Introduction to Sublime Text – A Sophisticated Code Editor

In this video article, we’ll be taking a first look at Sublime Text, a wonderful and fast coding editor loved by a lot of developers. It’s ease of use, blazing fast speed and easy extension by the use of packages makes it great.

If you are coming from the world of IDE, this is going to be a tiny bit different at the beginning but I’m sure with the passage of time and continuous use of Sublime Text, you’ll eventually fall in love with it.

So let’s get started and install Sublime Text in the system. Open http://www.sublimetext.com/download in your browser of choice and download the version suited for your Operating System. After successful installation, you should open up Sublime Text.

When you first open up Sublime Text, it doesn’t look much but with a little configuration and customization it can prove to be a great coding tool. First up, let’s make some necessary configuration changes to the editor to make it look more appealing. Although, you are free to change these settings to suit your needs.

To update the editor settings, navigate to the menu bar option Sublime Text -> Preferences -> Settings on the Mac and Tools -> Preferences -> Setttings on Windows. I’m not a Windows user so that could be a little different. On Mac, you can also open up the Settings by pressing Command + ,. Make sure you find the setting what you want to change in Settings -> Default panel (left hand side), copy it over to the User Settings (right hand side) and then change it to suit your needs.

I have shared a couple of Sublime Text settings below that I usually prefer but you can freely change them to whatever you like.

Sublime Settings

{
    "font_size": 16,
    "spell_check": true,
    "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
    "indent_to_bracket": true,
    "highlight_line": true,
    "line_padding_top": 8,
    "line_padding_bottom": 8,
    "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true,
    "ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true,
    "bold_folder_labels": true,
    "default_line_ending": "unix",
    "use_simple_full_screen": true,
    "highlight_modified_tabs": true
}

Before finishing up this article, I would like to get one more thing done. Let’s install the Package Control extension for Sublime Text to enable us to install 3rd party packages to extend its base functionality. You can do that by going over to Tools -> Install Package Control. This will install Package Control in Sublime Text.

That’s it for this tutorial, in the next tutorial I’ll be sharing a couple of shortcut keys with you to enable you to work much faster by touching the mouse very less and doing most of your work from the keyboard including most of the navigation in Sublime Text.

Till next time, Good Bye.