betterthan: Sublime Text

I’m extremely happy with Sublime Text 2. It’s filled the big editor-shaped hole left by the slow development of TextMate. Posts on customing Sublime Text have been done to death over the past year, so this will be no more than a quick overview of my current settings. For more detailed info check Customise Sublime Text 2 and the Sublime Text Forums.

So, here are my embryonic Sublime Text changes. They’re generally tweaks for doing front-end work, with a couple of basic Django additions. Even though Sublime Text is pretty extensible, I’ve tried to avoid adding or changing anything until I’ve identified a real need for it.

Packages

Package Control

This is essential. Install it first, then use it to install and manage more packages.

SideBarEnhancements

This is nearly essential, unless you’re really fond of dropping into iTerm or Finder every few minutes to perform basic file operations.

HTML5 and jQuery packages

Very front-end focussed, of course. I’m considering whether it’s worth creating a Polyglot fork. That could work nicely with the specialmoves coding standards.

ZenCoding

This is the only try-it-out-and-see-what-sticks package I’m allowing myself at present.

Prefixr

Runs a block of CSS through the Prefixr API.

Djaneiro and SetDjangoSyntax

Djaneiro adds Django support and SetDjangoSyntax, as you’d imagine, attemps to set syntax to Django when appropriate. The latter requires Djaneiro.

Theme

I’m using Made of Code.

Settings

Fairly minimal here.

"auto_complete_commit_on_tab": true,
"ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true,
"rulers":
[
    150
],
"translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
"trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true,
"word_wrap": false

The whitespace settings can be problematic when working on projects with people who aren’t as fastidious about such things. If that happens, they can be over-ridden in per-project settings.

Keyboard Bindings

Again, I’ve kept this pretty minimal.

({ "keys": ["super+alt+["], "command": "reindent" },
{ "keys": ["super+k"
- "super+t"], "command": "title_case" })

Very minimal, in fact. This is mostly because the Sublime Text defaults are generally sane.

The reindent command is stolen from TextMate. My muscle memory had a hard time coping without that one.

I’m not sure why the title case isn’t set as a default, as there are matching upper case and lower case shortcuts.