One of the things that I'm most enjoying about my move back to development is regaining mastery of the text editor. There is nothing like wielding a powerful text editor effectively. Visual Studio is an impressive IDE but its text editing powers never wowed me like others I've used in the past. The one I'm using now is better than any I've experienced.
I'm speaking, of course, about Sublime Text. I bought it with my own money, which is high praise considering the dearness of its price and my, um, frugality. It's the first editor that holds a candle to jEdit, my previous winner in the category.
The thing is it's far better than jEdit! Here are just a few of the reasons (here are more of them):
- Speed. It is really close to instantaneous.
- The plugin ecosystem is far better than anything else I've seen.
- The command palette practically embeds Alfred in the editor.
- Keyboard operation is an integral component. And I'm all about mouse avoidance.
I'm trying to build up my ST skills gradually, integrating a new one only after I've hit my stride on an existing one. I'm very productive so far, but I can still see a lot of room for improvement.