I’ve been building websites for a long time. In that time, I’ve used my fair share of text editors – from plain Notepad in the early days, to UltraEdit, Notepad++ and in recent times Coda & now Sublime Text.
I’ve finally settled on Sublime Text 3 as my editor of choice. For the work I do – mostly building WordPress themes and writing short snippets of PHP, it’s ideal. It’s fast to load, with none of the overhead of Java based applications like Netbeans and Eclipse. And it’s lighter and less “intense” than pure PHP IDEs like PHP Storm.
It fits my workflow well.
To get the best from Sublime Text 3 I install the following extensions, which include styling tweaks, functionality add ons and code linting. At the moment I have the following packages installed:
- Bracket Guard Immediately highlights incorrect brackets.
- Colour Highlighter Underlines selected hexadecimal colorcodes (like “#FFFFFF”, “rgb(255,255,255)”, “white”, etc.) with their real color.
- Dash Doc Open the selected text or text under cursor in Dash documentation browser.
- DocBlockr Simplifies writing DocBlock comments in Javascript, PHP & more.
- Emmet Emmet (ex-Zen Coding) for Sublime Text
- Filesystem Autocompletion Auto-complete paths and filenames from the filesystem
- HTML/CSS/JS Prettify HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON code formatter for Sublime Text 2 and 3 via node.js
- Package Control
- Project Manager Project Manager for Sublime Text 3
- SidebarEnhancements Enhancements to Sublime Text sidebar. Files and folders.
- SFTP Commercial SFTP/FTP plugin – upload, sync, browse, remote edit, diff and vcs integration.
- SublimeCodeIntel Full-featured code intelligence and smart autocomplete engine.
- SublimeLinter Interactive code linting framework for Sublime Text 3, with the WordPress ruleset for PHP installed.
Styling wise, I absolutely love the Seti UI colour scheme, which uses some excellent code colours and adds file-type icons to the Sublime Text sidebar.
I also use also an excellent set of Genesis Framework code snippets by Sridhar Katakam, with a few of my own snippets thrown in for good measure.