{"id":577,"date":"2012-05-11T14:41:35","date_gmt":"2012-05-11T18:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jetmore.org\/john\/blog\/?p=577"},"modified":"2013-02-20T15:54:56","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T19:54:56","slug":"getting-up-to-speed-with-sublime-text-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jetmore.org\/john\/blog\/2012\/05\/getting-up-to-speed-with-sublime-text-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Up To Speed With Sublime Text 2 – Notes For Notepad++ Users"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently started a love affair with the Sublime Text 2<\/a> text editor. Looking around the web, I’m certainly not alone, and there are many great tips and tricks posts. I probably can’t write anything better than what’s already out there, so this post is really just an attempt to document for my future self my own customization decisions and the logic behind my choices.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I Need Another Text Editor Like I Need a Hole In The Head<\/h1>\n

An important piece of context for this post: I went looking for a new editor specifically because I was annoyed at switching between BBEdit<\/a> on Mac and Notepad++<\/a> on Windows (I also use vi\/vim\/gvim on all platforms, but am not annoyed in the least with it). If either BBEdit of Notepad++ were on both platforms, I would be using it and not considering ST2. But they aren’t, and I am, and so much of this post is “how do I replicate this feature in Notepad++” or “I wish this cool BBEdit thing would work”. There’s even the short term effect of turning off interesting features in ST2 because I found them distracting. Long term I will revisit these choices, but in the short term my goal was to make ST2 as usable as BBEdit or Notepad++ as quickly as possible, even if that mean losing possible ST2 functionality.<\/p>\n

Pay The Man<\/h1>\n

Sublime Text 2 is commercial software. It’s free to use right now (it is in beta) but the author reserves the right to charge in the future. After I used it for a while I didn’t need to wait. This software is definitely worth the $59 I paid for it, and I hope it motivates the author to keep working on it.<\/p>\n

Settings<\/h1>\n

I might as well start this by jumping straight into the user settings. ST2 uses very readable JSON files to control things like preferences and keybindings. Setting “preferences” is really just opening a JSON file in the editor itself and typing away. All of the defaults are in a well-commented file, available from the “Settings – Default” menu option. Here’s a snippet of the file contents:<\/p>\n

\r\n    \/\/ Set to true to insert spaces when tab is pressed\r\n    "translate_tabs_to_spaces": false,\r\n\r\n    \/\/ If translate_tabs_to_spaces is true, use_tab_stops will make tab and\r\n    \/\/ backspace insert\/delete up to the next tabstop\r\n    "use_tab_stops": true,\r\n\r\n    \/\/ Set to false to disable detection of tabs vs. spaces on load\r\n    "detect_indentation": true,\r\n\r\n    \/\/ Calculates indentation automatically when pressing enter\r\n    "auto_indent": true,\r\n<\/pre>\n
Two great side effect of using a commented text file for configuration:  Finding an option is as easy as searching for a keyword, and the configuration is versionable.  The awesomeness of neither of these should be underestimated.  <\/p>\n
Once you find a setting you want to tweak, open the user-specific settings file (“Settings – User”) and add them there.  Here is my current user-specific settings file, followed by some brief discussion of why I set the option:<\/p>\n
\r\n{\r\n    "auto_match_enabled": false,\r\n    "auto_complete": false,\r\n    "color_scheme": "Packages\/Color Scheme - Default\/Mac Classic.tmTheme",\r\n    "draw_white_space": "all",\r\n    "font_face": "Courier New",\r\n    "trim_automatic_white_space": false,\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n