Sublime Text

For most new programmers I recommend Sublime Text. It’s excellent and will serve you through most of your CS courses and software jobs. When you’re ready to move up from Sublime Text you can follow the experience of others who have moved from Sublime Text to Emacs.

Getting Sublime Text

Visit the Sublime Text web site and download the approprite installer for your computer. For almost everyone these days you’ll want a 64-bit version. Sublime Text is not free, but you can use it in evaluation mode whcih simply means that the program will ask you if you’d like to buy a license every n saves (I think n is 10). If you decide to use Sublime Text I recommend that you buy a license, as I have (even though I use The One True Editor as my primary editor).

Customizing Sublime Text

Customizing your text editor will save you time and ensure that your source files are consistently formatted. In some cases customizations will save you hours of frustration. For example, Python uses whitespace for indentation and requires that all whitespace in a file is consistent – either tabs or spaces but not both. Since they look the same, beginning Python programmers are often frustrated by syntax errors in code that looks correct but contains both tabs and spaces. Setting your text editors to indent with spaces exclusively will save you from this frustration.

Basic Settings

Open Sublime Text’s preferences file:

• macOS: In Sublime Text’s application menu, select the Preferences menu, then click Settings - User.
• Linux and Windows: In the main menu, select the Preferences menu, then Settings.

Two editor tabs will open side by side. The left contains the default settings, the right tab contains your cusomizations. The first time you open your settings the custom settings tab will contain a blank JSON dictionary (curly braces). Replace the empty dictionary with the following:

{
    "tab_size": 4,
    "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
    "rulers": [80],
    "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true,
    "ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true
}

and save the file with File -> Save or:

• macOs: Cmd-S.
• Linux and Windows: Ctrl-S

Keybindings

A few keybindings will make your life easier.

macOS

[
   // Indents the current line, or selected lines according to the indentation
   // rules for the active language mode.
   { "keys": ["option+shift+i"], "command": "reindent", "args": {"single_line": true}}
]

Useful Packages

First, you want Package Control, the official Sublime Text package manger. Install it using the Command Palette. Invoke Command Palette with:

• Shift+Command+P on macOS, or
• Shift+Ctrl+P on Linux or Windows.

These are some essential packages:

• iOpener