Sublime Text is a text editor and if you don't know it you can check it out here:
https://www.sublimetext.com/
Doing a quick google search for the word "sublime" reveals the definition
very great excellence or beauty
This is the exact theme of this blog post. I will try to highlight some of the things I like about Sublime Text and share some of my settings and plugins I like.
I am using Sublime Text for many purposes and it all comes down to text editing. However, text editing can be many things depending on the context. I think mostly developers are familiar with Sublime Text, however, I have been using Sublime Text for taking notes, writing markdown, writing LaTeX files for university projects etc. I am also using Sublime Text daily when i am programming. I have been programming in several languages in Sublime Text and if the language syntax is not part of the standard package delivered by Sublime Text, just bring up the menu and install a plugin which does (after installing package control (an integrated tool to download in install plugins)).
Since I am using Sublime Text on a daily basis I have found things which I have tweaked for getting the ultra good feeling of using the text editor. First off, I am using Sublime Text on all my computers, thus, I have the need for making updates to the settings and keybindings files on all the computers. I have done this the same way as I use Linux configuration files. I have already written about this in a previous blog post which can be found here. TLDR: dropbox and symbolic links.
Okay - now for the real deal. For those who are not familiar with the Vintage plugin for Sublime Text i will explain it. A long long time ago a console based text editor called vi was developed. Later on a console based text editor called vim (V IMproved) came along. What's special about this and what is the relation to the Vintage plugin you might ask? The answer is that depending on the mode normal letter keys serves different purposes. First off there is the navigation. The keys h,j,k,l are used for moving the cursor around in the text file when in command mode. h and l are like the left and right arrow keys respectfully and j and k are like the down and up arrow keys. When in command mode you can press the ":" key and type in a command. For example the command :wq(enter) will save and quit the file. (This is actually a running joke on the internet and have even been asked on stack overflow). I feel like I've become more efficient in writing since I enabled the Vintage plugin since I won't have to move my hand around the keyboard and find the correct keys to navigate the text file.
Now I am going to share some extensions I did myself with you guys. Often I use VIM in terminals and sometimes I even have tabs opened in VIM. This can be done with :tabe, :tabn and :tabp (i refer to those as "tab edit", "tab next" and "tab previous"). These command are not part of the standard Vintage plugin, therefore I chose to edit the plugin files myself to add support for those commands. I did this by editing the file Vintage.sublime-commands. I added the following entries:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | { "caption": ":tabe - tab edit", "command": "prompt_open_file" }, { "caption": ":tabn - tab next", "command": "next_view" }, { "caption": ":tabp - tab previous", "command": "prev_view" } |
The entries just utilized already implemented commands in Sublime Text so these should work out of the box.
To end this post I'm going to share some of the settings I have in my settings file. I have not covered all the things I wanted to in this blog post, however, I am going to write up a part two later on. I have added comments which describes the purpose of the setting.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | { "bold_folder_labels": true, //If you have added folders to the current open project, this will use a bold font for folders. "caret_style": "phase", //The animation of the blinking vertical bar when editing text "detect_indentation": true, //Sublime Text tries to figure out indentation style based on the open file "fade_fold_buttons": false, //When false the triangles which can collapse code blocks are always shown "highlight_line": true, //The background of the line the caret is on in is changed to from the regular background color "spell_check": true, //Enables spell check by default for all files "translate_tabs_to_spaces": false, //Setting which determines whether tabs should be replaced by a number of spaces. (I have this set to true for specific projects) "vintage_start_in_command_mode": true //Starts in Vintage command mode (as previously described) when opening files. This is to match the VIM approach) } |