Sublime Text 2

Sublime Text 2 is the best text editor I've come across recently; it's cross-platform and there's a (non-limited, non-expiring) trial available. One of the reasons it's better than a lot of editors I've used is the number and quality of the plugins available for it.

Really Useful Plugins

Package Control

Package Control is a package manager for Sublime Text 2. It makes finding and installing plugins incredibly easy.

The best plugin for Sublime Text 2 is the Package Control plugin, which is absolutely essential. Package Control lists available plugins and also takes care of installing them, meaning plugin installation is as simple as typing part of a package name (to see what’s available) and choosing from a list.

For example, if you wanted SASS syntax highlighting, you simply open the Command Pallete (Ctrl+Shift+P) and type ‘Install’ to find the installation command. This will then show you a list of available plugins; type ‘SASS’ to find SASS-related plugins, then choose an appropriate plugin and press ‘Enter’ to install. Plugins are even installed without having to restart Sublime Text!

Package Control can be installed by running the following command in the Sublime Text 2 console (opened with Ctrl+` (backtick) or View > Console):

import urllib2,os; pf='Package Control.sublime-package'; ipp=sublime.installed_packages_path(); os.makedirs(ipp) if not os.path.exists(ipp) else None; urllib2.install_opener(urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.ProxyHandler())); open(os.path.join(ipp,pf),'wb').write(urllib2.urlopen('http://sublime.wbond.net/'+pf.replace(' ','%20')).read()); print 'Please restart Sublime Text to finish installation'

The rest of the plugins mentioned here can all be installed through Package Control by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P to open the Command Pallete, then typing ‘Install’ to find the installation command as above.

Zen Coding

Zen Coding allows auto-completion of snippets by pressing tab.

The Zen Coding plugin is installed by default in Sublime. This plugin makes creating HTML vastly quicker and easier - instead of typing out each tag and nesting them, you type a snippet version and press ‘Tab’ to expand it into HTML. For example, to create a list with an id of ‘nav’ containing three links, the Zen snippet would be:

ul#nav>li*3>a

This expands to:

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

Tag

Tag provides a number of useful functions for working with markup, such as auto-closing tags and tidying up formatting.

Tag is one of my favourite plugins when I’m working with HTML - not only does it highlight tags which are missing closing tags, but it also inserts the correct closing tag when you type (the start of a closing tag).