2.1 Installation and Base Settings

All right, so let's get started in lesson one. I've already downloaded the app, and I'm gonna bring this into my Applications folder, and now we're ready to get started. So the first thing of course is, it is unregistered, and that's okay, if you're just getting started with this editor, or you're using this course as a way to convince yourself to switch, then stick with unregistered for now. But when you decide that this is the editor for you. I really do recommend, go ahead and pick it up. It's very cheap and it's gonna save you quite a bit of time. Plus, it's an excellent way to give back to John, who was the creator of Sublime Text. So I've already purchased this, I'm gonna go ahead and add my license. I will go to Help, Enter License, and of course, you don't need to see this, so I'm gonna blur it out. There we go. So the first thing I will do is open a project, so we have something to look at. I will go to File, Open, and let's open this url-shortener project that I did in a course not too long ago. So the first thing you'll notice is our sidebar. Now it's nothing flashy, and admittedly it's probably one of the less featured parts of Sublime Text 2, but as I think you'll find, you'll very rarely be referring to the sidebar. You'll be bringing up the files using keystrokes. So let's open, just a random file path stop php. And I'm gonna switch to full screen. The first thing that you'll see is automatically we have a nice color scheme, we have a dark background. And also take a look at the side bar here and this is very unique to Sublime Text 2. It gives us a birds eye view of the entire file. So clearly, this can be very helpful, cuz you can immediately switch to the section that you need to with only a click of a button. Next, as with most editors, if you want to adjust the size of the text, on the Mac, I can hit Cmd+Equals, and Cmd+Minus to zoom out. Now, let's say that you don't like this theme. Well, you can adjust it by going to Sublime, Preferences, Color Scheme and you'll see built in it comes with a little more than a dozen. So you can play around with some of these. There's Blackboard, here's Solarized, you'll see Solarized comes built in, and let's take a look at one more. Let's do Solarized Light, and if you're not familiar with the Solarized theme, it's become very popular, because the colors are inverted, and according to some science and logic. This would be considered the best lighting for the day, and the other one would be the best lighting for the night. So you'll notice that when I select the text, its giving us essentially what the dark solarized version is and visa versa. But, you know, what for this course, at least for now, we're gonna stick with the one that comes by default, like so. Now we know how to zoom in, but what if you want to set default settings? Well, once again, let's go back to Sublime, Preferences, and to begin, I'm gonna go to the Default settings. Now, this is ironically one of the things that Sublime is criticized for the most, but the irony is that I consider this to be one of its best features. It's not flashy, you're not seeing a GUI, but at the same time, you have tremendous control over every single piece of Sublime Text. So to give you an example of what we have here, this is JavaScript, it's just a JavaScript object. So, if I want to adjust the font face, I can do so, if I need the font size, and then you'll see there's lots of stuff here. Smart indenting. Setting a wrap width. Matching brackets. And also, if I scroll down to the bottom, you'll see ignored_packages, Vintage, and if you happen to be a Vim user, certainly you will want to remove this which will provide them support. But we'll take a look at that in a future lesson. So, initially, you might change this, we'll do something really high just to see it. And expect that suddenly update the entire app, and even maybe you close it out and reopen it, but nope, it's not working. So what's important to remember is that this is your default settings, and every single time Sublime Text is updated. This file will be refreshed, or in effect, all changes you make will be reset. So your custom settings, and I'm gonna bring this back to 10, should instead be applied to Preferences, User, or notice on the Mac, I can hit Apple+comma, which is standard for Settings for lots of apps. And now you can see, he's already set some default options for us. In this case, he set the font size to 11. So, if I were to update that to 20, now you'll see instantly that updates, and now every time I open Sublime Text in the future, that will be set to a font size of 20. In this case, for our course, because I'm on a low resolution, I'm gonna go a little higher than I normally would. Maybe around 16, but in real life, I would probably stick with around 12. Honestly, it just depends on how long I've been working. So that does it for this lesson. We installed Sublime Text, we registered it, and we took a look at our color theme options as well as applying user-specific settings. So, I'll see you in the next video.