
A little while back during my exploration of PHP IDEs, I evaluated Sublime Text 2. At that point I had found a number of nifty plugins for ST2, mostly for PHP development. Since then I’ve found even more plugins that I find useful/nifty/cool. They are not PHP specific and I do not use all of them on a regular basis, but I think they are all worth sharing. Of course, as my collection of shinies is always growing, I welcome suggestions (that’s what the comment section is for)!
== Sublime Package Control ==
If you’re using Sublime Text and you don’t have SPC, there is something wrong with you. Install it, bring up the Command Pallet (Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows, Super+Shift+P on Mac) and type “Package install”. Now enjoy the hundreds of packages you can install. Unless otherwise noted, all of the following plugins can be found through SPC.
== Gist ==
You know how you can tell I’m not a hard core programmer? I had no idea what the purpose of Github Gist was for. I ran across the Gist plugin and a Tuts video that explain how to use this in a useful way. Suddenly… light bulbs blinked on! Lightning struck! Apples fell from trees! Whatever you want to call an epiphany, it suddenly made sense. Now rather than having to dig through old applications, I could store handy code snips… and life was good.
== Gitignore ==
If you use Git, you’ve probably had to make a .gitignore file (or 20). This is a good solution to templating that job. Truth be told though — the plugin is nifty and I keep it around… however GitHub now lets you select several dozen .gitignore templates on project creation — making this plugin a bit unnecessary (in my workflow at least).
== Knockdown ==
Do you hate documentation? Do you write readme files so infrequently that you forget all your markdown formatting? Well you’re in luck, knockdown gives you the an essentially WYSIWYG Github flavored markdown in Sublime Text.
== HttpRequester ==
This is another plugin that I discovered via Tuts. The examples usage shown off in the video demonstrate this plugins power perfectly. Write something web-based (say an API, maybe in NodeJS) and document a sample call in the code. Whenever you need to test it out you can just highlight & stab “Http Requester” and off it goes.
== CodeIntel ==
One of the features that Sublime Text lacks as an IDE is auto-complete. This is predominantly because ST isn’t an IDE, it’s a text editor on steroids (really, really BIG steroids). So when you want auto-complete you want CodeIntel which titles itself as “A full-featured code intelligence and smart autocomplete engine for Sublime Text 2”. They list 23 markup and programming languages which basically reads to me as “support for every real programming language”.
== Bootstrap Snippets ==
I originally found Sublime Text because of the Twitter Bootstrap project. It seems only proper (and full circle like) to have a plugin especially for Bootstrap.