Sublime Text 2 Ubuntu PPA

Sublime Text 2 is a pretty neat text editor which will remind you of TextMate. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX and while it's not free, you can evaluate it for an unlimited period of time. Check out our Sublime Text 2 review for more info.

Sublime Text 2 is currently in alpha and there are new builds available for download quote often so I wanted to create an Ubuntu PPA for a while now but I couldn't find out what license it uses. I've emailed the Sublime Text 2 developer and got no reply so I decided to package it like Adobe Flash: the .deb will download Sublime Text 2 from its website so the .deb doesn't come with the actual files.

While Sublime Text 2 automatically checks for updates and prompts you to download the latest version, I like getting the updates through a PPA. Further more, using this PPA, Sublime Text 2 will get a proper .desktop file so you can right click files to open in Sublime Text 2. You can also open files from the command line (run "sublime-text-2 /path/to/file").

This is the first version of the Sublime Text 2 packaging so there might be bugs. The deb doesn't check if the download was successful; also, it will probably fail to install behind a proxy; and finally: I've only tested it in Ubuntu 10.10 32bit. Use it at your own risk!

Add the PPA and install Sublime Text 2 in Ubuntu

Before installing, please note that initially, Sublime Text 2 used "~/.Sublime Text 2" for the configuration files while the latest versions use "~/.config/sublime-text-2". Because of a bug with having 2 configuration folders, the deb will remove "~/.Sublime Text 2" so if you have some configuration files you want to keep in there, move them to "~/.config/sublime-text-2".

Add our Sublime Text 2 PPA and install it in Ubuntu using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-2

I've set up the PPA for personal use but of course, anyone can use it. If you find any bugs, please report them in the comments below.

For what's new in the latest Sublime Text 2 builds, check out its homepage.


Also see: GMate: Get TextMate Features And Styles In Gedit

Sublime Text 2 Is A Nice TextMate Alternative For Linux (As Well As Windows And Mac OSX)

Sublime Text 2 is a TextMate-like text editor currently in alpha which is now available for Linux too (as well as Windows and Mac OSX). The application is not free but its evaluation period does not expire.

Sublime Text 2 comes with a very interesting interface: a sidebar for projects or files and Chrome-style tabs as well as multi-pane editing which includes horizontal, vertical and even a quad pane mode:

A very interesting feature is "Goto Anything": press Ctrl+P and type something - this will search in both filenames and lines of code across currently open files as well as recently close files. Start your search by using "#" to go to that word line, "@" for symbol or ":" for line:

The user interface also comes with a cool minimap which shows you an an overview of your files:

Other features include macros, various find tools (find in files, find in open files, incremental find), easily switch between project, multiple selection, autocomplete and lots more. And of course, everything is customizable.

Since Sublime Text 2 is currently in alpha, some features are missing. These include distraction free editing, spell checker, bookmarks, a full python API and more - but all these will be coming in the next months.

Download Sublime Text 2 alpha for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX | To run it on Linux, simply extract the downloaded archive and double click the "sublime_text" file.

Update: Sublime Text 2 is now available in a PPA for Ubuntu!


Want most of the TextMate features in Gedit? Try Gmate.

[Info via Sublime Text 2 blog]

How To Integrate Meld Into Gedit For Easily Comparing Files [Quick Tip]

Meld is a great visual diff and merge tool but it can only be used for that and is not suitable for coding. On the other hand, Gedit is a great text editor but it doesn't come with a tool for comparing files. Wouldn't it be great if you could integrate Meld into Gedit? Here is how to do it.

Please note that by using the instructions in this post, you won't get a built-in compare tool in Gedit - you'll only get a quick way of comparing the file you're currently viewing in Gedit and some other file, in Meld.

Set up Meld as an External Tool in Gedit

Before proceeding, make sure you've installed Meld and Zenity (Zenity should come by default). In Ubuntu, install Meld using the following command:

sudo apt-get install meld zenity

In Gedit, go to Edit > Preferences and on the "Plugins" tab, enable the "External tools" plugin. Then click "Configure Plugin", add a new external tool (the "+" button), give it a name like "Compare with Meld", additionally set a keyboard shortcut for it and under the "Edit" field, enter this:

#!/bin/sh 
meld $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_DIR/$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_NAME `zenity --file-selection --title="File for comparsion" --filename=/home/` &

Now whenever you press the keyboard shortcut you've set above or go to Tools > External Tools > Compare with Meld (or whatever name you've set for the custom external tool), a Zenity window will popup letting you browse for a file to compare with the currently active file in Gedit.

[via Linux for Designers]

Install Geany And Geany Plugins 0.20 In Ubuntu [PPA]

Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages.

Changes in Geany 0.20:

• Improved compatibility with GVFS using GIO to save documents
• Fix sometimes crashing when closing a modified document and choosing Save
• Reorganise Find in Files dialog and add Files pattern to filter search results
• Show mimetype icon in sidebar Documents list and notebook popup menu
• Add per-document indent width setting
• Fix passing quoted arguments when using 'Send Selection to'. This means e.g. sed 's/\./(dot)/g' now works
• Add alternative color scheme based on Python colors (View->Editor->Color Schemes - not all filetypes supported yet).

The Geany Plugins 0.20 package got two new plugins: UpdateChecker and WebHelper as well as many changes for the GeanyExtraSel, eanyGenDoc, GeanyLaTeX and TreeBrowser plugins.

Complete changelog: Geany 0.20 | Geany Plugins 0.20

Install Geany and Geany Plugins 0.20 in Ubuntu

Add the Geany PPA and install Geany in Ubuntu Karmic, Lucid and Maverick using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:geany-dev/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install geany geany-plugins