Recently I switched to Sublime Text 3. Previously I had been using Adobe Dreamweaver for about 10+ years. And no, I didn’t use adobe’s built in browsers, “Design preview”, etc. It was a simple text editor, with highlighting, tag closing and build in FTP support. Simply, it was the first editor I used after Notepad and I never felt I needed to switch. Why did I move on to Sublime Text 3? Because Dreamweaver became too heavy, slow and just felt like an ancient piece of software.

On my way to a new editor I tried Atom a really cool web-technology (JS) based text editor. I liked it, but it didn’t have the FTP support with which I had grown so used to. And to be honest, I didn’t spend enough time using it as well.

Next I went onto Sublime. I loved it immediately! Simple, clean design, FAST, fast fast! After a while though I realised it didn’t have everything I needed, so I got on ready. Not long and I had a few “packages” that extended its functionality to the basics I needed. Now I cannot even consider switching back to Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver is not cheap, and considering you have to pay for every freaking new version it is too much for what it provides. Sublime on the other hand is merely $70 for a lifetime license. Oh, and you can use it for free, but will occasionally get a popup asking you if you want to buy the license. For such a brilliant tool, that you can do most of the things you need (for front-end development, not sure about backend) I think it is more than worth it’s price. Below is my setup with simple instructions to install the same themes/packages:

Looks

Theme: Brogrammer.sublime-theme
Colour-scheme: Oceanic Next (SL).tmTheme

Install using Package Control

1. Press CMD + Shift + P (Mac)
2. Type “install” and select “Package Control: Install Package”
3. Type “oceanic” and select “Oceanic Color Scheme”
4. Repeat 1) and 2)
5. Type “brogrammer” and select “Theme – Brogrammer”

Final User Settings:

One of the main reasons I like the Oceanic colour scheme is because it has JSX highlighting support:

Packages / Plugins

SFTP

An FTP client that allows you to work from a local copy and as you save your files to upload them straight to a remote server – invaluable

1. Press CMD + Shift + P (Mac)
2. Type “install” and select “Package Control: Install Package”
3. Type “sftp” and select “Sublime SFTP”

Sublime Linter

Framework for interactive code linting within Sublime 3 (not for V2)

1. Press CMD + Shift + P (Mac)
2. Type “install” and select “Package Control: Install Package”
3. Type “sublime linter” and select “Sublime Linter Framework”
4. Then repeat steps from 1 to 3 and at the last one instead of selecting the framework install the linter packages – CSS, JS, etc.

Babel

Sublime syntax ES6 definitions with React JSX

1. Press CMD + Shift + P (Mac)
2. Type “install” and select “Package Control: Install Package”
3. Type “babel” and select “Babel”

Oh and it has GIT support!

EDIT 8 December 2015:

CSS3 Syntax

1. Press CMD + Shift + P (Mac)
2. Type “install” and select “Package Control: Install Package”
3. Type “CSS” and select “CSS3 -The most complete CSS support for Sublime Text 3.”

Do you use any other packages that you find invaluable?