editor | Ryan Rampersad's Chronicles

Steps into Sublime

I really like Sublime Text.

When I was testing on my previous computer, I had the Package Control system setup. It’s like gems for Ruby or npm for Node. You can grab the Sublime Package Control written by Will Bond — it’s free and it’s easy to install.

The second thing I did was into install a beautiful theme. The default Sublime Text theme is fine but I’m just different that way. Phoenix Theme is a great choice. Installing that is relatively easy too, but there is some configuration required.

After installing my themes, I like to setup Sass and PHPDoc support. To do that, it’s a quick Searching the package repository for Sass is easy enough. If you’re on a Mac or running Linux, you could use the SassBuild package, I suppose, but since I’m running on Windows, I use the plain Sass package. For PHPDoc, there will probably be two packages with similar names and no clear difference — it saddens me but the newer one listed (updated last in 2012) didn’t work while the older one did (updated last in 2011), but it’s not a big deal.

This is as much as a reminder for me as it is to perpetuate Sublime and packages.

Text Wrapping in TextWrangler

TextWrangler has a strange default window setting where it won’t wrap automatically and won’t push the white background to encapsulate the overflow. Text wrapping is important on a small screen.

Text wraping is available on a per document basis via TextWrangler > View > Text Display > Soft Wrap Text. The soft means that it won’t add line breaks into your code, it will just display lines so they don’t go off the screen. By default though, the wrapping will only expand to the page guide, or where the white ends and the gray begins, then go to the next line, it seems.

Changing the text wrapping globally is possible via TextWrangler > Preferences > Editor Defaults. On the right, there is a checkbox with Soft wrap text a few options. My preference is Window width since full screen editing is awesome.

Happy wrapping.

Tabs to Spaces in TextWrangler

I used TextWrangler for years in high school. It was better than Eclipse for quick and light needs when I was programming in Java. Earlier this year, I decided to stop using the tab key and replace them with spaces.

TextWrangler is setup by default to use tabs. Overriding is a little obscure. Go to TextWrangler > Preferences > Editor Defaults. Once there, tick the Auto-expand tabs checkbox and you can specify the number of spaces per tab-key in the Default font selector below.

Happy tabbing!