This chapter will give us the ability to fully customize our Sublime Text's look and feel. We will also customize our own color theme. And as a bonus, we will check out the Split Windows feature.
In this chapter we will cover the following topics:
Overriding and maintaining key bindings
Understanding Sublime's base settings
Beautifying Sublime with colors and themes
Mastering Split Windows
In the previous chapter, we bound as key combination to our macro. Sublime also gives us the option to bind keys to any command by adding custom key bindings; but what are key bindings exactly? In one sentence:
"Key bindings map key presses to commands."
All of Sublime's key bindings are configurable by JSON-formatted .sublime-keymap files.
Key bindings can be different per platform; their filename has to be one of the following:
Default (Windows).sublime-keymap
Default (OSX).sublime-keymap
Default (Linux).sublime-keymap
These file names are platform dependent; this means that the key bindings defined in the Windows keymap file will only work if we are on Windows or other OSes. It is important to know that user-specified key bindings need to be placed in Packages/User/Default (<platform>).sublime-keymap.
As we saw, Sublime Text can be fully customized to fit our needs. It stores its settings in JSON-formatted .sublims-settings files. Sublime will load these settings files in the same order that it loads the keymap files. This means that our settings that are stored in Packages/User will always override all other settings except those that have been changed in the current buffer.
Each settings file has a prefix that defines its purpose. These prefixes are names that can be descriptive, such as Preferences (Windows).sublime-settings. This means that the file applies only to Windows. We can also specify the file type in the descriptive name, for example, Ruby.sublime-settings. This means that the file applies only when editing Ruby code files.
Sublime Text can be a beauty! We can change Sublime's visual experience by changing its base settings, color schemes, and themes.
Let's start by tweaking Sublime's settings to change visual elements; for example, we can highlight the current line, change the caret style, show fold buttons, boldface folder names, and highlight modified tabs. We are going to do this by opening our user preferences and adding some visual settings to it. The following numbered bullets refer to the labels on the next screenshot:
"highlight_line": true, "caret_style": "phase"
"fade_fold_buttons": false
"bold_folder_labels": true
"highlight_modified_tabs": true
The following screenshot shows the output of the visual settings:
This is cool but not enough for us; we want Sublime to be more awesome!
Sublime Text includes one of the most useful productivity features that is out there—Split Windows! We all know this from vi and Visual Studio, but how can we split our Sublime? We simply need to memorize some shortcut keys.
Let's split our window into two columns using Alt + Shift + 2 on Windows or Linux and Option + Command + 2 on OS X as shown in the following screenshot:
We got a new empty column. Now, we need to move a file there. We'll do it by pressing Ctrl + Shift + 2 on Windows or Linux and Control + Shift + 2 on OS X as shown in the following screenshot:
This feature is very useful when working with source and header files, or even when comparing two files. We can also open up a grid by pressing Alt + Shift + 5 on Windows or Linux and Option + Command + 5 on OS X as shown in the following screenshot:
To master this skill, we'll need to memorize the following shortcuts:
|
Split Windows shortcuts |
Windows/Linux |
OS X |
|---|---|---|
|
Single window |
Alt + Shift + 1 |
Option +... |
