Productivity Tweaks

00:01 I’ve got two more productivity tweaks for you. The first one is how we’re going to make the sidebar area here, this area, a little bit more useful. And then also I’m going to show you how you can keep your editor tabs under control, because it’s actually quite easy to end up with 20 or 30 tabs open and then this whole system becomes kind of useless.

00:25 So I’ve got two hacks or plugins for that that I want to show you to set up that are really going to help with this.

00:35 So, the first plugin that I want to show you is called SideBarEnhancements, and it’s going to add some more options here to the sidebar. By default, when you click on a file, you can only rename, delete, and open the folder.

00:50 When you click on a folder, you can’t really do much here either, or you know, it’s very limited in what you can do with these context menu options by default.

01:03 What SideBarEnhancements does, it basically fixes that and allows you to duplicate files inline to rename them, move a file, to move it to the trash instead of deleting it, and a couple of things like that.

01:16 So, what we need to do to get that functionality is, again, go through the Install Package function and then we’re going to search for SideBarEnhancements.

01:30 You want to click on SideBarEnhancements or hit Return, and that’s what’s going to install SideBarEnhancements. And now once that’s complete, you don’t really have to do anything else besides quitting Sublime Text and then starting it again so the plugin gets activated.

01:48 And now when you click on a file, you get all of these new options. For example, you could cut, copy, and paste that file. You could copy its path, which is super handy sometimes. You could duplicate a file, like if you’re working on a web application and you need to duplicate some kind of template that you’re working with, that could be really handy.

02:11 You can do all kinds of things. You can create new folders directly within other folders, and I think you could not do that before, so it adds a bunch of really, really helpful functionality here to the sidebar.

02:23 So SideBarEnhancements is a plugin that I really, really recommend. There’s one more tweak we can make here, and that is reducing some of the clutter that you might see on the left side.

02:37 For example, what often happens is that you get an extra folder, like a __pycache__/ folder in there, or if you’re working with people who are using macOS, you will get these .DS_Store files showing up, and these can get a little bit distracting. So, again, you want to go to your settings and there’s two very helpful settings that I like to set. And

03:00 there’s going to be a lot stuff to type in here, so I would recommend actually that you go to the ZIP file that came with these videos and find the user preferences there, and then just copy over the settings for "file_exclude_patterns".

03:20 I’m going to do that in a minute, I just want to show you what the other settings are that you need to copy. And the other one is called "folder_exclude_patterns". And again, both of these are lists of file patterns.

03:35 I’m just going to paste in the settings that I use to give you some example, and I would recommend that you start with those as a baseline. So basically, this is going to get rid of all of these intermediary files, like the .DS_Store files, and then also stuff like build files, you know, output libraries, and stuff like that.

03:55 And then I also like to get rid of the .git/ folders, or like the folders for all the version control systems in the __pycache__/ folder.

04:03 And some of them are excluded by default, but I found that it really helps with reducing some of the clutter. I mean, you could go further and even get rid of things like the .gitignore file but, you know, it might be going a little bit too far. Like personally, I don’t do that, but you could do that with the same mechanism here in the file and folder exclude patterns.

04:24 This could really make sure you’re only seeing the things that you actually want to see here in the sidebar. So coming up next is a plugin that’s going to help with reducing tab clutter.

04:35 And what I mean by that is when you open a bunch of files here, the tab bar can get extremely crowded, right? This is really difficult to keep under control. Like, I mean, I changed the window size to be smaller, right? Like usually, we would have a little bit more space, but even here, this just gets kind of unwieldy, right? Like, what is this file here?

05:00 And it just gets kind of frustrating. And sure, you can use that little hamburger menu there on the right to kind of jump directly to a file, and then there’s also a way to do that through the Command Palette, but personally, I found that this was just driving me nuts, right?

05:16 And I’m going to show you a way to get rid of that now, and that is by installing an extra plugin, and it’s called the Zen Tabs plugin, The ultimate plugin for Sublime Text 2&3 to keep your tabs in Zen.

05:33 So you want it install that.

05:36 This should install quickly. And I like to make a tweak before we actually jump into this, so I like to make a settings tweak. So you want to go to Package Settings > Zen Tabs, and then go to your user settings. And then here, I would add the "open_tab_limit" setting,

05:58 set that to 5. Actually, with all of these, whenever that file is empty, you can just add the new open braces, close braces, and start adding new options. So as long as it’s valid JSON, you’ll be fine. So, okay.

06:13 Basically what this plugin does is it makes sure the number of tabs you have open is limited. Let me restart my Sublime here for the plugin to get activated.

06:25 Okay, so we restarted Sublime, and now what I’m going to show you… I’m going to show you the same thing that I did before, I’m going to open a bunch of tabs, but what you’ll see is that now we have a limit of five tabs open at the same time. And when you add another one…

06:41 So, it’s kind of hard to find another one that I didn’t open already. So when you add another one, then Zen Tabs is going to replace older tabs with the newer ones, right?

06:53 And so what’s actually pretty cool is that it’s smart enough to make sure you’re not losing data. So when I’m editing these—you know, just making sure changes to them so you can see that here they were edited—and then click around, then it’s either going to bump up the tab limit or just replace tabs haven’t been modified.

07:15 So you can’t really lose data with this, and I’ve been using this plugin for years and I’ve never lost any data due to it. And this really helps for making this tab bar actually useful so you can switch between tabs. So, you know, it’s a small tweak, but this was really something that was driving me nuts, so I was so glad when I found this plugin, because it really solved that problem for me.

07:39 And of course, you can change the settings and bump that up maybe to 10, or depending on your monitor size and screen resolution, you maybe want to pick a different setting.

07:47 But this was really bugging me and it was completely solved through this plugin. So again, these two tweaks they’re productivity tweaks that make it a little bit easier for you to interact with the file system in Sublime Text and then also when you’re editing files to kind of keep that clutter here under control. I found both of them very helpful, so I hope you like them too.