at once, which is useful for us. There are multiple ways to perform this feature.
- CTRL + CLICK: Point your cursor to multiple places in your code.
- CTRL + D: Select specific word and next same word in the whole file.
- CTRL + F: Find the word in your file and select them all.
- CTRL + SHIFT + F: Find word in multiple files.
- CTRL + L: Select the entire line you are editing.
- SHIFT + SCROLL: To use horizontal scroll in the file.
- CTRL + SHIFT + ARROW: To change the place of selected code block
- Comment:
Comments are very important for every programmer.
- CTRL + /: Shortcut to comment or uncomment the selected text or line.
- CTRL + SHIFT + /: This is for comment or uncomment the selected block.
- Matching Bracket:
Finding matching or closing bracket in the lengthy code but with sublime it’s very easy.
- CTRL + M: Find matching brackets.
- Go to:
Sublime provides best feature to jump to the file, function or line in one stroke.
- CTRL + P: Type a part of the file name to open the file.
- CTRL + R: Find the function in the file.
- CTRL + G: Go to the line number in the file.
- Spell Checker:
I always made some mistakes in the spellings while codding. If you are like me then you can enable the spell checker in sublime.
- Go to Preferences > Settings – User and add the following line
“spell_check”: true,
OR
- Press F6 from keyboard for current file
- Layout:
- This is the best feature I like most, it split the window into views. We can open and work on multiple files at once. Go to View > Layout > select the option.
- Customize Keyboard Shortcuts:
Some keyboard shortcuts are very difficult to type while codding, so we can customize them as we needed. In my case CTRL + P to find the file in the project, I customize it CTRL + Q. let’s see how I did this.
- Go to Preferences > Key Bindings
- Type the following statement in Default-Sublime-keymap—User
- { “keys”: [“ctrl+q”], “command”: “show_overlay”, “args”: {“overlay”: “goto”, “show_files”: true} },
- Restart the editor.
- Snippets:
Sublime provide various feature to type our code easily but some codding stuff we type all the time, so sublime makes it easy to quickly insert code snippet that you define.
- Go to Tool > Developer > New Snippet following file will open.
- The main content goes between <content><![CDATA[& ]]></content> , like we can see in screenshot “Hello, ${l:this} is a ${2:snippet}.” Is content of code.
- <tabTrigger>p</tabTrigger> this is the trigger for the content, which the text we type followed by the tab, that expands to content we mentioned in snippet.
- Finally, save this file, with .sublime-snippet ex. Demo.sublime-snippet
- Packages/Plugins
- Following are the instruction and list of useful packages for every programmer.
- First you have to know how to install the package in sublime text.
- Press CTRL + SHIFT + P and type package install
- Search the package name in the search box and press enter
Let’s see the list of packages
1) Alignment
This is very simple and easy to use the plugin. I always try to make my code well organized and good looking. Well-aligned code always helps to revisit the code.
To Use: Select the code you want to align and press CTRL + ALT + A.
2) Bracket highlighter
This plugin provides bracket highlighting for all part of the code.
3) Emmit
This is the time saver for all web developers. You can build your HTML code on the easily and quickly.
To Use : press CTRL + ALT + ENTER and start typing your HTML.
4) All Autocomplete
Sublime have it’s own autocomplete feature but the All Autocomplete plugin, however, search all open files to find matches while suggesting words.
5) Bootstrap 3 Snippets
This package provides all the classes and code of bootstrap. You just type the snippet code of this plugin and it will automatically generate the code for elements.
To Use ex. If I enter the code like bs3-form and press tab.