About this page

This page is there to quickly describe how I use on a daily basis the awesome Sublime Text 3, a multi-platform text editor.

This article contains quick explanation of the installation and use of Sublime Text (2 or 3), and also a list of the best plugins that I use with ST3, links to my configuration files and general remarks.

(And weirdly, this page is one of the more popular of my website. Please contact me if you have any suggestion to improve it, or to say thanks if this page has been useful to you :) !)

About Sublime Text 3

The official website is www.SublimeText.com/3. My article focuses on version 3 of Sublime Text (currently, version 3.083, released the 26th of March 2015).

My configuration

My configuration files, scripts and snippets of buildings for Sublime Text 3 are all in the folder publis/ST3.

To use one of these files (.sublime-settings, .sublime-snippet, .sublime-macro or .sublime-build), just copy it into your Packages/User folder. More details for the .sublime-settings files, or the .sublime-build files.

The best plugins?

All of these plugins are free, almost all are free and open-source, and they are all installable from the package manager (Ctrl+Shift+P: "Package Control: Install Package")

For each packet quoted below, a link to the information page on packagecontrol.io/packages/ is given.

Small customization plugins:

• BracketHighlighter improves how opening and closing parentheses, and opening and closing tags are colored ((, [, {, < etc).
• BufferScroll is interesting because it allows to keep in mind absolutely all positional information (sliders panel, buffer etc. for each file and each window).
• Clickable URLs is simple but great: to highlight the URLs (local or Internet) addresses, and open them with a keyboard shortcut.
• Dictionaries a for multi-lingual spell-check (English, French, ...).
• The small GitGutter will help to visualize the difference of each line of each file regarding the last committed version for the git repository in which it is located (visually great to see the changes since the last commit).
• Gremlins help to visualize dangerous non-visible UTF-8 caracters, like odd and invisible whitespace characters.
• Language - French - Français also adds various dictionaries for French.
• Status Bar Weather adds unnecessary weather in the status bar at the bottom. Useless but fun. Yeah, your text editor can tell you the weather!
• Boxy Theme (with "Boxy Tomorrow") is my favorite theme, it brings a very refined but perfectly all smooth interface, suitable for optimum productivity and is cool with your eyes. It also have awesome icons for your side-bar!

Plugins that add great features:

• Calculate to easily create ordered lists (among many other things): write i+1 on each line, then one hit of Ctrl+Maj+c and pouf, the multi-selection is now 1, 2, ..., n.
• DictionaryAutoComplete enables auto-completion to integrate the words of dictionaries used for spell checking. Quite cool but can quickly be boring. Can be useful if you write prose and not code (project report, poetry etc).
• HighlightWords to always highlight some specific words (for instance, TODO or FIXME).
• IncDecValue allows to easily increment or decrement numbers, dates or colors.
• InsertDate allows to easily add today's date with a key shortcut (F5 by default), like this: Wednesday 25 November 2015, 22:21:57.
• LineEndings to highlight and easily erase the painful (and unnecessary) spaces at the end of lines.
• MakeCommands will launch from the control panel of any rule of construction from a Makefile. It's simple, but purely awesome! I use a lot of Makefile for my various projects. Such an efficient idea in fact!
• SideBarEnhancements makes the sidebar much more useful.
• The wonderful SublimeGit (installable from packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeGit). Allows a full integration of git via the control panel. Free but annoys you regularly to ask you buy a (useless) 10$ commercial license... But it is really awesome, so you will support this. GitSavvy seems to be a good free and open-source alternative.
• TableEditor is great to easily edit tables in plain text documents (for Markdown, reStructedText, pandoc etc). Very well documented and quite complete.
• Terminal to open a terminal (ie. a console) already in the correct folder. I never use it, but it works well. More details on wbond.net/sublime_packages/terminal.
• Wakatime to use Wakatime.com (read this other article for more explanations).
• WordCount adds a counter for words (and pages optionnally) in the information bar. Small and simple but useful!

A better support for some languages:

• AutoDocstring simplifies and improve significantly the writing of Python docstrings (2 or 3), and even supports the two popular styles Google docstring and Numpy docstring.
• ColorHighlighter highlights the colors in a CSS, HTML or LaTeX file (or any file), for instance red will be colored :red:`red`. Simple but great, very useful when editing CSS or colorful LaTeX files.
• ColorPicker allows you to select a color, and insert it as is. Very handy when writing CSS or HTML.
• Gnuplot provides good support for programming with GNUPlot v4+.
• JSONLint automatically checks the correctness of any edited JSON file (and ST conf' files are JSON).
• LaTeX-plus could improve the use of LaTeX in ST (see the doc).
• Markdown Extended is supposed to improve the syntax coloring for Markdown, lightweight markup language, designed for easy preparation of document. I use Markdown especially via my project StrapDownJS ! (See an example ?)
• nginx improve the syntax coloring for config files for the awesome NGinx web server.
• OCaml improve a little bit the syntax coloring for the two languages caml-light and OCaml. To be used with OCaml Autocompletion.
• GNU Octave Completions and Matlab Completions adds functions and commands from GNU Octave or MATLAB to the completion window.
• RestructuredText Improved improve significantly the syntax coloring for reStructedText, the markup language used by Sphinx and the official Python documentation (and so for this page and my site). To be used with these snippets for rST.
• requirements.txt adds a very good support for Python requirements.txt files.
• TWiki for its color theme, brilliantly balanced and well colored. I use their syntax coloring theme TWiki "Monokai for Markup" for every language! After testing a lot of them, it really is my favorite color theme!

Heavier plugins, or plugins designed for a specific language:

• MagicPython improves the syntax coloring for Python (it recognizes the new syntax features that came in the last versions 3.5 and 3.6).
• MatlabFilenameAutoComplete adds the filename of the Matlab/Octave functions (ie the local files file.m) to the automatic tab completion. It is a way to compensate with the borring fact that Matlab/Octave asks to write any function as a seperate file...
• The brilliant SublimeLinter checks the code you write for syntax error as you write it (Spyder does the same for Python, for example). Quite extraordinary! Anaconda IDE is far more powerful but specific to Python. There is plenty of awesome linters: annotations, chktex, flake8, json, mdl, pylint, shellcheck.
• LaTeXing (installable from packagecontrol.io/packages/LaTeXing), improve support for \(\LaTeX{}\).
• SendText+ is convenient to quickly "send" some code to an open terminal in another window (to work with Python, Octave, R, bash or anyother toplevel).
• SublimeCodeIntel is supposed to enable intelligent access to a program recognizing the definitions of variables, functions, classes, etc., it is expected to "jump" directly to the definition of any element of the program (I do not like it).
• Emmet (installable from packagecontrol.io/packages/Emmet), improves writing HTML, CSS and Javascript documents quite magically. It surely takes time to master its features, but I guess it's worth it!

Additional advice

As for every powerful and awesome software, Sublime Text 3 will require a certain training time.

Additional credit

Thanks to Jill-Jênn Vie for advising me to use Sublime Text 3 (in Octobre 2013).