Sublime Text 2 - code folding text editor

Posted by jaslar
Jan 7, 2015 at 05:59 AM

Haven’t seen this one before here.

I got curious about markdown editors that allowed for code folding. Eventually, Google offered me something called Sublime Text 2, which is a multi-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) “sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose.” http://www.sublimetext.com/. It was a free download, so I grabbed it.

I spent a lovely couple of hours removing line numbers, increasing the font size, switching the theme to black text on white background, adding a word count plugin, and loading an HTML preview to the markdown syntax. It even has a distraction-free, full screen mode. It has lots of keystroke shortcuts to get things done, handy for touch typists. At this point, it looked a lot like WriteMonkey.

I checked out all the text editing commands. I made sure it had spell check. It has tabs for managing multiple files, and ways to display a file in multiple columns. It does macros. It does project management (IDE type things). It has powerful search commands.

Code folding is odd. Text either has to be indented (as in code) or selected (highlight anything you want, then issue the command to collapse it to a horizontal yellow bar, then there is an arrow to expand it again - just hover your mouse along the left margin). And you do have to be careful. Delete that little yellow bar, and all the text hidden beneath it is gone, too. But there’s an whoops command (Command-Z on the Mac, which is what I’m playing with today), thank goodness.

So it doesn’t work quite like the obvious onscreen visual cues of a typical outliner. But ultimately, it offers even greater control over what appears.

My conclusion: this is a powerful piece of software, bristling with menu options. And it didn’t take long to customize the heck out of it.

Finally, I tried to find out what the “unregistered” flag at the top right was about. Answer: Sublime Text is neither open source nor free. A license costs $70. But that’s per person - you can put it on as many machines and operating systems as you like. I probably won’t pay that, although I’m sure it’s worth it. It kinds of looks like you could keep using it without paying, but I don’t hold with that. Nice to get a chance to put a program through its paces first, though.

So I had a most pleasant evening CRIMPing, and wound up with a pretty robust, multi-platform, outliner-friendly writing environment by the end. Others of you might find it interesting, or useful, or both.