To Typo is Human, To GREP is Sublime (Text)
June 20, 2019

To Typo is Human, To GREP is Sublime (Text)

Benjamin Plotkin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Sublime Text

Sublime Text is one of many programming-focused text editors in use by my department and it is a particular favorite of mine. It is used, in concert with other text editors, by our programming staff. As a free-to-start, fully unlocked, and highly featured text editor, it enables my software development staff to quickly and easily do their day-to-day programming work.
  • Sublime offers a competitively-featured text editor in a free-to-start model, ensuring a strong appeal with new and experienced coders.
  • Sublime allows extensive user-customization and functional extension via configuration settings and Package Control.
  • Sublime supports multi-line and block editing in an intuitive, easy to learn manner.
  • Sublime ships with a powerful grep module for advanced finds and replaces.
  • End-user configuration can be somewhat opaque, as it involves copying and modifying default settings files, and it's easy for a newbie to get swamped in the fine-grained configuration options.
  • User-supplied packages don't always do what is advertised—nothing adversarial or malicious in my experience, just packages that purport to do something but aren't always well-implemented or maintained (although this is not Sublime Text's fault, really).
  • The behavior of the "replace all" function can be mildly irritating, as it hides the find and replace dialog from the bottom of the editor window upon completion of a find and replace call. Perhaps this is a user-configurable behavior?
  • Sublime Text has positively impacted my ROI as it has consistently provided my staff with a low-cost, high-quality text editor, with the ability to test-drive it before purchasing.
  • Sublime Text's sophisticated feature set, including grep, find and replace, block editing, and multi-line editing, has allowed staff to be more productive when producing code.
  • Sublime Text's sometimes confusing configuration methods may slow down newbie users, but any time invested in its learning curve is quickly repaid, and then some, with the turbocharged abilities it gives users.
  • Atom
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Code
  • Notepad++
Sublime Text is a worthy contender in the text editor/IDE arena, holding its own against competitors like Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, and Atom. Sublime's committed and creative user-base, and the wide range of customizations they make available through Sublime packages, is a powerful differentiator in Sublime Text's favor. Sublime's commitment to product improvement is another solid plus in its favor.
Sublime Text is great for beginning coders who want to take a fully-featured spin with an excellent text editor with IDE functionality, without having to pay upfront or suffer with time or feature-limited shareware. It's also a wonderful option for long-time programmers who are stuck in vanilla text editor land and would like to get into a more user-configurable text editor. Sublime is not well-suited for human-readable communications; there is no inbuilt print functionality, and it is set up to support fixed-width characters and column widths deemed best for programming purposes.