Sublime text basics

Tabs

  • Ctrl - n - create new tab
  • Ctrl - w - close current tab
  • Ctrl - tab - move to the next tab

Command palette

If you don’t know hotkeys for a command, or don’t know if such a command even exists, use command palette. It’s the first place where you should search for unknown commands. To open the command palette, press Ctrl - Shift - p, and then type command name. For example, you want to transform selected text to upper case. This is what you should do:

  1. Ctrl - Shift - p
  2. Type text “lower”
  3. Select “Convert case: Lower case” command ( moving arrows ), and press Enter (or click )

Sidebar

  • Ctrl - 0 - focus on sidebar
  • Ctrl-k, Ctrl-b - toggle sidebar

Layouts

Sublime Text allows you to open a few tabs side by side.

  • Alt - Shift - 1 - leave only one edit buffer
  • Alt - Shift - 2 - split window vertically ( 2 tabs )
  • Alt - Shift - 3 - split window vertically by (3 tabs)
  • Alt - Shift - 4 - split window vertically by (4 tabs)
  • Alt - Shift - 5 - “Grid layout”. Two windows in a row
  • Alt - Shift - 8 - Split horizontally, 2 tabs
  • Alt - Shift - 9 - Split horizontally, 3 tabs

You can move between layout windows with Ctrl + <number> hotkeys. Ctrl - 0 - move to the sidebar, Ctrl - 1 - move to the first tab, Ctrl - 2 - move to the second tab, and so on.

Line manipulation

  • Ctrl - Shift - arrow up/arrow down - move the current line up/down
  • Ctrl - c - copy the whole line
  • Ctrl - x - cut the whole line
  • Ctrl - Shift - arrow up/down - move the line up/down

How to install packages (plugins)

First, you need to install package control. It’s the Sublime Text package manager.

  1. Open control palette (Ctrl - Shift - p)
  2. Type “Install package control”, press enter
  3. When package control is installed, open control palette and type “Install package” - press enter.
  4. Then start typing package name, for example “Color scheme”. Sublime Text will show related packages.

Multiple cursors

Sublime Text has a great support for working with multiple cursors. To set an additional cursor, use Ctrl - click. Then, all commands ( like moving cursor, char/word deletion etc) will be applied to all cursors.

There’s also nice feature in Sublime Text - you can select next occurance of the current word. It works this way:

  1. Press Ctrl - d on current word. It will be selected.
  2. Press Ctrl - d one more time. The next occurance of this word will be selected.

This is useful when you want, for example, delete or replace some occurances of a word.

Working with code

These commands may be useful for programmers.

  • Ctrl - m - move between brackets. Works even if the cursor is placed in the middle of text between them.
  • Ctrl - Shift - m - select text between brackets
  • Ctrl - g - go to line
  • Ctrl - ; - open dialog with all words in the current document. Start typing, then select required word with Enter. Then you can move to the next occurance of the word with F3

How to install packages on startup in Emacs

Put these lines at the beginning of your .emacs:

; list the packages you want
(setq package-list '(
	web-mode
	projectile
	))

; list the repositories containing them
(setq package-archives '(("elpa" . "http://tromey.com/elpa/")
                         ("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
                         ("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")))

; activate all the packages (in particular autoloads)
(package-initialize)

; fetch the list of packages available
(unless package-archive-contents
  (package-refresh-contents))

; install the missing packages
(dolist (package package-list)
  (unless (package-installed-p package)
    (package-install package)))

This solution I’ve grabbed here

Atom text editor's sunset

"A hackable editor for the 21st Century”, they said.

How it was at the beginning

In 2014-2015 ( I’ve found snapshots of atom.io website for 2014 year on waybackmachine, but Wikipedia says that it was released in 2015), Github released Atom ( I personally can’t recall when I first heard of Atom) - “A hackable editor for the 21st Century”. It quickly became very popular, because… I don’t know why, I never liked it. Anyway, it’s the fact. Atom was a loud name. None of “Best editors for…” types of articles and blog posts hadn’t mentioned Atom as a honorable member of their lists. It was built using web technologies ( that wasn’t so popular as now ), it was free, and a language for its extension was Javascript - one of the most popular languages. Because of electron, Atom was RAM expensive for a text editor ( especially in comparison to Sublime Text, Emacs, Vim or Notepad++ ), but for most users it wasn’t an issue, because Atom was in trend and beside that it had some really nice features - for free and out of the box.

Microsoft bought Github

In 2018, Microsoft acquired Github. It was obvious that Microsoft won’t support Atom because it had its own product - VSCode, which is a mainstream editor/IDE now. I think that VSCode has drained a lot of ideas and features from Atom:

  • Technology (Electron)
  • Extension language
  • Built-in interface for working with git repositories
  • Collaborative editing (In Atom , it was called “Teletype”, in VSCode, it’s the “Live Share” feature)

Over the years, VSCode was actively evolving ( not always in a good direction ) and became more and more popular across developers. Let’s see at stackoverflow developer survey results.

  • 2022 - 1st place (74.48%); Atom - 12 place (9.35%)
  • 2021 - 1st place (71.06%); Atom - 10 place (12.94%)
  • 2020 - I have not found info about tools for this survey
  • 2019 - 1st place (50.7%); Atom - 10 place (13.3%)
  • 2018 - 1st place (34.9%); Atom - 9 place (18.0%)
  • 2017 - 5 place (24%); Atom - 7 place (20%)
  • 2016 - 13 place (7.2%); Atom - 9 place (12.5%)
  • 2016 - Not presented; Atom - 5 place (2.8%)

In 2019, the next year after acquiring Github, VSCode made a huge jump - from 34 to 50%.

By the way, Wunderlist service ( a todo app) was shut down the same way - it was bought by Microsoft and later closed in favor of Microsoft todo.

Sunset

In the summer of 2022, Github published a blog post, where they announced that they’re sunsetting Atom.

Atom editor sunset

Pulsar

Community has forked Atom and reincarnated it as Pulsar editor.

Official website

It’s mostly an Atom editor (that’s good), just with a new name. According to the Goals page, Pulsar’s main goal is to keep Atom and its huge package base alive and up to date. It’s a great idea.