After watching a video by Daniel Bachhuber, an Automattic code wrangler who’d raved about Sublime Text 2 at the end of his presentation, I thought I’d give it a try.
Enter Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a powerful IDE that’s also beautifully designed, super smooth and fast. I was surprised and impressed by the quality of the interface, the simplicity, the default choices of colour scheme and fonts. I really wanted to use this editor. So I did. First hurdle was to get the VI plugin. I’m old hat when it comes to text editing. I learned to use vi very early in my computer using days and the power of having every command at your fingertips is hard to give up. Unfortunately the plugin doesn’t support all of the vi commands I’m accustomed to using so I was thinking I had no choice but to go back to using my old IDE, Komodo Edit.
Oh no, slipping into the past…
Switching back over to Komodo was like an experience in time travel. I was shocked by how much better Sublime looked. I was torn. Beauty or efficiency: Could I not have both? So I vowed to try and make Komodo look as nice as Sublime. I remembered a site I’d used a lot to come up with ideas for which colour combinations to use when designing web sites called kuler.
Kuler saves the day
Browsing through the kuler colour themes lifted my spirits and after playing around with the font and colour preferences in Komodo I started to see that it would be possible to make Komodo look as nice as Sublime. Happily, Komodo’s colour picker widget includes an eye dropper tool so I could click on the colours directly from the kuler site. Slowly my scheme was improving. Choosing a better font and increasing the size also helped a lot. I was getting pretty close now. Sublime deals with large files much better than Komodo. The scrolling is so smooth. But, a fully functioning vi interface is far more important to me. Now that I have a look and feel that’s beautiful in my eyes (and a simple method to change it with the help of kuler) I’m happy to keep using Komodo Edit and let those not stuck on keyboard commands enjoy the amazing Sublime Text.
My current colour scheme in Komodo
