sublime

I really great overview of Sublime Text 2 by Steve Randy Tantra. No less than 7 videos of the core Sublime Text features.

This is another installment of my series on using Sublime Text for writing. It applies to coding too, but I'm going to examine the functionality from the perspective of a writer.1 Bookmarks in Sublime Text are similar to Markers in BBEdit. They are as the name implies, marks that refer to specific text in a document. BBEdit Markers are more advanced since they can be titled and browsed as a list.

This macro requires the Sublime Text CLI to be configured. I followed the instructions here with a minor modification. Keyboard Maestro does not recognize the command in usr/local/bin so I created it in /usr/bin: sudo ln -s /Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/bin/sublime This provides access to Sublime Text from the terminal on a Mac. My command is sublime some instructions use the default name subl. This macro launches Sublime Text with my NVAlt folder as the source:

As pointed out in the comments to this post about using Sublime Text to write, it’s annoying that it will not use the OS X spell checker and dictionary built into other text editors. For example, here’s the dictionary lookup in NVAlt: Sublime Text 2? Not so much: Here’s a quick and dirty Keyboard Maestro macro that gets around the gap and provides a universal dictionary macro in any app.

Markdown Headers Inside any Markdown document, hit ⌘-P (ctrl-P on Windows) and type "@" to get a list of headings.1 Start typing a word in a heading to have the list narrowed. Click a heading to jump to it. Jump to Word type "#" after ⌘-P to get a list of all words in the document. Start typing a word to narrow the list. Select the word to immediately jump to the first occurrence of that word and have it selected.

Make Sublime Text 2 a better writing environment with two small plugins. Install the WordCount plugin and the WordHighlight plugin.

I'm thrilled with the current state of text editors. There is a wealth of excellent applications on Mac, PC and iOS for working with plain text files. On the PC and ocassionally the Mac1, I use Sublime Text (previous post). ST2 is extremely powerful. For someone with the right commitment, there's magic to be had. $60 gets a cross platform, scriptable and gorgeous text editor. Sounds like a good deal to me.