[Sublime + Python Setup] Sublime Text is just a blank canvas…

Hey there,

When I became serious about optimizing Sublime Text with plugins, it was hard for me to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Without a real guideline or roadmap I resorted to installing *any* plugin that seemed remotely useful.

Anything that I heard about on Twitter, Reddit, or some random blog post, I just installed it to try it out —

Needless to say, I completely painted myself into a corner with that strategy.

80% of the plugins and tweaks I tried didn’t work the way they were supposed to.

Even when I eventually declared “plugin bankruptcy” and uninstalled them all, some crust, some residue must’ve remained…

And it was gunking up my whole development setup.

Sublime didn’t feel as snappy as before. And it developed an ugly tendency to freeze for seconds at a time. Sometimes it even crashed.

I wiped my machine, reinstalled the OS and was back to normal…

At least for a while.

Of course, like an addict, I eventually got suckered into trying the latest and greatest Sublime packages again… and I pretty much ended up again where I’d started.

On the other hand, I still really *loved* Sublime Text.

I saw it’s strengths: the buttery smooth scrolling, the gorgeous font rendering. The excellent multiple-cursor editing mode (a real timesaver).

I really wanted to go all in: to make Sublime my main code editor and to tune it exactly to my liking.

Because I knew it would be going through all that trouble, picking plugins and custom settings, would eventually pay off and lead to programming bliss.

5 months later I had things figured out for the most part.

Yet looking back, it took me way too long to come up with a good baseline setup, a stable foundation that I could work with —

To be honest, a large chunk of these 5 months I had just wasted on trying out random tweaks that didn't get me any closer to my goal.

The way I floundered with setting up Sublime completely from scratch… you might know the same pain.

Maybe you learned the hard way, too, that starting with the default config and randomly slamming in plugins and tweaks as you find them simply does not work.

Like a lot of text editors and IDEs, Sublime is like a blank canvas.

And, if you’re starting with the default config you’re doing yourself a disservice.

A disservice that might cause you a ton of frustration and wasted time.

Looking back it would’ve been great for me to start with a tested, proven, and rock-solid setup as my baseline—and *then* modify it to meet my needs.

It’s like “decorating and arranging your home office to your liking” versus “pouring concrete to build your own house from scratch”.

There’s a rock-solid development setup with Sublime that I’ve tested and refined through actual development work for more than 3 years.

All the hard work is done.

And you can leapfrog to the same setup in less than an hour. Click the link below to see how:

>> Get a rock-solid Sublime Text foundation to build on

— Dan Bader