Recently, I’ve had one of those events in my professional life. They happen (for me) even less frequently than changing jobs. Yes, I have changed my preferred text editor. gasp!
I’ve moved from Komodo, which is a very competent and extensible (with Javascript!) editor, to the new kid on the block, Sublime Text 2. Sublime is a product still in beta, but I can recommend it as being definitely stable enough for every day use.
I’ll apologise up front if the following sounds too gushing or like an advertising pitch. I have no commercial interest in the product whatsoever, I actually just really like it and want others to try it out.
When starting with Sublime, the first thing you’ll notice is how amazingly fast it is. I am still amazed at how quickly it starts and continues to be, even on my little old netbook. The second thing is that you’ll see that Sublime is a text editor made by programmers for programmers. The default colour scheme is a very pleasing and eye-friendly pastels on dark grey, the interface is absolutely no-nonsense: no toolbars; no buttons for new file, save, cut, copy or paste; just one menu bar, an (albeit slightly gimmicky IMO) “minimap” of the file, and your code. All commands are available from a “command palette” which is opened via a key binding. Similarly, opening project files or searching for functions is done with another palette. These palettes, apart from being super-quick, also provide fuzzy text matching. For example, to make the selected text upper case, I just select the text, then press Ctrl+Shift+P, and type “chup”, which will find “CHange text to UPper case”, or if I want to open “lib/test/PolygonTest.js”, Ctrl+P and “l/t/p” or “PolTe” or whatever narrows it down enough with the minimum amount of typing. Everything is possible without even touching your mouse.
Probably the most surprising thing is the configuration settings. Every programmer worth his salt will fiddle and adjust settings to get the work environment Just Right, and usually this means poring through dialog after dialog of checkboxes and pull-downs. In Sublime, all the configuration (yes, ALL) is done via JSON text files. This is shocking at first, but amazingly liberating once you start to use it. As a programmer, every day you build complex data-structures capable of modelling anything by combining numbers and strings into nested arrays and maps — why couldn’t you configure a text editor in the same way? Settings are applied instantly upon save, meaning you can test out each of the settings very easily and get it just how you like it. Even key bindings are handled this way. Every interaction you have, from moving the cursor, to basic copy/paste/save actions, even to what happens when you click a mouse button is configurable. Even better though is that you can bind the same key combo to several actions and then affix conditions (referred to as “context” in the config) to that setting. For example, the “enter” key can add a new line in regular text, but you can also add another binding which makes it prepend commenting characters (//) if the current context is a comment. Triple-click might normally select a line, but if it’s on a function definition it could select the entire function body for you. After all this tweaking, you can commit your plain-text settings to version control for portability between your workstations, which is very handy!
One other feature I’ve not seen in any other editor is multiple selections. Komodo and other editors (VI, Emacs…) have “block editing” where you can make rectangular selections and edits across rows and columns. This is particularly useful for modifying blocks of repetitive code which happen to align vertically. Sublime takes that a step further by allowing for multiple selections. It is surprisingly useful for reformatting code, and as a replacement for Find-and-Replace. Just select (let’s say) the variable you want to rename, and hit Ctrl+D. The next occurrence of that word will get selected. Repeat as often as you like, the just start typing and you’ll be typing in multiple discrete locations. This feature alone has reduced the amount of macros and regexes I use to clean up text drastically. You’ll wonder how you lived without it, seriously.
The last thing I want to mention is the fledgling, but fast-growing developer community around Sublime. As a tool for programmers, its been designed to be extended with plugins, written in Python. What’s even better is that there’s a package repository plugin called Package Control, written by Will Bond, that completely streamlines the plugin installation and upgrade process integrated directly into the editor. Plugins are hosted on Github or Bitbucket and you can pull the upgrades as their published. After installing that package (which you can do just by pasting a command into the integrated python shell..!), all the available packages are shown in a command palette, and are installed without even requiring a restart. Since the code for the plugins is on Github, it’s really easy to fork it and send in pull requests if you find a bug, too. I highly recommend it!
And there’s just enough time for a quick little shout-out for one of my own plugins. If you’re writing Javascript or PHP with Sublime, you should totally install the JSDocs plugin. You can install it with the aforementioned Package Control plugin, or there’s instructions on the Github page. This plugin makes writing Javadoc-style comments a breeze by adding context-sensitive autocompletes, comment-aware linebreaking, and it even inspects your code to prefill @param and @return tags in a docblock. The readme file has much more information and many examples. If you run into any problems, leave me a note in the issue tracker and I’ll get right onto it!