Sublime Forum

Paragraph formatting features in Sublime Text

#1

I was wondering whether Sublime Text has basic paragraph formatting features; specifically align left, align right, centre and justify. I am also a registered user of UltraEdit (I also am a licensed user of Sublime Text) but I find UltraEdit to be a bit bloated (bloatware). I don’t think that UltraEdit has this feature. Thank you for your help.

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#2

Sublime Text is a plain text editor. Text alignment and justification doesn’t make any sense when working with plain text.

If you’re looking to format your text I suggest using a rich text editor like LibreOffice, Word, WordPad, etc.

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#3

I am a hobbyist programmer (just getting started - I don’t know much yet). I want to be able to write READ.ME files (and other similar text files) and format them so that they look neat and tidy. UltraEdit has paragraph formatting features and I think Vim has as well.

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#4

readmes are generally plain text or markdown, neither of which can do text alignment or text justification. Alignment and justification can be faked by inserting spaces, which you can do using plugins in ST: https://packagecontrol.io/search/align, https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Justify.

As someone who regularly reads readmes, please don’t justify or center/right align your text. Wrap it at a reasonable column width and leave it at that. You can do this in ST using Edit > Wrap > Wrap Paragraph at Ruler.

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#5

Text alignment and justification doesn’t make any sense when working with plain text.

There are many cases when left alignment and line-width reformatting makes a lot of sense. Example, working with .rst files that do not need long lines to have generated output paragraphs correctly. Or converting long-line .md files to have line-feeds in the right place so that it is readable (<= 90 characters or less) in any given line. That makes it readable by every text editor and every IDE. Nevermind that Sublime Text can “wrap” the text so you can see all of it. It’s not the same thing, and there are cases where inserting line feeds is the right thing to do.

I never use full justification or right justification. But I am very thankful that ST can do paragraph wrapping (inserting line feeds). This is important to my work.

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