October 06, 2016

Text Editors you need to PARTY with

Your first two loves are always going to be either Sublime or Atom - both are easy to use and free!

If this was Team Fortress 2, Sublime would be the Scout and Atom the Heavy.

You’ll love Sublime for its ultra-fast speed and smart search-memory. But you’ll hate it for the notorious “Would you like to purchase a license now?” pop-up.

Atom on the other hand, you’ll love and hate for the opposite reasons: it doesn’t bombard you with ads but is EXCRUCIATINGLY slow. Sublime can run around the block three times and do a couple of backflips before Atom even has a chance to walk out the door.

Party up with Sublime if you want to go fast: so fast that you have to receive pop-ups to slow you down! (Install Sublime on Ubuntu).

Party up with Atom if you want old-reliable: remember Aesop’s fable on the tortoise and the hare? (Install Atom on Ubuntu).

I used to adore Sublime, I really did. But ever since that pop-up got on my nerves and tabbing messes everything up, I never looked back. Atom is my pick-me-up now. So without further ado, here are the packages and plugins that I find make coding a whole lot better.

• Emmet autocompletes and closes your html tags!
• Pigments colours your hexadecimal colours so you don’t have to remember what #ff0000 is. And yes it is spelled ‘colour’ in English but in the text editor you will have to spell it as ‘color’.
• Open Recent: yes we definitely take this one for granted.
• Minimap just like in your RTS games: informative - but all the scrubs are unaware that it exists.
• Script to run simple Ruby logic ♥ (and I guess other languages) right in the text editor.
• ERB helper: you’ll know why when the time comes my friend. You’ll know why.
• Unregistered if you are ever missing that sweet pop-up from Sublime.
• Activate Power Mode when you get used to all the pretty syntax highlighting Atom does for you and the novelty has worn off.