Better Sublime Text workflow

Developers are well known for their mild-mannered manners and their softly spoken opinions. But get them on the topic of The Best Text Editor and all hell breaks loose.

Obviously, there is no Best Anything, as it’s all a matter of opinion and the job in hand. This doesn’t stop bloggers from fanning the flames of dispute with Top 10 Lists and Why This Thing is Better Than That.

Sublime Text. The best text editor in the world. Probably.

However. Sublime Text really is rather brilliant. It is on a par with the Mac-only TextMate and up there with the powerful-yet-stupidly-difficult Vim. It might be as easy to use as Coda, and may be as productive as Espresso. It is slick, quick and configurable. Best of all, for me, it is cross-platform, so I can work comfortably in any environment.

Back in the day, there was only ever BBEdit. And now they have arrived like buses, swarms of them, all going to McText Editor Land.

Andrey Tarantsov wrote an inflammatory entitled yet masterfully informative blog post Sublime Text Workflow That Beats Coda and Espresso.

Essentially, he recommends the Sublime packages Package Control and SideBarEnhancements, the handy Mac-only windows manager Divvy and his own live-preview-on-save LiveReload.

This brings to my mind the maxim:

Where there is delay, remove it.

Something as simple as a keystroke to snap your windows to preset areas and preview-on-save functionality simply speeds up the development process, so your fingers have to move less and your mind doesn’t have to work so hard.

It is these incremental improvements in your own workflow that pays incremental dividends in output. Do the same with less, equals more time for the fun stuff.

And talking about incremental improvements, Sublime Text has finally arrived out of beta! It is truly 2.0! There’s a slew of good stuff in there, stuff I never even knew didn’t exist, it’s that good.

It’s almost worth learning to write/code just so you can use it.