Skip to main content

Still a sucker for Sublime

Posted in Development and Tools

My coding days started on a hooky copy of Dreamweaver, back when it was still a Macromedia product. A few years later when I decided I was going to be a professional web designer/developer, I forked out for a copy of Adobe Creative Suite (CS) 3 Web Premium.

CS4 and CS5 quickly followed and the upgrade costs were prohibitive for my bootstrapped little business, so I made do with Dreamweaver CS3 until early 2011 when Panic’s Coda caught my eye.

As well as being a significantly cheaper commitment than Dreamweaver and the Creative Suite, Coda was much more light-weight than Dreamweaver, as well as being nicer to use. Coda wasn’t without its quirks though, so a year or so later Coda 2 was released it was a no-brainer purchase/upgrade. The new version was great but had some weirdness (the sidebar was on the right of the screen…) and felt like a bit of bloat was creeping in.

Not long afterwards I attended a co-working event where someone was using a slick-looking, lightening-fast editor called Sublime Text. I delayed using it for a wee while as there was a bit of a learning curve involved in the set-up/configuration, but when found some time I was hooked!

Over the years I’ve tried some other editors – I spent a few months using Atom when it was fairly new; ditto for VS Code. I even revisited VS Code recently. But Atom was slow and VS Code had (has) something about it that doesn’t feel quite Mac enough. I’ve always ended up coming back to Sublime Text (now on version 3).

Admittedly, there was a lot I enjoyed about the other editors I tried, but luckily Sublime had some options or plugins that enabled these features when I switched back.

I think if JavaScript was a bigger part of my working day, it might be that VS Code could present some compelling reasons to switch, but for now I’m happy.

I don’t think it really matters what text editor you use. If it works for you, you should use it. But it might be that another editor has a really compelling feature that’ll save you time and/or effort, so keeping an open mind and even spending some time reading up on, downloading and having a poke around in a new app might well be a great idea. Even if, like me, you always seem to end up back where you started!

Accessibility in your inbox

I send an accessibility-centric newsletter on the last day of every month, containing:

  • A roundup of the articles I’ve posted
  • A hot pick from my archives
  • Some interesting posts from around the web

I don’t collect any data on when, where or if people open the emails I send them. Your email will only be used to send you newsletters and will never be passed on. You can unsubscribe at any time.

More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Alt text for CSS generated content

    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

  2. The accessibility conversations you want to be having

    In most companies, accessibility conversations centre around WCAG compliance, but that’s just the start. Thinking beyond that is where you want to be!