By Nicholas Cerminara
This tutorial is out of date and no longer maintained.
So quickly to explain the difference between a theme and a color scheme: A theme will be everything from the color of your sidebar, tabs, and things like that. A color scheme references only to the syntax highlighting style. You have complete control to modify these however you want, but I usually stick to a theme’s given color scheme.
Some top themes in my opinion are:
To find themes, search “theme” in your package manager. After installing a theme, you might have to reboot Sublime. In the video below, you’ll see me rebooting the editor to make sure it registers all the theme settings.
Resource! If you’d like to play around with different color schemes as well, I recommend starting here. This page by Dayle Reese previews pretty much all of them. Or, you can just scroll through the iframe below (all iframed content in the tile below is subject to change, all intellectual property rights reserved to the creator Dayle Reese)
Being able to switch between projects in Sublime is a breeze. It’s super helpful for keeping momentum going while moving to a new task. Watch the video below to see it in action. Sublime Text also has a very useful and fast project switching keyboard shortcut.
Apple: COMMAND+^+P
Windows: ALT+CTRL+P
Vintage Mode allows you to emulate commands and keystrokes in Sublime Text similar to Vi or Vim. If you’re familiar with Vim, you’ll know there are essentially two modes: Command Mode and Insert Mode. You can toggle these modes the same way you would from the command line with ESC
and with i
. Insert mode is just normal use of sublime, while command mode lets you navigate.
By default, Sublime Text 3 has this disabled (or ignored). To enable it, simply open your User Settings and change the “ignored_packages” key to:
For a full list of the supported commands, check out the docs.
You can search an entire folder or project with Sublime Text with ease. To do this you can either right-click a folder in the sidebar and select “Find in Folder”, or you can use the keyboard shortcut shown below:
Apple: COMMAND+SHIFT+F
Windows: CTRL+SHIFT+F
You can also run advanced searches using an optional regular expression option. This can even be used to search all files inside of a folder or project. Some basic easy and examples would be:
All numbers individually: [0-9]
All letters individually: [a-z]
With Sublime Text 3 you can sort lists numerically or alphabetically with ease. You can also sort in reverse order as well. This can be useful in tidying up your lists, arrays, CSS, and variables. You can also use it to shuffle or remove duplicates.
This feature lets you visualize the document as you are working on it at a zoomed-out scale. Using the minimap can:
Sublime Text 3 has an entire array of global configuration options for you to personalize your editor to your development liking. There’s basically a huge global JSON configuration file that you can tweak. To see and modify these settings:
The complete list of default settings are:
You can tweak that however you like. I find this will probably depend on the OS you are running, the primary language you are using, or how you simply like to code. Here’s Chris’s default settings on Windows and it works well. Below is my current settings on a Mac:
Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!