I recently changed from Dreamweaver to Sublime Text 3, I thought it would be good to share some of my thoughts and reason why I did so. I have been using Adobe Dreamweaver from CS6 and even purchased the Creative Cloud package but the application is just not worth the monthly fee.
- The most obvious reason behind the change is the cost, Sublime text is a once of R1000 (70 dollars) once off, while Dreamweaver is R300 (20 dollars) a month. I don’t use all the other Adobe software and I find that paying for Dreamweaver separately is just not worth it.
- Sublime text is so much faster, than Dreamweaver and uses much less processing power. Sublime text uses about 40MB for memory, while Dreamweaver uses about 100MB.
- Dreamweaver is more focused on the WYSIWYG editor, which would be considered better for developer/designer hybrids. This is not a problem but it doesn’t show the exact website or make clean code.
- The plugin community is a major part of sublime as there are thousands of plugins available, any features you may miss from other text editors are likely to exist in the Sublime plugin repository.
- Sublime Text editor is very stable and I have yet to experience the application crashing. On the other hand, Dreamweaver was plagued with various problems and constant crashes.
The basic out-the-box Sublime Text lacks some features, in order to get Sublime to do some of the functions that Dreamweaver does and more you will need to install these plugins. The great thing about Sublime is the community is massive and there are many free plugins available. Below are some of the plugins that I use for Sublime Text.
The first thing you need in order to make finding, installing and managing packages easier is Package control.
AutoFileName
Do you ever find yourself sifting through folders in the sidebar trying to remember what you named that file? Can’t remember if it was a jpg or a png? Maybe you just wish you could type filenames faster. No more.
Whether you’re making an img tag in HTML, setting a background image in CSS, or linking a .js file to your HTML (or whatever else people use filename paths for these days…), you can now autocomplete the filename. Plus, it uses built-in autocomplete, so no need to learn another pesky shortcut.
BracketHighlighter
Bracket Highlighter matches a variety of brackets such as: [], (), {}, “”, ”, <tag></tag>, and even custom brackets.
CSSFontFamily is a Sublime Text 2/3 plugin with a collection of font stacks autocomplete.
Commercial SFTP/FTP plugin – upload, sync, browse, remote edit, diff and vcs integration
Sidebar Enhancements
Provides enhancements to the operations on Sidebar of Files and Folders for Sublime Text. This is one of my favourite plugins and makes Sublime text so much more user-friendly.
