Sublime Forum

A Few Beginner Questions

#1

Hi ya’ll,

I’m new to Sublime Text 3, but believe I’m going to learn to love it quickly. For one of my college classes, we’re collectively trying out different text editors to report back what we found. I was lucky enough to land here, but just have a few quick questions.

First, I’ve recently installed package control, and was wondering what the best starter/essential packages are? I’ll mostly be doing HTML and C++ editing.

Second, what has drawn you to (and kept you here!) Sublime Text? From what I’ve seen, all the keyboard shortcuts would make for a productivity machine, but I’d like to hear it from someone with more experience than me.

Thanks you so much for your help.

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#2

Welcome to the Sublime Text universe! I’ll let others provide a list of recommended packages for you; I don’t use anything other than the built in functionality for either of those two programming tasks, personally

What originally drew me to Sublime was some dissatisfaction with the tools that I was using at the time. They were big, slow to load and much more complicated than I needed. More specifically they seem to cater to every possible developer demographic all at once and were thus fairly heavyweight and more complicated than I needed.

In Sublime I found something that was small and optimized for speed, with a small solid core set of functionality. The ease by which you can customize key bindings, the menu, or add plugins and third party packages to enhance the experience to exactly what you need and no more was worth it’s weight in gold to me.

Something else I also enjoyed and continue to enjoy is the design philosophy Jon started with, which was to question why so many tools for editing text waste so much space on UI chrome when they could use it to show you more text.

As such, with keyboard shortcuts and the command palette instead of loads of tool bars and immense deeply nested menu structures, I hardy ever need to take my hand off the keyboard to use the mouse which is a huge boon to my productivity.

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#3

The strength of Sublime is its extreme extensibility. Much of the built-in functionality is almost inconsequential in the sense that if it weren’t there, I (or another comunity member) could easily implement it. And if I don’t like how it works, I can rewrite it exactly the way I want, down to the smallest detail. Indentation, bracket matching, basic editor commands — almost nothing is set in stone.

The few immutable core features are generally good. I have to give a particular shout-out to the syntax highlighting system, which features a custom implementation of the regular subset of Oniguruma. The system isn’t perfect (it can’t handle nondeterministic CFLs) but it’s very fast.

Regarding Sublime’s keyboard shortcuts — I was unable to concisely express my feelings in text, so as is the fashion of the time I made a picture.

Of course, Sublime isn’t perfect. The biggest items on my wishlist are, in no particular order:

  • A modern Python runtime with a robust package system. (Creating dependencies in Package Control is a pain.)
  • Nondeterminism in syntax highlighting. (JavaScript and many other languages can’t be properly highlighted without it.)
  • The ability to create custom panels in the UI, such as a status bar or a table of contents.

Some packages I use regularly:

General

  • A File Icon
  • BracketHighlighter
  • GitGutter

Languages

  • Babel
  • CFML
  • Indent XML
  • Oracle
  • Pretty JSON

Package Development

  • AutomaticPackageReloader
  • CSScheme
  • OverrideAudit
  • PackageDev
  • ScopeAlways
  • YAML Macros
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