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Rahul
Rahul

Posted on

The Love for Sublime Text!

I have been an ardent fan of sublime text for the last 4 years. I have never considered any other IDE for ruby. Here's how I am able to work effectively using sublime text and why is it hard for someone like me to switch to any other IDEs.

Quick Pros:

  • Easy to set up
  • No learning curve
  • Simple. Fast. (much like the success of WhatsApp)
  • Hassle-free for beginners (just focus on one thing - code)

Tools/Plugins that I use in Sublime:

  1. Rubocop
  2. Git Blame/Annotate
  3. Bracket Highlighter
  4. Snippets (in-built)

What I use 99% of the time:

  1. Cmd + P - switching between files
  2. Cmd + R - searching for a method in a file
  3. Cmd + Shift + F - global search

I am happy to delegate other activities to the terminal.

  • Version Control - Terminal/ SourceTree
  • Debugging/ REPL/ Server - Terminal

After spending quite some time with Sublime Text, I started looking for some IDEs. These two caught my eye.

  • VS Code
  • RubyMine

Both of these provides a complete package for development - code, commit, REPL, debug/server.

They have added support for docker, reviewing PRs, configuring multiple build tasks. You never have to go out of it to do something.

Somehow I felt these overwhelming and never once I considered switching to any of these in the past 4 years.

Reasons for hanging on to Sublime Text:

  1. Most of the time, at least 5 projects would be open in different windows, yet Chrome would be laughing at the RAM consumption of Sublime Text.
    To say, lightweight will be an understatement

  2. No boot-time whatsoever. Opens in a flash

  3. Strong muscle memory of key bindings (working with multiple cursors, swapping lines, find previous/next occurrence of a word)

  4. The most important part - feel and comforts of using it

Now that I am considering it's time that I give a shot to either of VS Code or RubyMine. I will follow this up with whys and hows of migrating from Sublime Text.

PS: Sublime Text, you have been a great friend!

Top comments (2)

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cescquintero profile image
Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴

Wow. I just learnt about CMD + R! Thanks for sharing and yes, Sublime Rocks 🤘🏽

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rahul_ramfort profile image
Rahul

Cheers :)