Steve Cooper

I’ve just bought a copy of sublime text, a very pretty text editor for Windows. I’m a bit of text editor geek, but I think it’s justified, with the amount of time I spend typing. Between coding and writing fiction, I spend hours and hours a day typing, so a good text editor is as important as a comfy chair, a good monitor, or a cup of tea. It’s just not civilised without.

If you spend much time writing text, you may want to have a look. I’m using mine for both programming code, and for fiction.

These things make it well worth it, in my opinion;

1. It’s gorgeous. Text Editing shouldn’t feel this good, says the website, and it’s absolutely right. The colour schemes are lovely, especially Chocolate Box, which is shown on the screenshot. If simple text editors like Notepad feel like using a bic biro, and emacs and vi feel like using a technical pencil, sublime text feels like using a fountain pen.

2. It’s functional. As a programmer, you expect the ability to do serious things to your text. Sublime comes bundled with syntax highlighting for many languages, a python plugin system, a build system, it’s own macro language, regex searching, snippets, sorting… there’s lots here. The ability to write python programs means that it’s going to be possible to write, well, absolutely anything you need. And you don’t have to do it in emacs lisp

3. The support is amazing. It’s written by Jon Skinner, an Australian who left his job at Google to write the editor. I wrote him an email yesterday suggesting a feature. Twelve hours later, he’s written the code and put it into the next beta. Twelve hours. And the reply email was chock-full of details he didn’t need to include, and an apology about the tardyness of the reply.

4. Full-screen mode; It has a full-screen mode that lets you blow the window up to occupy every available pixel, which makes it great for writing without distraction. If you’ve looked at rudimentary full-screen editors like WriteRoom, you’ll know the idea; replace your cluttered desktop with a single text entry window. Sublime Text does this, but still has the advanced functionality of a heavyweight text editor.

5. It’s only just begun. The current version is 1.01, and already it’s stuffed with goodies.

Anyway. Enough. Go get it.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.