2012-07-07T23:53:03+02:00 https://friendlybit.com Friendly Bit is a blog by Emil Stenström, a Swedish web developer that occasionally gets ideas of how to improve the internet. 2012-07-07T23:53:03+02:00 2012-07-07T23:53:03+02:00 http://friendlybit.com/tools/my-text-editor-sublime-text/ Emil Stenström

What text editor you use when coding is a very serious subject. I'll hardly be able to talk about what I prefer, without some people (other than you, of...

<p>What text editor you use when coding is a very serious subject. I'll hardly be able to talk about what I prefer, without some people (other than you, of course ;) taking it as me trying to steal their editor from them. I'm not going to. I'm just going to tell you what I think, and you can just decide of you agree or not. My hope is that it helps you be more certain about your own choice of editor.</p> <p>What I look for in a text editor:</p> <ol> <li><strong>Support both Mac and PC</strong>. I use a Mac for work, and a PC at home, and I want to be able to use the editor skills I've learned at work for my hobby projects, and vice versa.</li> <li><strong>Less than 3 seconds starting time</strong>. Big projects means lots of little files to open. So while programming I will open files and close files all the time. Each delay waiting for the editor to open, or a file to load, means hundreds of seconds over time.</li> <li><strong>Syntax highlighting for web languages</strong>. I work with web stuff, both front end and back end, and I need colors to be able to scan files quickly. I don't really care about the exact ones, light or dark, I just want it to look decent. What &quot;web languages&quot;? HTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON, Python (Django), Ruby (Rails), PHP, SQL.</li> <li><strong>Handle big files</strong> <strong>(&lt; 1 Gb)</strong>. From time to time I work with big files. Can be database dumps or large text files. I'm not expecting &lt; 3 sec to open them, but at least &lt; 15 sec, and then be able to work with the file without the editor lagging.</li> <li><strong>Some kind of file browsing/project support</strong>. There's never just one file and there's needs to be a way to overview all the files in a certain directory structure, and pick from them. I'd like there both to be file searching support and a way to click to a file through the directory structure.</li> <li><strong>Code auto-completion for web languages</strong>. Do I use font-variant, font-style, or font-decoration to set italic? I want my editor to show me a list of options, and let me pick. This is harder to do well for the dynamic server-side languages, but I still want it.</li> <li><strong>Look good</strong>. I don't want something that looks like the terminal, and want something beautiful. For me this means gradients, nice rounded tabs to click on, a nice font, a color scheme that matches.</li> </ol> <p>With that list of priorities in mind, let's look at a couple of popular editors:</p> <ul> <li>Editors that are not available both for Mac and PC: <strong>Textmate</strong>, <strong>Coda,</strong> <strong>Notepad++</strong>, and <strong>Visual Studio</strong>.</li> <li>Editors that are slow: <strong>XCode, Eclipse</strong>, <strong>NetBeans</strong>, <strong>Dreamweaver</strong>, and most other editors built with Java.</li> <li>Editors that don't handle syntax highlighting and code completion: <strong>Notepad</strong>, <strong>Wordpad</strong>.</li> <li>Editors that don't handle big files well: <strong>Komodo Edit</strong> (what I used til recently).</li> <li>Editors that look like shit: <strong>Emacs</strong>, <strong>Vim</strong>.</li> </ul> <p>And then there's <a href="http://www.sublimetext.com/"><strong>Sublime Text</strong></a>. Which does all of the above, perfectly. You should try it.</p>