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Product Overview of Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a powerful and feature-rich text and source code editor designed for developers, programmers, and writers. Developed by Jon Skinner and Sublime HQ, it was first released on January 18, 2008, and has since become a popular choice across various operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.
What Sublime Text Does
Sublime Text is tailored for editing and writing code, markup languages, and prose. It offers a minimalist interface that is highly customizable, making it an ideal tool for managing and editing large codebases and text files efficiently.
Key Features and Functionality
Syntax Highlighting and Code Folding
Sublime Text provides robust syntax highlighting and code folding capabilities, supporting numerous programming and markup languages. The syntax highlighting engine has been significantly improved, especially in Sublime Text 4, with features like handling non-deterministic grammars, multi-line constructs, and lazy embeds.
Auto-Completion
The editor includes advanced auto-completion features that suggest completions based on the programming language of the current file. It also auto-completes variable names assigned within the same code base. Sublime Text 4 has further enhanced auto-completion with improved ranking quality, new settings for controlling auto-completion behavior, and better support for snippets.
Snippets
Users can save blocks of frequently used code as snippets and assign keywords to them. This allows quick insertion of code by typing the keyword and pressing the `Tab` key.
Navigation and Editing
Sublime Text offers quick navigation features such as the “command palette” with adaptive matching for invoking commands, and shortcuts to jump to symbols, lines, or project files. It also supports simultaneous editing, allowing users to make multiple selections and edits at once.
Integrated Terminal and Code Building
The editor includes an integrated terminal/console window, enabling users to run code directly from within the editor. This feature can be set to build the code automatically every time the file is saved, reducing the need to switch to a command-line prompt.
Customizability
Sublime Text is highly customizable through JSON settings files, allowing for project-specific, platform-specific, and user-defined settings. Users can also extend its functionality with plugins written in Python, which can be installed via the built-in Package Control system.
Other Notable Features
- Multi-Select and Column Editing: Users can select multiple lines, words, or columns, making it easier to perform batch edits.
- Spell-Check and Auto-Save: The editor includes a spell-check function that corrects as you type and an auto-save feature to prevent work loss.
- Macros and Repeat Actions: Sublime Text supports macros and the ability to repeat the last action, enhancing productivity.
- GPU Rendering: Sublime Text 4 utilizes GPU rendering on Linux, Mac, and Windows, resulting in a fluid UI even at high resolutions.
Licensing and Availability
Sublime Text is proprietary software available under a shareware license. It can be downloaded for free and used as an evaluation version with no time limit. However, a perpetual license must be purchased for continued use without limitations, with a starting price of $80.00.
In summary, Sublime Text is a versatile and powerful text editor that combines a minimalistic interface with extensive features and customization options, making it a preferred choice for developers and writers across various platforms.
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