Review: Sublime Text 2

Sublime Text 2 is a text editor that seems to be intended for hard core developers. This is one of those things that is just… amazing. Yea, sure… it is just a text editor. How interesting could text be. Well, if you write code of any sort, you have always kept an eye open for that one editor in shiny armour. While the interface is far from shiney, it has the ability to edit the colour scheme any way you want it to be. There are several out there for the public to use free of charge as well. Syntax highlighting, yea yea, colours, stuff… things we have heard and come accustomed to over the years.

Here is the real beauty. There is an optional (on by default) side bar on the right hand side for visual quick scrolling on the right hand side. As much as I hated it at first in Sublime Text, for some reason ST2 has made me take a second look and fall in love. No, not shiny enough for you? How about custom snippet libraries? packages/add ons? How about a way to completely add a new language if you have the time and know how to write it? Still something you have seen to often before? How about this thing is available on Mac OSX, Windows, AND Linux. Not to mention, the package library (this is where all your snippets and add ons live) is able to be copied to each without editing. Of course if you have something OS specific that statement isn’t true, but for the most part it is. And I love it. They also built out a portable windows version for your flash drives that also has the package library folder. That is where I keep my up to date library, even though I don’t use windows very often.

Still not good enough, huh? How about a package manager? This is what really made it something special to me. I came across this while looking at a Zen Coding plugin that someone had sent me to check out. It asked that you install it via this manager. It adds feature by hitting control+shift+p, typing install, and then browse a wide range of different packages that people have prepared for you. Anything from some JQuery Mobile snippets, to ST2 themes.

While I was having a lot of fun with this for the first couple of days. I had a thought. What if I could solve my one complaint that I have had sense I stopped using crappy WYSIWYGs years ago. I want to upload the file I am working on to a remote location without leaving my editor. FTP and SFTP are such basic protocols, it can’t be to hard to code that into something. So I searched for FTP in this package manager and to my amazement, there where two. One of which I felt was worth it and done right, so I installed it. SFTP takes that basic protocol idea to another extreme. It gives you many options, all editable from a json file. It even lets you upload on save, sync down on open and even browse remote files.

I could keep going on and on about Sublime Text 2, but I am sure this is already boring for most of you. I will end it with this: I thing Sublime Text 2 is one of the greatest editors on the market today. It is free to use as a full featured trial version. You will get a alert box every once in a while to ask if you want to buy it yet, but it does not expire. I suggest giving them money, so they can continue to provide us with this gem of a product. Kudos to Sublime Text 2!!!!

p.s. If you purchase a key, it follows you to all your computers. This means you can unlock it on your Ubuntu machine, Windows machine, OSX MacBook Pro, and your flash drive portable windows version at work and at home, with just the one key.

Have you tried Sublime Text 2? Let me know what you think about it!