Sunday, October 18, 2009

Sublime Text is a Serious Text Editor with No Bloat

Windows: Looking for a text editor that helps you write text or code and doesn't get in your way? Sublime Text lives up to its name. It's a white-on-black, keyboard-friendly editor chock full of powerful, but unobtrusive, features.

Without digging into the menus, you'll notice from the get-go that Sublime Text is fairly familiar, at least if you're a programmer—white text on a black background, with line numbers and row/column counting in the lower left corner. Jump up to the menus, though, and you'll find a whole lot of power user features if you want them. Macro recording, code helpers and context highlighting, savable text snippets, project organization, extensive layout tools, and more than we've had the time to really dig into this morning.

You could just use Sublime Text for when you need to get writing done and nothing else—it comes with distraction-free full-screen views, and only the "Mini-map" on the far left is showing when you're typing, and that's a fairly handy tool for skimming around your text. Realistically, though, you'll want to take a deep dive into Sublime Text, learn its keyboard shortcuts, and dig into the features that save you time and automate the grunt work of writing.

Sublime text is free to download for trial use; a license for a single user on infinite machines, with free upgrades, is $59. There's seemingly no limit set on the trial, but when you peek around this program, you'll hopefully feel that the designers have earned their keep.

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