Freshening up Sublime Text - part two: Update favourite packages
Continuing my work to improve my development environment by tinkering with my Sublime Text 3 setup started in “Freshening up Sublime Text - part one”. I will now look at the packages that I used in Sublime Text 2 that I haven’t yet migrated to ST3, either because they weren’t available for ST3 or I haven’t had a use for them yet. Now it is time to install the ones I want to use or find a replacement if they are still not available for ST3.
These are the packages I have installed in ST2, but not in ST3:
Alignment
Alignment is a package for simple alignment of multi-line and multiple selections. It is great for simple code formatting without having to use a full language-specific formatter. This is now available for ST3 so this is definitely being added.
Bullet
Bullet improves support for markdown by automatically adding list markdown (*, +, -, > etc). It is useful when writing a lot in markdown, like this blog. It hasn’t been upgraded to ST3 so it is no use as is. According to the Github repository it hasn’t been updated in two years and there is a one year old pull request that has not been processed, so it seems pretty dead. A quick search in Package Control reveals many packages that extends the markdown support in Sublime Text and both MarkdownEditing and SmartMarkdown provides the same functionality as Bullet, in addition to much more. Having evaluated both, I am replacing this package with MarkdownEditing.
FileDiffs
FileDiffs shows diffs between the current file and clipboard, another file, or unsaved changes. These are all useful features, but the plugin is a bit clunky to use so I am going to hold off on installing it to see if I really need it.
Fortran
Textmate bundle for syntax highlighting Fortran. I am not using Fortran much so I do not need this package. As a side note I must say that it is very cool that Sublime Text can use Textmate bundles. If any syntax highlighting is missing as a Sublime Text package, you can almost always find it as a Textmate bundle.
Function Name Display
Function Name Display displays the current file, class and function name on the status bar. Somewhat useful, but not enough that I will bother with this now. Maybe later.
GenerateUUID
GenerateUUID is a simple tool that can insert an UUID in the text via command or keyboard short cut. Very handy when coding so I am adding this to my packages.
HexViewer
HexViewer is a plugin that enables view and edit of hex code. This is not really necessary as ST3 has built in support for hex editing of binary files.
Indent XML
Indent XML does exactly what it’s name suggests, i.e. it indents or reindents XML text. It can format all text or just selected text and also supports multiple selections. Oh, and it also does the same for JSON. It is very nice and goes into my collection.
INI
Simple syntax highlighting of INI files. It is maybe a bit surprising that Sublime Text doesn’t come with this built in. On Windows, this file format is still used many places, but less and less. This package therefore goes into to the “wait until needed” pile.
Octopress snippets
A package with snippets for some Octopress macros. Useful when writing posts for blogs using Octopress. Sadly it hasn’t been upgraded for ST3 so this is no go.
Pascal
Syntax highlighting of Pascal/Delphi code. It hasn’t been updated for ST3 and I don’t really need it either.
PowerShell
Another syntax definition packages. This has syntax highlighting and snippets for PowerShell. I played around with PowerShell for a bit to learn it with the intention to use it as a better shell than cmd, but gave up in disgust and went back to good old Command Prompt. Why do Microsoft have to make everything so unnecessary complicated? And why do they have to invent something new every time? If I ever need something better than cmd I will rather use a real shell like Bash or similar, but that is a whole other blog post. It will suffice to say that I am not touching this package.
Sass
This package adds syntax highlighting and code completion for the CSS macro language Sass. This was nice to have when I was setting up this blog as Octopress uses Sass stylesheets. For now, it goes in the “wait until needed” pile.
WordCount
WordCount provides real-time word count of the current file in the status bar. I found this useful when writing posts for this blog, but stopped using it when I upgraded to ST3 as it took time before it become compatible. Now that it is available, it goes into my collection.
That was all ST2 packages that I used earlier. So after this my package collection now consists of the following packages: