We move from Dreamweaver to Sublime text, a long time ago. I have created a list of reasons why after I switched to sublime text, Dreamweaver was removed, and I have not looked back. This is not a post to bash or complain about Dreamweaver, I have also moved from web design to more web development stuff.
Key Strokes
Dreamweaver allows for a drag and drop and that makes it easier to insert images and content. The same can’t be done with sublime but that is where Key Strokes come in, allowing you to easily insert content without having to type out everything.
Multiple cursors
This is one of my favourite features of Sublime, being able to select multiple elements at once, not something I thought I would use a lot in the text editor.
Shortcuts
There are hundreds of useful shortcuts in Sublime Text for commands that don’t exist in Dreamweaver. Shortcuts for things like tag wrapping, line duplication and bracket selection to name just a few.
Even after a year, I’m still discovering new shortcuts that help make me a more efficient coder and if a command doesn’t have a key binding, it’s easy to assign one.
Fuzzy search
This is another great advantage Sublime Text has over Dreamweaver. Pretty much everything is based around ‘fuzzy’ searching. A fuzzy search means you only need to enter a few key characters and Sublime Text will try and match these with a list of what it thinks are the most relevant commands.
Code preview
One Sublime feature that can be pretty useful is the condensed preview of your code layout, especially for large pages. This allows you to quickly view and select areas of your code based on its overall shape and structure.
Bracket and div highlighting
Ever find yourself wading through big chunks of code in Dreamweaver trying to locate that closing div or bracket? This is a problem easily avoided in Sublime because of the way it highlights opening and closing brackets, divs and other tags.
Bookmarking
Bookmarking is another one of those great features that you don’t know you’re missing out on until you start using it. While there are plenty of good ways in Sublime to skip to specific areas of code.
Plugin Community
Sublime Text has a huge and active plugin community and with thousands of plugins available, any features you may miss from other text editors are likely to exist in the Sublime plugin repository.
Configurability
So many aspects of Sublime Text can be configured to levels not available through Dreamweaver.
You can install custom themes to change the GUI and code colours for example. Plugins and key bindings allow you to improve your coding process and the splitting code editor window allows you to work on different files side by side.
Sublime requires fewer resources
Firing up the task manager, I see Sublime Text takes up about 40MB of memory vs over 100MB in Dreamweaver. This is hardly surprising as Dreamweaver comes loaded with all the GUI and other tools that allow for a more drag-and-drop approach to web development.
Lightning fast loading
Sublime Text fires up in less than a second. Dreamweaver however, for the reasons mentioned in the previous point, takes at least 12 seconds on my machine, making it feel heavy and cumbersome.
Better stability
Never crashes and loads up super quickly unlike the other counterpart…. Adobe ain’t known for being the most stable.
Pricing
A single license for Sublime Text will set you back a mere $70. That’s a lot less than the cost of the new Adobe Creative Cloud and well we still use the free version.
If you’re more of a designer and less familiar with or interested in getting directly involved with code then Dreamweaver might be a better tool for you. Things like initial document setup, various UI elements and Dreamweaver’s drag-and-drop approach in design view are engineered to help website creation without even touching a line of code. This is where Dreamweaver’s main strengths lie.
