Top features you need to know about

2 min read

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1 – Minimap

The minimap is an innovative feature of Sublime Text 2 that gives you a bird’s-eye view of the document you are editing. Always present at the right-hand side of the editor, it allows you to quickly look at a live, updated, zoomed out version of your current document. While the text will rarely be distinguishable, it allows for a topographical view of your document structure.

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The minimap feature is also very useful for navigating a large document as it can behave similar to a scroll bar. When clicked on, the minimap can be used to scroll the document to a different portion.

However, should you find yourself not needing the minimap, or need the screen real estate it inhabits, it can easily be hidden by using the Menu bar to select View | Hide Minimap.

2 – Multiple cursors

Another way Sublime Text 2 differentiates itself from the crowded text editor market is by way of including the functionality that allows the user to edit a document in multiple places at the same time. This can be very useful when making an identical change in multiple places. It is especially useful when the change that needs to occur cannot be easily accomplished with find and replace. By pressing command + left-click on OS X, or Ctrl + left-click on other platforms, an additional cursor will be placed at the location of the click. Each additional cursor will mirror the original cursor.

The following screenshot shows a demo of this functionality. First, I created cursors on each of my three lines of text. Then I proceeded to type test without quotes:

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Now, as shown in the following screenshot, anything typed will be typed identically on the three lines where the cursors are placed. In this case I typed a space followed by the word test. This addition was simultaneous and I only had to make the change once, after creating the additional cursors.

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To return to a single cursor, simply press Esc or left-click anywhere on the document.

Summary

This article covered a few few features of Sublime Text 2 including multiple cursors, a plugin system, and a few others which will be covered in this article.