Useful Sublime Text Plugins

12.07.2014

When it comes to simplicity and power, nothing seems to beat Sublime Text. Aside from its core productivity enhancing features like batch editing, multi-line edits, and fuzzy file search, Sublime Text also has a slew of open source plugins created by the developer community. Here I list 7 plugins I download every time I install Sublime Text.

Package Control

Package Control is simply a package manager for Sublime Text. It makes it easy to download and manage packages from the online package repository, and is what you use to download and install all other plugins.

BracketHighlighter

As its name implies, this plugin highlights brackets for you. This is especially useful when you have deeply nested HTML tags or code blocks. It makes it easy to see which closing bracket belongs to which opening bracket and vis versa.

Emmet

Emmet is a plugin that allows you to quickly generate HTML with tab shortcuts. For example, typing ul>li*3>a will generate this:

<ul>
<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li><a href=""></a></li>
</ul>

PackageResourceViewer

This plugin allows you to open up packages to edit. I haven’t used this for anything other than editing Sublime Text themes, but that alone makes this extremely useful.

SideBarEnhancements

By default, the side bar only has a few commands. With this plugin, you are given many more to choose from, such as the ability to duplicate files, opening in finder, and moving files.

SublimeERB

This plugin gives you a ctrl + shift + . shortcut to generate ERB tags. If you work a lot with ERB templates, this can be a huge timesaver.

Theme – Soda

And finally, there is the Soda Theme which gives Sublime Text a better looking UI than the default. There are many themes out there to choose from, but for some reason I always go back to Soda Dark. The side bar font size is a bit small, but I’ll show you how to change it in a future post using the PackageResourceViewer.