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Hi, I'm James Kennedy a web developer here at BarkWeb. Since starting my journey into the world of web development I’ve tried a lot of text editors, from vim to emacs (I liked vim more), visual studio code, webstorm, all the way to notepad++.

However, there is one text editor I always end up coming back to, Sublime Text. I love how fast and extensible it is out of the box (it’s also the text editor I’ve used the most so I’m slightly biased).

This is going to be a list of Sublime Text plugins I use every day that I just couldn’t live without:

1. Package Manager

Every single Sublime Text plugin list has package control somewhere on it and if it doesn’t, well it probably should have. Package control is the `npm i` of sublime text, sure you could just download the plugin files and move them into the correct directory but using package manager makes installing a new plugin 100x easier.

2. Emmet

Emmet is one of the most popular plugins available, it allows you to write HTML and CSS rapidly by using shorthand versions of tags, attributes and styles. 

3. Git Gutter

Git is an important part of a web project, it is the most popular version control software currently. It’s important to know which lines you’ve edited, added and removed, git gutter lets you see this information in a very simple way, by displaying an icon in the gutter, hence the name, Git Gutter.

4. Lorem Gibson

Being a massive Cyberpunk and technology fan, William Gibson is one of my favourite authors (I highly recommend Neuromancer and Snow Crash). Sometimes I need to use filler text, either to demonstrate how something will look to a client or for testing and Lorem Gibson is just more interesting than Ipsum in my opinion.

5. Project Manager

This is probably my most used plugin on this list, project manager allows you to add several directories as ‘projects’ that can then be jumped between. This is great for a couple of reasons, firstly, it allows you to have different projects that you can move between without having to open multiple Sublime windows. Secondly, it means you can have different build commands for each project within Sublime and you don’t have to keep track of which project you’re currently in.

6. Material Theme

While this isn’t a plugin per se, it’s my favourite theme for sublime due to the large file tree, vibrant colours and extensive customisation options.

There are so many amazing plugins for Sublime that narrowing it down to just 6 was nigh on impossible. This is by no means an extensive list of the plugins I use otherwise it would get to the point where it would be 2019 by the time you finished reading this blog post.