Useful Sublime Packages

Sublime Text on its own is a great tool to use for HTML / CSS / JavaScript development — but it gets even better with packages! Sublime Text is free to evaluate, with a nominal cost for continued use — a great way to get your feet wet with the tool.

Installing Package Control into Sublime allows you to include add-ons to make coding easier. Once you have installed Package Control into Sublime text, the next step is to locate packages that are helpful. I find a lot of benefit with the following packages.

Bracket Highlighter
Opening and closing brackets/braces/parenthesis can be tricky to keep track of — especially if you are troubleshooting code. This package will highlight the complementary bracket/brace/parenthesis your cursor is currently on.

Sublime Code Intelligence
Many IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments — tools to write your code in) offer code completion. Sublime will do this for repeated statements, and it will do it pretty well, but not for code not previously entered. Sublime Code Intelligence will help with code completion for common HTML, CSS, and JavaScript syntax — helping you to avoid typos.

Sublime Server
Sometimes supporting libraries you might include in your project (for example if you are including a framework like jQuery or something similar) don’t run well in a local environment (testing files directly from your computer). Making your local development environment more like a web server can help avoid some of these issues.

There are many local testing servers you can download, but Sublime Server is nice since you have everything integrated together and you can run any open file by right-clicking on it and choosing ‘View in Sublime Server’ which will launch your file to your default browser in the localhost.


In the examples and demo’s to come, I tend to utilize all of these packages to aid in my development.