A code editor is a very personal choice for a developer. Over the years, I’ve used Notepad++, Pico, Nano, Dreamweaver, and ColdFusion Builder and they all have their pluses and minuses. Recently, I’ve started using Sublime Text 2. It doesn’t hog your system resources and isn’t littered with controls but it has more features than a lot of the big IDEs out there.
It uses TextMate bundles for expansion, has tab ripping (a personal must have), spell checking, and easy tag completion. That is just the tip of the iceberg, though
I figured that I would compile a “top 5 tips” list for getting started with Sublime Text 2.
Out of the box, Sublime Text 2 supports a lot of languages but ColdFusion isn’t in that list. Luckily, Somebody has developed a plugin to add support. With the plugin installed, you can use the tab key to complete tags. Want to see an example of how to use it? Check out this screencast.
If you are like me, you use TortoiseSVN a heck of a lot. Want to integrate it into Sublime? Well, there’s a plugin for that. Prefer Git? It works with TortoiseGIT also.
Some people like to live on the edge. With the risk of walking the dangerous path, you get to enjoy the rewards (like getting new features before the guy in the next cubical). If you want to get the dev build of Sublime, it is there and waiting for you.
Every now and then, you find yourself needing to edit multiple instances of the same function reference or variable name. If you hold down the control key, you can click in multiple places or highlight many words and it will create multiple cursors for you. This way, you only have to type the chunk of text once.
One of the things that makes Sublime so powerful is that you can get to almost anything through keyboard shortcuts. Don’t know what the shortcut, that you are looking for it? Hit control+shift+p and you can browse through all of them.