Kenneth Reitz

Sublime Text 3 Love

I’m happy to announce that Sublime Text 2 [edit: post valid for Sublime Text 3] was officially released today! This is awesome news. I’ve spend 12+ hours a day for the past year and a half in Sublime Text 2. It is indeed sublime.

## Why should you try it?

  • It’s light and fast
  • It’s cross-platform
  • Chrome-like tabs
  • Split window layouts!
  • It’s not vaporware
  • It supports TextMate Bundles and Themes!
  • It’s fully scripted with an embedded Python interpreter, making it nicely extensible

## Beautiful

My editor looks like this:

This is comprised of a few things:

### Soda Dark Theme This is a nice alternative to the default “skin” of Sublime. It comes in both light and dark flavors. You can grab it on GitHub.

### Tomorrow Night Tomorrow Night is my current favorite color scheme for syntax highlighting. I’ve cycled through around with quite a few in the past, but this one is really something special.

### Ubuntu Mono I’m pretty passionate about monospace typefaces. Over the years, I’ve been a heavy supporter of Monaco, MS Consalas, Inconsolas, Menlo, and finally Ubuntu Mono.

Simply the greatest programming font ever made. Download it here.

### Configuration

I’ve optimized my settings for Python development.

  • Hidden sidebar
  • Disabled minimap
  • Disabled fold buttons
  • All whitespace drawn
  • Auto-trim trailing whitespace
  • PEP8-esque line rulers (79 for code, 72 for docstrings)

Here’s my user config file:

{ "auto_complete": false, "close_windows_when_empty": false, "color_scheme": "Packages/User/Tomorrow-Night.tmTheme", "draw_white_space": "all", "find_selected_text": true, "fold_buttons": false, "font_face": "Ubuntu Mono", "font_options": ["subpixel_antialias"], "font_size": 13.0, "highlight_line": true, "rulers": [72, 79], "theme": "Soda Dark.sublime-theme", "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true, "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true, "folder_exclude_patterns": [".svn", ".git", ".hg", "CVS", "_build", "dist", "build", "site"] }

## Tips

Here’s a quick list of things that I didn’t pick up on immediately when migrating from vim.

### Subl

Sublime text has nice mate-esque commandline launcher called ‘subl’ hidden in its distribution. To make it available universally:

$ ln -s /Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/subl

Once Installed, you can run it anywhere to open a fresh project/window:

$ subl .

Due to muscle memory burn-in, I also recommend:

alias mate=’subl -w’

## Shortcuts

Shift + Command + P: Command Palette

This nifty window pops up and gives you a list of available commands in your current context (e.g. Package Control: Install Package).

Command + T: Go to File

Pretty standard stuff. Jumps to the file you select.

Command + R: Go to Symbol

Use this to hop to any symbol definition in your current file.

Command + P: Go to Anything

Use this to hop to any file, symbol, or line in your current project.

## Location

On OS X, the location of the Sublime configuration is:

~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/

## Plugins

While Sublime does support Textmate Bundles, it also has a robust Python-powered plugin and extension system that allows for some very cool plugins that weren’t possible with TextMate.

### Package Control

The first thing you need to install is Package Control. It’s essentially Homebrew for Sublime packages. It’ll save you tons of time.

### Sublime Linter

This wonderful plugin gives you instant feedback about the code you’re writing, as you’re writing it. It has fantastic PyLint + PEP8 support out of the box. You can install it via Package Control. Learn more on GitHub.

### Sublime CodeIntel

Maintained by the same developer as SublimeLint, CodeIntel gives you IDE-style functionality with intelligent code completion, import suggestions, and go-to definition support.

It’s really nice to have sometimes. I typically have it disabled. Give it a spin and see what you think. You can install it via Package Control. Learn more on GitHub.

### kCode and More

This old plugin is a remnant of my old PHP + Textmate work. If you write a lot of Python scripts, the ‘env’ and ‘enc’ snippets will save you a lot of typing:

#!/usr/bin/env python# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

The repo is available on GitHub.

Other great plugins available via Package Control include HTML Encode, Gist, and Restructured Text.

Happy hacking!