Hey guys, it's Alisha, and today we're gonna go over learning how to use Sublime Text. (upbeat music) Sublime Text is one of the most popular text editors in the world. It's jam packed with powerful features like multi-line editing, build systems for dozens of programming languages, regex find and replace, a Python API for developing plugins, and so much more. In this video, you'll learn how to use Sublime Text to fulfill all your text and code editing needs. But before we get too far, I wanna let you know that there will be links to more resources in the video's description, and remember, subscribe and ring that bell to get notifications for future helpful content. Now, what exactly is Sublime Text? Sublime Text bills itself as a sophisticated text editor for code, markup, and prose. Originally released over a decade ago in January 2008, Sublime Text is now in its fourth major version and supports Mac, Windows, and Linux. At its core, Sublime Text is akin to a Swiss army knife that can be applied to any use case or problem involving manipulating text. At first glance, Sublime Text may appear to be a text editor that's only useful to developers. While it is a great tool for developers, it is also a powerful app for writers and bloggers. Sublime Text is available from the official Sublime Text website as a free download. With that said, Sublime Text is technically not freeware. Instead, Sublime Text is a shareware app, which means it can be downloaded for free, but there may be some feature limitations after a period. In the case of Sublime Text, the app will continue working indefinitely, but you'll occasionally see a popup with details on how to purchase the app. If you're interested in purchasing Sublime Text, you can get a personal or business license. Let's establish a core understanding of Sublime Text before branching off into user specific items. Unlike other apps with graphical settings menus, the Sublime Text settings are entirely text based. To view your Sublime Text settings, go to Sublime Text, then Preferences, and click Settings. You should then see a document like this. This settings document may look daunting at first, especially if you're not used to working with developer-oriented tools, but we'll help you make sense of everything now. Sublime Text settings are stored in JSON format. JSON is an industry standard format for storing key value information, so you may have seen it used somewhere else before. JSON stores information into key value arrays, like so. This array can be used to describe the properties of a car. In this case, a blue sedan with five seats. Similarly, a JSON array can specify settings for an application, which is precisely what Sublime Text does. Let's go back to the Sublime Text settings file. As you saw in the screenshot the settings file is presented as two JSON arrays. The array on the left contains Sublime Text default settings, while the one on the right includes custom user settings. In general, you should never change the default settings directly. Instead, you should override default settings with custom settings. This allows you to revert to the default settings if something goes wrong. So, how would you go about changing a few default settings? Let's say you wanna make these changes. To make these changes, add each element to the custom user settings document in valid JSON format, like so. If you have existing custom settings, add each setting without creating a new array. If you're unsure whether you formatted the settings correctly, you can use an online tool like JSONLint to validate your JSON array. After you've specified the settings, save the file, and you're all set. When working on a project, whether a series of blog posts or source code for a web application, it's common for your files to be organized within a project folder. Sublime Text considers and provides a functional graphical interface for managing files and directories. Let's say you have a folder named my-sublime-text-project, like the one in this screenshot. If you drag and drop this folder into Sublime Text, you'll be able to create new files and folders directly within Sublime Text. As you can see, the my-sublime-text-project folder can be seen on the left-hand side of the Sublime Text window, under FOLDERS. Right clicking on the project folder brings up a sub menu that lets you create new files, rename files, create and delete folders, and more. Sublime Text's built in file management features removes the need for an external tool like Finder to perform basic file management tasks. In Sublime Text, a project refers to a collection of imported files and folders, like the my-sublime-text-project folder we imported earlier. If you click Project in the menu bar, you'll see there are options such as Open Project, Switch Project, and Save Project As. However, there is no option to create a new project. This is because Sublime Text projects are implicitly created when you create a new file and import a folder. In the previous example, we can click Project in the menu bar and click Save Project As to save the project. Highlight how the file management and project management feature can organize content. For example, an author can create a file for each chapter in a book, while a blogger can create different folders for different categories of posts. Sublime Text has a powerful search and replace implementation. Not only does it support regex, but you can also specify files and folders to search through. For example, if an author wanted to change the name of a character in a story, they could specify the search folder and run the search on all the contents of the folder. Sublime Text is extensible, and it's markdown editing package is a great tool for writers who use markdown syntax. Sublime Text has a rich plugin ecosystem that can be accessed via the builtin package manager. Developers can install plugins to improve their workflow. For example, the formatter plugin includes formatting rules for HTML, CSS, JS, Python, and other languages. The plugin can be configured to automatically format source code files, which helps to keep code neat and standardized in terms of formatting. A couple more must have plugins to consider include package control, needed for installing plugins, and Emmet. Sublime Text offers a multi-line editing, which can be accessed by holding down command on Mac, control on Windows, and using the mouse to select multiple lines. After multiple lines are selected, you can edit all lines at once and multiline copy paste is even supported. Sublime Text supports split windows to view and edit multiple files simultaneously. This can be useful when referring to a different file while working on a project. Sublime Text ships with support for build systems. Build systems let you run code directly in the Sublime Text editor's terminal without the need for an external terminal. You can enhance your coding experience even more by downloading a Sublime Text theme. Most of them come bundled with a variety of color schemes already. The difference between themes and color schemes for Sublime Text is that a theme decorates the core UI elements, like side pane, tabs, menus, and more, while color schemes are responsible for syntax highlighting. Some of the best themes to check out include Material Theme, Spacegray Theme, Ayu Theme. Sublime Text is one of the most popular code editors out there today. Rightfully so, it provides both writers and developers with a ton of tools to use. There's nothing more satisfying than finding the perfect code editor. If you've never tried Sublime Text it's worth a look. 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