
My Top Sublime Text 2 Plugins - phatbyte
http://www.henriquebarroso.com/my-top-10sublime-2-plugins/
======
JonnieCache
If you use a dark color scheme, you should install a theme that has a
similarly dark background for the sidebar.

The "Soda Dark" theme goes well with the default color scheme. (The ui theme
is separate from the syntax highlighting color scheme, you don't have to use
the text colors seen on the github examples)

<https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/>

In terms of plugins, apart from the ones mentioned here, Quick File Creator is
indispensable: <https://github.com/noklesta/SublimeQuickFileCreator>

Not a plugin, but if you haven't realised it yet, know that the multiple
cursors each come with their own separate clipboard. Learning how to combine
this with the move and select by word and the parenthesis-movement commands is
what will make the vim users eventually respect you.

Oh and you can hack your language syntax definition files to make more things
apart from function definitions turn up in the function browser. This is
especially useful for ruby DSLs, sinatra etc.

~~~
wesbos
I've created a theme + colour scheme called cobalt2

<http://wesbos.com/cobalt2-theme-sublime-text-2/>

~~~
dubcanada
This may seem like a funny question, but how do you find staring at blue all
day long? It just seems like too much of a single colour too me.

~~~
groovy2shoes
Back in the day, that's all we had. Microsoft editors were all white-on-blue
and Borland editors were all yellow-on-blue. We didn't even have syntax
highlighting. And some of us liked it that way. Get off my lawn!

~~~
primitur
pfft, you had blue? ;) I was happy to finally, one day, have a CURSOR! Oh
crap, it blinks! Wow, high tech type!

Well, all this fun talk of SublimeText2, and my .2c .. I have been using ST2
for a long time now as an editor for MOAI, in which facility it really works
well and .. well I've come to really love the editor, like love it, but am a
vim user, 100%, and often get sad when I switch back and forth .. ;(

ST2, for MOAI and the Lua language, actually is really a sublime IDE
experience, and imho the word sublime can be applied to this experience: I am
using the same editor on both editor'ish platforms (osx, linux), and then
building an app with its own language/VM wordspace that runs on .. everything
.. iOS/OSX/Linux/Win/NCl/etc.

Right now in space-cadet mode, hacking on a laptop in some cafe, I sit in
SublimeText2 .. hit alt-R, the MOAI app runs, its great, I commit to repo, the
buildserver builds and runs the very same app on the nexus7, iphone5, pandora,
osx, linux desktops, and various other sundry devices around the place.

In this capacity, ST2 has mastered my needs for integrated development. I
guess I should learn how to read HN with it, next ..

------
pearkes
If you write Go, definitely check out GoSublime[1]. It's very powerful and
gives you an IDE like environment inside Sublime Text 2.

[1] <https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime>

~~~
swdunlop
Seconded; GoSublime gives you a nice REPL for Go's build and test commands,
package completion and linting. It is the second Sublime Package I install,
after Package Control and before my own Antiki.

------
chesh
Why I love ST2: multi-platform, fuzzy search, plugins, multiple cursors, JSON
config files.

My setup:

\- Package Control plugin: the very first thing you should setup after
installing ST2 (it should really be a part of ST2)

\- Next step sync config files over Dropbox to get exactly the same editing
environment from Win, Mac, and Linux

    
    
      - move the /User folder under "Sublime Text 2/Packages" over to Dropbox/ST2/User
    
      - in Win goto CMD and from the %APPDATA%\Sublime Text 2\Packages folder enter: mklink /D "User" "path to\My Dropbox\ST2\User"
    
      - in Mac OSX/Linux goto the Packages folder (you can find the location under >Preferences>Browse Preferences) and enter: ln -s pathto/Dropbox/Sublime\ Text\ 2/User ./User
    
      - the fantastic thing with this setup is that in any new machines, Package Control will automatically take care of installing any missing plugins
    

\- Keybindings: tons of customizations to suit what I am used to and work
across all OS's

\- Theme: Soda Dark

\- Colors: Made of Code

\- My favorite plugins: Alignment, Bracket Highlighter, Emmett, FileDiffs,
SublimeCodeIntel, SublimeLinter, Tag

ST2 is the best investment I have made in software apart from open source.

~~~
unwiredben
Thanks for the tip on linking the config folder to Dropbox. That's super
effective!

------
benatkin
If you bring Sublime into a unix environment, please make it add line endings.
This is what vim and emacs do by default.
[https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/Newline-
at...](https://github.com/editorconfig/editorconfig/wiki/Newline-at-End-of-
File-Support)

~~~
notJim
This is interesting. I guess it's so that if you cat a file, it doesn't
clobber your cursor? I've always noticed that git will say "No new line at end
of file", but I've never really known if that's a bad or good thing, or why it
matters.

~~~
benatkin
When someone opens up a file created with Sublime Text 2 with vim or emacs and
saves it, it clutters the commit messages. It's clutter whether the file
contains other changes or not. It still shows up in diffs unless you suppress
whitespace.

~~~
martinced
First it's obvious (but hardly anyone ever cares about it) that that such
trivial things are still issues just show how much our diff tools are still in
the stone age (for a start they should be able to figure out that the two
source file: one with the ending and the other without are semantically
identical)... But I'll bite.

First the parent mentioned "if you're on Un _x". What makes you think_ you*
are the one correct with your text editor's behavior and that the traditional
Un _xy way of doing it is not correct? (and OS X is a Un_ x variant).

Then it's trivial to modify Emacs so that it exhibit the behavior you want. Is
it trivial to modify Sublime Text Editor 2 to that it behaves on Un*x like vim
and Emacs do?

I'll never ever understand "programmers" who aren't using a programmable text
editor.

But I don't care: time is on my side. Emacs was there 35 years and still shall
exist long after all these glorified Notepad shall long be dead ; )

~~~
nicholassmith
"I'll never ever understand "programmers" who aren't using a programmable text
editor."

I'll never understand people that want to spend hours configuring their text
editor, despite how much more productive they say it makes them. Sublime is
perfectly programmable through judicious use of plugins and snippets anyway.

A subset of that, I'll never understand emacs users.

~~~
jasonm23
You can use both Emacs and vim in this "judicious use of plugins" style, and
there's such an abundance of starter kits and battle tested configurations
that the default of either is nothing you need to spend hours configuring your
way out of.... There's a reason why these tools are so long lasting, and both
absorb every new feature displayed by new editors. TextMate is clearly
surpassed by Sublime, even though you could feasibly mod it to adopt those
features which make ST2 better.

Emacs (and possibly Vim) could also implement any feature you could reasonably
expect from a text editor, and in many cases it already has them, you maybe
just don't know.

But this is 2013, and you're not alone, people all around the world are
improving Emacs all the time, and have been for 30 years+ ... you don't HAVE
to do all the work, you can just use it.

As the man says, Emacs and Vim will be here long after John Skinner has got
tired of ST2 and quits developing it.

------
slurry
Not to go all Stallmanesque here, but doesn't it bother you to use a
proprietary text editor when there are so many excellent free/open-source ones
around?

~~~
notJim
This question really only makes sense to me from a Stallmanesque standpoint
though (unless you don't have much money for some reason, in which case the
financial considerations come into play.)

Surely unless you have some ideological reason to pick a FOSS editor, you'll
simply use the best one available.

~~~
georgemcbay
I'm certainly not Stallmanesque and I've got money -- in fact, I'm a
registered owner of Sublime Text 2, but there is at least one real-world
practical way in which ST2 being OSS would be preferable for me. I
increasingly do my coding on ARM-based Linux devices as opposed to x86-based
ones and ST2 has no ARM build, and repeated requests asking for one are, as
far as I've seen, summarily ignored by the author.

If ST2 were OSS I could build it for ARM/Linux myself, everything it relies on
is already available on those platforms. But it isn't, so I've had to quit
using it and recommending it to others.

~~~
jahewson
Doesn't it bother you to use a propitiatory CPU architecture such as ARM?
</sarcasm>

------
kaolinite
If you want to read Hacker News whilst inside Sublime, check out my plugin:
<https://github.com/dotty/HackerNews-SublimeTextPlugin> (or alternatively,
search "hacker news" in package control).

------
frewsxcv
I don't want to start a flame war; I don't consider myself a die hard vim
user: What are reasons why I should switch to Sublime Text 2?

~~~
grimgrin
If you're not a die hard vim user but do enjoy vim navigation/insertion styles
then you may want to try out Sublime's Vintage mode:

<http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html>

~~~
notJim
I tried this after learning vim, and it seemed to suffer from an uncanny
valley problem. Once you get into the flow of things, you'll start treating it
like vim, and then when something suddenly behaves slightly different or
doesn't work at all, it's very disruptive. I can't think of a specific example
right now unfortunately, as that was a while ago, but it happened regularly.

------
flexterra
You might also want to try (my plugin) BrowserRefresh: Save the file you are
working on and refresh your browser (or many browsers) with one keystroke.

<http://gcollazo.github.com/BrowserRefresh-Sublime/>

#ShamelessPlug

------
tednaleid
Sublime Text 2 plugin writing is surprisingly easy via python. I recently
wrote a plugin (SublimeJump <https://github.com/tednaleid/SublimeJump>) to let
you jump to any visible character with a couple of keystrokes. It's similar to
AceJump (emacs) or EasyMotion (vim) if you're familiar with those.

~~~
mode80
I've been waiting for this! Thanks tednaleid.

------
Kaivo
You can also check Tuts+ free tutorial about ST2. It contains a list of
interesting plugins (most of them mentionned in this article) alongside others
I find quite useful.

[https://tutsplus.com/course/improve-workflow-in-sublime-
text...](https://tutsplus.com/course/improve-workflow-in-sublime-text-2/)

------
taitems
I would avoid Prefixr like the plague as it's broken to the point of being
destructive, and not maintained. Installed it today before I saw this post,
stopped using it immediately.

<https://github.com/wbond/sublime_prefixr/issues/4>

------
stared
A nice selection (for me (i.e.: I use): Package Manager, SublimeLinter,
SublimeCodeIntel, Git).

Additionally, as a scientist, I use a lot (and like a lot)
<https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools>.

------
swah
I think we might get ST3 soon - there haven't been updates for half an year
now.

~~~
JonnieCache
He earned a 6 month holiday considering the workrate he put in on those early
builds, and the amount of cash he must have made in the intervening time.

It's not like the thing is riddled with outstanding issues.

~~~
swah
Its true. I expect and would pay around 50 USD again for it, though.

------
stinos
I really like the general way of working with SublimeText, but there's one
major reason I simply cannot use it for the job: it is terribly slow with
large files. One of the things we have to do often is open a >10mb logfile on
a cifs share and quickly search through it. It takes ST2 over 10seconds to
open the file. The same for each refresh of the file. Even wordpad on Windows
loads the file faster, so there seems to be something quite off at the core
side of things.

~~~
ditoa
I have the same issues regarding load speed on large files. I am a long time
UltraEdit user and it is the fastest editor on Windows for working with large
files that I have found. Unfortunately UltraEdit has a pretty awful UX
compared to modern software. It is still very much a Windows 9x app which kind
of sucks. Also it has some annoying as hell Unicode issues which is why I
ended up switching to Sublime Text for 99% of my work and just keep UltraEdit
around for those one a month moments.

~~~
stinos
well I'm using Notepad++ atm and it's fast as well. It also has the awesome
feature (Opera also has it) that you can close tabs by doubleclicking them.
Once you get used to that it's extremely hard to not use it everywhere..

~~~
mobweb
OS X has CMD+W which also can be used almost everywhere, including Sublime
Text, to close a tab.

~~~
stinos
yes I know. Practically everything under Windows uses Ctrl+W as well for
closing tabs/windows.

------
javajosh
It's spelled "Emmet" (docs.emmet.io) and it's more widely known as "Zen
Coding". (I asked the author about the name change and forgot why now - some
sort of trademark dispute).

~~~
nobleach
Yeah, it seems like Emmet removed one of my favorite features with Zencoding.
I could hop into a string of HTML attributes and hit "." or "#" and it would
create a new attribute of class="|" or id="|" respectively, and place the
cursor in between the quotes.

~~~
javajosh
Uh, I use Emmet every day, and it certainly does have that feature. Perhaps
your expansion hot key is different.

~~~
nobleach
I never had to use a hotkey in the past. I do for regular expansion, and I
haven't looked into why koans stopped working, but I imagine that is hotkey
related.

------
visarga
Does it have decent SFTP out of the box or as a free plugin? I'd like one of
those persistent SFTP browsers, not the default one which does not follow the
principle of least astonishment - it uses a custom interface where I have to
select the SFTP server every time I want to open another file and there is no
multiple selection. It looks like an original UI design invented by a
programmer with no UI design experience, reinventing the wheel.

~~~
testrecord
<http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp>

------
mambodog
I found SublimeCodeIntel to be unreliable, so I use SublimeCTags[1]. I've also
bound mouse3 to navigate to a function definition in my User .sublime-mousemap
file:

    
    
        {
        	"button": "button3",
        	"count": 1,
        	"press_command": "drag_select",
        	"command": "navigate_to_definition"
        }
    

However, it doesn't work as well for OO code.

[1] <https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags>

------
dreeves
The one thing holding me back from Sublime Text is fonts. I really want the
Fixed 6x13 font (like xterms use) which requires anti-aliasing turned off.

Does anyone know if that's possible in Sublime Text?

Link to the xterm font: <http://yootles.com/outbox/FixedMedium6x13.dfont>

PS: It also needs the line spacing set to .8 which I've found a way to do in
TextMate and Terminal.app.

~~~
dkulchenko
Both are possible through Sublime's config file.

See [http://www.reddshift.com/2011/10/turn-off-anti-alias-for-
sub...](http://www.reddshift.com/2011/10/turn-off-anti-alias-for-sublime-
text-2.html) for how to turn off anti-aliasing, and
[https://gist.github.com/1149379#file-sublime-
text-2-settings...](https://gist.github.com/1149379#file-sublime-
text-2-settings-json-L27) for line spacing.

------
maebert
#1 should be SublimeCodeIntel, not SublimeLinter - otherwise thanks for this
list, I didn't use Emment before but will certainly give it a spin.

~~~
Osiris
I've never gotten that plugin to work well with my PHP code. Code complete is
awful. I've switched over to PhpStorm for PHP code because it has static
analysis and refactoring.

~~~
blindhippo
It's worked intermittently for me in PHP but overall it's really buggy.

I've had some luck using the branch version which you can grab here:
<https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeCodeIntel>

------
SeanDav
I tried using ST2, but it lacks one basic feature that is essential to me. It
will automatically update a loaded file with any changes made externally. This
is fine, except when you don't want it to do this and then discover there is
no way to toggle this behaviour.

It should just be a simple configuration option but until it is added then
this is a deal breaker.

~~~
mobweb
I just tested this because ST has notified me in the past when an item was
changed, see: <http://i.minus.com/jVzFslpF9xhuo.png>

BUT it seems that this doesn't always work. I just tested with a newly created
file and for some reason there was no warning, it just reloaded the file.

~~~
jackmoore
I believe you can undo the update with ctrl+z

------
whytookay
These are all really cool, and I look forward to checking them out!

On a side note:

Does anybody know of a plugin for ST2, or another editor that works well for
coding that allows for a semi-transparent/transparent background? (for
Windows) I've been searching for the last few weeks to no avail, and was
hoping that somebody here might have encountered something.

------
zvrba
Does it support REPL for various interpreters? (emacs has ESS for R, SLIME for
LISP, surely others.)

I couldn't find anything about this in the docs (just quick browsing) and
nothing was apparent in the menus after I've tried to install it. So.. just
asking, not trying to start a flame war :)

~~~
drcongo
<https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL>

------
AlexanderZ
If you are using Rails, have a look at this plugin: [http://say26.com/rails-
file-switcher-plugin-for-sublime-text...](http://say26.com/rails-file-
switcher-plugin-for-sublime-text-2)

It allows you to switch between your models, controllers and views really
fast.

------
togasystems
I just started using CTags for php development. It allows you to move to class
and function declarations. Great for large projects and unknown code.

Link to plugin: <https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags>

~~~
beefsack
I've always struggled to get SublimeCodeIntel to work under Linux, and when
I've seen it work, it's not very good.

CTags is absolutely fantastic though, I live and die by it in large code
bases. It's backed by ctags on the system too, so it has an impressive list of
supported languages.

------
hybrid11
Live reload is also an awesome plugin, it automatically refreshes the content
in your browser when it changes.

<https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2>

------
darkmuck
Why should I switch when jEdit does mostly just fine and its OSS?

------
xedarius
Does anyone know of a plugin that allows Sublime to handle XML files
correctly? By correctly I'm mainly talking about auto-formatting and generally
understanding how XML is indented.

Thanks

------
Gigablah
I used SublimeCodeIntel some time ago and while it worked as advertised, I
ended up having to remove it since it was causing ST2 to hang especially on
large codebases.

------
lunixbochs
For everyone using SublimeLinter - I'm curious if you've tried sublimelint
(the parent project) recently and if there's any reason you chose
SublimeLinter over it.

------
humbyvaldes
LiveReload is one of my favorites <https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-
sublimetext2>

------
purephase
The bracket highlighter is awesome. So simple, yet powerful. I've been using
it for the past 20min and I'm not sure how I survived without it. ;)

------
rlander
SublimeREPL should be on this list. It's an interactive repl inside ST, much
like emacs inferior lisp mode, for any language with a repl.

~~~
stared
Yes, it's useful and nice (maybe except for keybindings):

SublimeREPL - run an interpreter inside ST2 (Clojure, CoffeeScript, F#,
Groovy, Haskell, Lua, MozRepl, NodeJS, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, shell or
configure one yourself) <https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL>

------
rglover
Has anyone switched from Coda (2) to Sublime Text? I've consider using ST but
haven't dug in enough to know the differences.

~~~
dubcanada
I find Coda to have too much stuff. I don't want something that has a bunch of
fancy icons and I have to scroll left/right to find my files and has 15
different areas all with extra garbage you don't need (such as the entire
right bar which is mostly useless too me).

However the project control part of Coda is amazing.

So it's a matter of how experienced web developer and what exactly do you do?
If you do mostly HTML/CSS/JS, then Coda is for you. If you do mostly other
stuff hardcore JS, ruby, php, lua, blah blah blah. I'd say sublime.

~~~
LukaD
It's also a matter of which OS you use. :) ST is cross platform and it's great
to have a good text editor available when you have to use Windows.

------
mikevm
Sublime is a very cool editor, but since you can't debug in it, I guess it's
only useful for web developers.

~~~
pretoriusB
How does this comment make any sense?

For one, web developers debug too. Javascript, PHP, Ruby, whatever.

Second, you can very much debug in Sublime (whatever that means). Do you mean
something like an integrated debugger, like say XCode/VS have?

A lot of developers use external tools for that, like gdb et al, depending on
the language.

Tons of developers of any kind use sublime, from C to Go.

~~~
mikevm
Oh yeah, I meant stepping through code. I'm used to debugging in IDEs
(Eclipse, Visual Studio), so command-line debugging using GDB is a major pain
in the ass.

------
VoiceOfWisdom
I believe on 1, you meant for the title to be Sublime Code Intel.

~~~
benaiah
No, the plugin's name is Sublime CodeIntel (without the space). That's what it
is in both the repository and package manager.

~~~
garg
It originally said SublimeLinter instead of Sublime CodeIntel

------
drivebyacct2
SideBar Enhancements is on my "avoid" list. If I remove it, even after
restarting Sublime, the context menu for the sidebar is permanently empty.

~~~
brandoncor
Same thing happened to me. I had no choice but to re-enable it since I didn't
want to reinstall Sublime Text itself.

~~~
ksherlock
<https://github.com/titoBouzout/SideBarEnhancements/issues/18>

~~~
drivebyacct2
Thank you thank you thank you!

------
martinced
What's the fuss with multiple cursor? Emacs has these too (of course) but
seriously WTF!?

Who programs in languages so mediocre that there are repetition everywhere and
that working is so repetitive that having multiple cursors actually helps?

Do you really _have_ to enter the same thing so often that having "multiple
cursors" makes you more productive and is considered a "killer feature"!?

All I see is that if you need that you have way too much repetition in your
"code".

I don't like repetitive stuff. That's what computers are good for. That's what
I do as a programmer: I carefully craft my tools so that all the stupid
repetitive tasks are done by my programs (or by my programmable text editor).

~~~
Silhouette
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not just
trolling.

Multiple cursors can be useful for doing things like quick renames, which
itself is already useful in a general text editor that is used with many
different file formats.

However, for me, they are often more useful because you can pick out general
patterns of text/symbols and do the same thing to all of them. Want an extra
<th></th> just after each <tr> in four lines of an HTML file? No problem. Want
to split a list of function parameters onto separate lines when they don't fit
on one any more, or the other way around? No problem.

Sure, in many cases you could do these things with a find-and-replace as well,
but that might involve making a selection to limit the scope of the replace
operation, setting up some sort of regex to make sure you only find the copies
of the original text you actually want, setting up another regex to do the
replacement without disrupting anything else nearby, and so on. Using multiple
cursors is often much more efficient.

