Sublime Text: A swiss knife of text editors. Practical examples.

Many users especially software developers like using Suplime Text as a text editor. For example, Chromium developers: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/sublime_ide.md

In this article I use short examples to explain some key tricks of Sublime Text. This tricks help you to save the substantial amount of time in many tasks.

We would use the following strings of numbers:

188417
72
8512
251127
670
337970
524267
297450
8512
337970

It is just ten lines for brieafity. But keep in mind that it can be hundreds and thouthands of lines and the following Sublime Text trics will take the same time!

Trick 1: Lines into the list

188417
72
8512
251127
670
337970
524267
297450
8512
337970

['188417', '72', '8512', '251127', '670', '337970', '524267', '297450', '8512', '337970']

Let’s explain what’s going on on the animation.

• We start from selecting all lines using Ctrl-A keys combination.
• The we press Shift-Ctrl-L for adding multiline cursor to the ends of lines
• Then we start editing our text. Home key puts multiline cursor to the begging of the lines. You can use Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right for words navigation.

The reasonable question: Can we do the same trick in another text editors like Notepad++? The answer is NO. We can do multiline selection in Notepad++ (Alt-Shift-Down or Alt-Shift-Up), but we can’t do multiline words navigation.

Trick 2: List into the lines

We are going to make reverse operation from the Trick 1. But we make the task harder. We add some tabs, spaces and endlines as separator.

['188417', '72', '8512'	, '251127', 
'670' , '337970',     '524267',
'297450', '8512', '337970']

188417
72
8512
251127
670
337970
524267
297450
8512
337970

Let’s see how we have done that:

• We started from find by pressing Ctrl+F
• The we entered the regulare expression \s*,\s*. Short explanation: \s means a space character (whitespace, tab, endline and etc.), * means zero or more times. Then we pressed Alt-Enter which is Find All command.
• After that we pressed Delete and cursor left on the necessary positions.
• Then we pressed Enter and edited the lines using Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right for words navigation.

Trick 3: Find duplicates

In this example we are going to highlight equal strings.

188417
72
8512
251127
670
337970
524267
297450
8512
337970

We have done the following actions:

• Ctrl-A – select all lines
• F9 – sort lines
• Ctrl-F – open find panel
• We entered the regular expression ^(.*)$\n^\1$
  ^ – the beggining on line
  . – any symblol
  * – zero
  $ – end of line
  \n – end of line symbol
  \1 – the first product of regular expression
• Then we pressed Alt-Enter which is Find All command and got all equal lines highlighted.

Summary

It is a good idea to practice by yourself and memorize the key Sublime Text combinations:

• Ctrl-A – select all lines.
• Shift-Ctrl-L – put multiline cursor in the selected lines.