Setting “preferences” is really just opening a JSON file in the editor itself and typing away. ST2 uses very readable JSON files to control things like preferences and keybindings. I might as well start this by jumping straight into the user settings.

This software is definitely worth the $59 I paid for it, and I hope it motivates the author to keep working on it. After I used it for a while I didn’t need to wait. It’s free to use right now (it is in beta) but the author reserves the right to charge in the future. Long term I will revisit these choices, but in the short term my goal was to make ST2 as usable as BBEdit or Notepad++ as quickly as possible, even if that mean losing possible ST2 functionality. There’s even the short term effect of turning off interesting features in ST2 because I found them distracting. But they aren’t, and I am, and so much of this post is “how do I replicate this feature in Notepad++” or “I wish this cool BBEdit thing would work”. If either BBEdit of Notepad++ were on both platforms, I would be using it and not considering ST2. I Need Another Text Editor Like I Need a Hole In The HeadĪn important piece of context for this post: I went looking for a new editor specifically because I was annoyed at switching between BBEdit on Mac and Notepad++ on Windows (I also use vi/vim/gvim on all platforms, but am not annoyed in the least with it). I probably can’t write anything better than what’s already out there, so this post is really just an attempt to document for my future self my own customization decisions and the logic behind my choices.

Looking around the web, I’m certainly not alone, and there are many great tips and tricks posts. I recently started a love affair with the Sublime Text 2 text editor.

Closest notepad++ for mac