Vocabulary

Introduction#

This is a really small part, but still essential if you want to be able to communicate efficiently with other people using Sublime Text 3.

More to come: settings, keymap, mousemap etc…

Themes

A theme changes the global skin of Sublime Text 3. It changes the tabs, side bar, quick panels (goto, command palette), status bar, etc…

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of themes (top 100):

Note: the convention for the theme packages name is that they start with Theme -.

Theme - Focus
    img/
    focus.light.sublime-theme
    focus.dark.sublime-theme

As you can see, this convention isn’t really respected.

The themes are defined in a .sublime-theme file.

Color Schemes

The color schemes changes the colors of the code. They can change, for example, with which color the keywords are highlighted, with which color the line the caret is on is highlighted (needs highlight_line to be set to true in the preferences (not part of the cojor scheme)), what is the color of the caret, etc.

Many themes come with color schemes, or many packages contain plenty of them.

needs example of packages

The color scheme are defined in a .tmTheme file. This is an XML file in the Property List format, which is used by many text editors.

The convention for the color schemes packages name is that they start with Color Scheme -

Color Scheme - Focus
    first.tmTheme
    second.tmTheme
    ...

Tools

you can use this web app to create/edit your color schemes: tmTheme editor.
An other tool is ColorSchemeEditor which allows to edit your color scheme from Sublime Text.
You can also switch very quickly of color scheme using Schemr

Plugins

Plugins are .py files that changes the behaviour of Sublime Text 3. They are written, as you probably guessed, in Python.

Because there is plenty of different sort of plugins (text manipulation, linting, formatting, preview, etc), we will not give any example to not over populate this page with a huge list. Have a look at the Package Control browsing page if you’re interested in optimising your workflow with some plugins (you should be).

Packages

A package is a folder that can contain anything that is listed in these examples (and other thing that can have nothing to do with Sublime Text 3, such as a gulpfile.js if you’re automating some tasks).

You can install any package using the create Package Control.

A `.sublime-package` ?

Maybe you’ve seen that, when you install a package using package control, you only get a .sublime-package in the Install Packages folder… How come you don’t get the code? In fact, a .sublime-package is a .zip file renamed. You can extract or preview some files inside a .sublime-package using PackageResourceViewer.

Settings

The settings, are, as many things on Sublime Text 3, simple JSON files. Though, the extension of the file isn’t .json but .sublime-settings. As you probably understood, the settings changes how the packages affects Sublime Text 3. It is important to be aware of as much settings as possible to optimize your workflow.

The system for most of the packages is the following: a default one, and a user one which overwrites the default one.

To understand the priority of the settings (which is strongly recommend), have a look at the unofficial-but-awesome documentation: https://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/customization/settings.html#the-settings-hierarchy