![]() Holding down the scroll wheel will let you highlight a block of code, or insert a column of cursors at the same indent position (shown in the image below).Cntrl + click will place multiple cursors at specific spots. ![]() Highlighting text and using Cntrl+D will let you select and change other matching occurrences of that text.This is great for making multiple edits or inserts in your code at the same time. One of Sublimes great features that Dreamweaver doesn’t have is multiple cursors. This is one of the biggest advantages of Sublime Text over Dreamweaver… the program feels like it has been built around the developer and engineered to reduce keystrokes and mouse reliance. It sounds pendantic I know, but any repetition of tasks that can be easily done through keystrokes is going to save us a lot of time vs using the mouse, especially when we consider how often we may use these commands throughout the day. The mouse equivalent has four separate movements: 1) Move the mouse to ‘Edit’, 2) Click ‘Edit’ 3) Move the mouse to ‘Copy’ and finally (after all that work!) click ‘Copy’. It’s two keystrokes and done in a single movement. We all know (I hope!) the shortcut keys to copy something in any program. Things like fuzzy search, tag completion and plugins (more on all this later) are optimised to reduce key strokes and our reliance on the mouse. I had this notion that code editors meant you had to type most of this stuff out longhand but I was wrong. One of the things I used to love about Dreamweaver was the way I could just drag and drop assets, an image for example, direct into code view and voilà! I have a fully formed IMG tag complete with dimensions and URL. After all, Dreamweaver had served me well for the best part of a decade… right back to the days it was called Ultradev and owned by MacroMedia (I bet few remember that!).Įnough preamble! Onto my top reasons why I like to use Sublime Text instead of Dreamweaver and why I think other web developers should give it a try. This isn’t a Dreamweaver bashing post and nor do I want to sound all preacher-like. So now that I have been using Sublime Text (V2) code editor for over a year, I feel I can approach this subject matter much more objectively. Even so, it’s healthy to try and keep questioning and challenging ourselves, especially in the fast moving web industry. It’s not our fault, confirmation bias is supposedly programmed in our DNA. We are all creatures of habit to a greater or lesser degree and when we develop workflows to help make our lives easier, we can get entrenched in the view that these honed practices are superior. I’m glad I did because it quickly became obvious that my presumed reasons for Dreamweaver’s superiority were just wrong. So, wanting to write an objective post from a web developers point of view, and because I had heard many good things about it, I setup Sublime Text 2 and dove straight in. This was biased, as I hadn’t properly explored other code editors like Coda, Sublime Text or Notepad++. I started writing this post over a year ago but back then it was entitled something along the lines of ‘Reasons why I use Dreamweaver over code editors’.
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