Essential Plugins for SublimeText 3

For any programmer sublime has become an essential and a very useful software nowadays. Well, for those of you who dont know what sublime text is, It is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) i.e An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of a source code editor, build automation tools and a debugger.

Lets assume that you reading this post know how to work around sublime and know the basics in installing packages to your sublime. If you dont then start by installing package control. Copy the code and paste it into your sublime console by pressing “cmd + ~” key.

NOTE: These packages are only my personal views and these are what i use in order to get most out of my development.

Package Control is the first thing that you have to install right away after installing SublimeText. With it, you can install, upgrade, remove, and view with ease the list of packages or plugins that you have installed in SublimeText.

SublimeLinter is a plugin for Sublime Text 3 that provides a framework for linting code. Whatever language you code in, SublimeLinter can help you write cleaner, better, more bug-free code. SublimeLinter has been designed to provide maximum flexibility and usability for users and maximum simplicity for linter authors.

It basically provides the functionality to debug errors in a code by figuring out where the error has occurred. After installing the sublimeLinter if you are a php developer then you would need to install SublimeLinter-PHP package too. Similarly, if you need javascript also then install sublimelinter-jshint but do not that in order to work jshint you need to install node.js and specify its path to the config file.

Bracket Highlighter matches a variety of brackets such as: [], (), {}, "", '', #!xml <tag></tag>, and even custom brackets. In general, BracketHighlighter (BH) will highlight brackets (or defined brackets like start and end blocks) surrounding the cursor. By default, BH will put opening and closing icons in the gutter of the corresponding line containing open or closing bracket.

This package is very useful for identifying the closing and ending of a particular tag.

DocBlockr supports JavaScript(including ES6), PHP, ActionScript, Haxe, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Java, Apex, Groovy, Objective C, C, C++ and Rust. This package simplifies the DocBlockr elements. Simply writing the code does not make one a good programmer. The program must be good documented so that the another person looking at the same code will understand what he/she has done.

In a nutshell, Emmet allows us to write HTML and CSS faster with abbreviations/shortcuts, then expand them in valid HTML tags.

Look in Emmet Docs for more brief details.

This is a Sublime Text 2 and 3 plugin allowing you to format your HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON code. It uses a set of nice beautifier scripts made by Einar Lielmanis. The formatters are written in JavaScript, so you’ll need something (node.js) to interpret JavaScript code outside the browser.

This will work with either HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON files. It is a very useful tool for code cleaning process as well.

Another one of my favorites is SideBarEnhancements. This plugin adds functionality over the lame sublime default sidebar options.

It Notably provides delete as “move to trash”, open with.. and a clipboard. Close, move, open and restore buffers affected by a rename/move command. (even on folders). Provides the basics: new file/folder, edit, open/run, reveal, find in selected/parent/project, cut, copy, paste, paste in parent, rename, move, delete, refresh… and many more..

This plugin integrates SublimeText with Git so you can run some Git commands from SublimeText such as Add and Committing Files, Viewing Log, and Annotating Files.

Install this package in order to bring up color picker.

To insert or change a selected color, use:

• Linux: ctrl+shift+c
• Windows: ctrl+shift+c
• OS X: super+shift+c

For WordPress Developers installing this plugin would enable the WordPress snippets. It includes different action, hooks, filters as well as function. By just type a word and pressing tab will do the trick.

There are numerous color themes for sublime text. Personally i found following themes good to work with and probably the best till this day.

• Cobalt2
• Brogrammer
• Material Design