Mike Jolley

8 necessary Sublime Text plugins

Sublime Text is a fantastic code editor – far superior and faster than editors I’ve used in the past such as Coda and Espresso.

There are many plugins/packages for SublineText to add features and tailor the experience to your work flow; these are my favourites.

Alignment

This lets you hit COMMAND-CTRL-A to align your PHP code with spaces. I usually use it to align my arrays and variables nicely to keep code readable.

DocBlockr

DocBlockr eases the creation of docblocks in your PHP code – simply type /** and hit enter when above a function or class and a blank docblock will be created ready to edit.

SublimeLinter

I personally use SublimeLinter-PHP the most. This lets you have errors highlighted in your code as your type:

Linter

Very handy when debugging, and to find silly mistakes. Just a note on this one, to get it working I had to edit /etc/php.ini and set display_errors = On to get it working in Mavericks.

Synced sidebar

When working in projects with the sidebar visible, this simply highlights/scrolls the sidebar to show the current file you are editing. When I have many files open this does make the sidebar easier to work with.

Sidebar enhancements

Sidebar enhancements adds more context menus to your sidebar:

Sidebar Menus

I use reveal and rename quite a bit so this saves time.

Trimmer

Trimmer will strip whitespace from your files when you hit CTRL+S.

Sublime FTP

This package isn’t free, but it is darn useful. Add a sftp-config.json to your project with FTP connection details, and this extension will allow FTP uploads and downloads. I use this when developing locally, but pushing to a remote server.

Sublime Text 2 WordPress

Adds auto-completion and snippets for WordPress functions. For forgetful folk 🙂

Installing these plugins with Package Control

Every user of Sublime Text should grab this first. Once installed it makes installing other packages a breeze, letting you open the command palette (SHIFT+COMMAND+P) and then choose “install package” to view and install available plugins.

Any others?

If you use SublimeText, what packages would you recommend? Share in the comments.

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Comments

17 responses to “8 necessary Sublime Text plugins”

  1. ghost1227 avatar
    ghost1227

    Pretty much what I’m already using, but I add JSON Reindent and HTML-CSS-JS Prettify to the list.

    Reply
  2. croixhaug avatar
    croixhaug

    Bracket Highlighter – indispensable for seeing what scope you’re in

    Reply
    1. ghost1227 avatar
      ghost1227

      Good plugin, but I got rid of it when I discovered that better than half the time scope > visible page height for me >_<

      Reply
    2. mikejolley avatar
      mikejolley

      I use bracket highlighter too, but tbh its not that useful because if you format your code the right way, the ‘grid’ lines added by sublime are enough.

      Reply
  3. rzen avatar
    rzen

    Excellent list! Here are two more really clever packages for you, and anyone else who might be interested:

    PhpTidy adds support for formatting code to WP core standards: https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/PhpTidy

    Modific will add markers to the line gutter to indicate which parts of a version-controlled file have been altered since the last commit: https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Modific

    Reply
    1. mikejolley avatar
      mikejolley

      I could never get PhpTidy to work before. I’ll have to give it another go.

      Reply
      1. ghost1227 avatar
        ghost1227

        Me neither…

  4. Myles McNamara avatar
    Myles McNamara

    These plugins are a must for me:

    emmet (emmet.io) amazing auto generate html,

    find function definition (or whocalled) great when need to track down a function,

    FileDiffs to compare two files or tabs,

    LiveReload so you never have to press refresh in browser again,

    Codeivate to track your coding (lang, time, etc)
    http://codeivate.com/users/myles

    Those are a few must haves for me, with other ones as well like terminal, adb, etc, for project specific needs. PhpTidy, etc.

    Reply
  5. Norcross avatar
    Norcross

    I also use Emmet: great for things like CSS. and the SCSS package to give my SASS files the same syntax highlighting as regular CSS.

    Reply
    1. mikejolley avatar
      mikejolley

      That one does look pretty cool – gonna check it out.

      Reply
    2. Matt Soria avatar
      Matt Soria

      Yeah, Emmet is for sure a must-have

      Reply
  6. armno avatar
    armno

    I also use
    – GitGutter https://github.com/jisaacks/GitGutter
    – EditorConfig https://github.com/sindresorhus/editorconfig-sublime
    – JsFormat https://github.com/jdc0589/JsFormat

    Reply
  7. Austin Wulf avatar
    Austin Wulf

    I’d also add Autoprefixer, because it’s great not to have to worry about browser prefixes when writing CSS.

    Reply
  8. Jason LeMoine avatar
    Jason LeMoine

    GitGutter [https://github.com/jisaacks/GitGutter]

    Reply
  9. Jenny avatar
    Jenny

    definitely Sublimerge should be one of “core” packages: http://www.sublimerge.com/

    Reply
  10. maurice avatar
    maurice

    Thank you for your list! I will have a look at trimmer, sounds good.

    I wrote a blogpost about the plugins I use (http://www.maurice-renck.de/en/blog/top10-sublime-text-plugins/) Have a look, if you like.

    Reply
  11. Michael Musgrove avatar
    Michael Musgrove

    SublimeMagick, CleanCSS, Alignment, and Bracket Highlighter are useful as well. So many nice plugins for ST2/3. Adobe’s Brackets is an open-source editor that’s worth a close look as well for anyone in the market, but as a creature of habit I just can’t stop using ST3 as my main editor. Love it.

    Reply

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