Skip to Content

Tweaking Sublime Text

Posted on

One of the things I love about Sublime is everything is stored in simple text files, and configuring the editor exactly to your needs is as easy as editing a few files.

You can easily access these under the “Prefrences” menu.

Note: before you go tweaking things you may want to make a backup of these files! :)

Let’s get started…

There are generally 2 sets of options:

  1. Default: The default out of the box Sublime options
  2. User: Your personalized settings (these will override the default settings)

And three areas for configuration:

  1. File: These are related to editing files
  2. Global: These are general editor settings
  3. Key Bindings: Define what hot keys do

To easily get started - open ‘File Settings - Default’ and select and copy that text. Then open ‘File Settings - User’, paste the selected text and edit away.

Or you can simply add individual options to the user settings file. To keep things clean that is the route I’ve taken… so far I’ve got:

:::json
{
	"color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme - Default/Monokai.tmTheme"
	, "font_face": "Consolas"
	, "font_size": 12.0
	, "word_wrap": false
	, "gutter"   : true
	, "line_padding_bottom": 0
}

(the Alignment package makes formatting this file easy)

Basically just setting my font, word wrap and color scheme. Note that these changes are usually instant - no need to restart the editor.

The gutter and line_padding_bottom settings I’ve found useful when I have a dense block of code I need to pick through - I can turn off line numbers and create some white space between the lines to make reading easier.

I’m still exploring all the settings available. If you have some favorites, please leave a note in the comments!