My Friend Richard was asking about different software and code editors on twitter last night. I mentioned Sublime Text 2 and how much I love it, to him; and he asked me for more info about it, so I decided to write a blog post about it instead of going and back & forth on Twitter.

So for those who don’t about it yet, Sublime Text 2 (ST2) is a cross-platform (yes it works on OS X, Windows and Linux) awesome code editor with a bunch of productivity tools and geeky goodness but without the huge overhead of typical IDEs (aptana, netbeans, etc…). I was a Textmate user until I switched over to ST2 about 4 or 5 months ago. The transition was seamless since ST2 looks and behaves in similar ways to Textmate and also supports Textmate bundles out of the box. Nonetheless, ST2 is infinitely more powerful than its predecessor.

Some of my favorite features/shortcuts of ST2 are:

• The project sidebar
• ⌘+P (ctrl+p on Windows/Linux) to open any files in the current project
• ⌘+shift+p (ctrl+shift+p on Windows/Linux) to perform special actions
• Automattic code completion using tab/return
• Great search+replace support
• Automatic docblock creation and recognition
• Updated daily or every other day (as long as you use the development track [which you should] & it never crashes yet has awesome small additions)

My Sublime Text 2 Setup

Richard also asked me about which extensions I used and how I had it configured, so here’s my setup:

• The Solarized Color Palette/Theme – I use the light one most of the time but will switch to the dark palette occasionally, especially at night. Note: you can use the Textmate Solarized bundle with ST2
• Package Control for managing extensions/packages
• The following packages (in alphabetical order – all available from Package Control): Additional PHP Snippets, Alignment, ApacheConf/htaccess, As Above, BracketHighlighter, BufferScroll, Case Conversion, Clipboard History, CoffeeScript, ColorPicker, copy-file-name, DetectSyntax, DocBlockr, DocBlox, HTML5, HyperlinkHelper, IndentXML, jQuery Snippets, LESS, MarkDown Preview, Nettus+ Fetch, Open Recent Files, Open Include, PHPDoc, PHPUnit, Placeholders, Prefixr, Pretty JSON, Quick File Creator, Quick File Renamer, SidebarGit, sublime-github, Trailing Spaces, WordCount and of course WordPress

Finally, I’d like to point you to this indispensable ST2 Tips & Tricks article on NetTuts.

One of my favorite things to discuss with fellow developer are the various development environments and set-ups, so please share in the comments! What code editor do you use? If you use ST2, what’s your setup like?