Sublime Text Snippets: Where have you been my whole life?

I’ve been coding for a while. Ten years to be exact. And I have used a lot of text editors along the way. First there was Notepad when I was learning HTML in college. Then Dreamweaver when I started my first job and managed the company’s intranet. I thought Dreamweaver and I were in it for the long haul. I loved Dreamweaver. And then suddenly the companies I worked for moved their websites to content management systems and Dreamweaver was abandoned. More recently, I have used Notepad++ and Sublime Text. Sublime Text is preferred.

I was first introduced to Sublime Text when I started taking web design and development courses at George Brown. I liked how clean and simple Sublime Text was. We used it for every project at George Brown. But apart from being introduced to the program, we didn’t learn how to become more efficient coders with Sublime.

Enter HackerYou’s front-end web development immersive bootcamp. Week one, we reviewed lots of HTML and CSS and I picked up some tips and tricks I’d never used before or had forgotten about. But the thing that blew my mind the most from week one, besides how happy I was that I enrolled in the program, was Sublime Text snippets. Do you know about these? I did not. I mean, I already thought it was super cool that to close some code, all I had to do was type </ and Sublime would take over. I often forgot and had to go back and clean up lots of p>, div> and h2>s. But snippets mean that I have to type even less!

So snippets… according to Sublime Text, are “smart templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context”. Basically, they are shorthand codes that will save you a ton of time while coding. And even though I love coding, it can be very tedious and time consuming making sure that every element is represented. Using snippets like Emmet mean that I can focus more on perfecting my code and less on typing. Yahoo!

My first project for HackerYou is already so much better because of things like the normalize and clearfix snippets. And of course Emmet, which I have a soft spot for because my family cat who lived to be age 16 was named Emmett. He was a great cat.

For more information about Sublime Text snippets, check out http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/extensibility/snippets.html?highlight=snippets. If you use a different text editor, you are still in luck! Snippets exist for other programs, so search for them.