Touring the interface

- [Instructor] When you first open Sublime Text 3, it'll look a lot like this. A plain gray box. If you're on Windows you'll have the menu bar across the top of the window, but that's about it. Not much to look at. If you hit command N or control N on Windows, you'll get an untitled file tab. But again not a whole lot to see here. Instead let's open an existing file. I'll choose file open from the menu and then open the index.htm file from the exercise files included with this course. Let's make the window a bit bigger so we have some room to look around.

And there we go. Now we've got some actual code to look at. If you look down the left hand side of the window, you get the line numbers in the gutter and there's little triangles here that you can use to expand and collapse sections of code. Down the bottom there's the status bar, starting with the line and column number. And when you install additional packages into Sublime Text 3 you'll get more information along here. Down at the far left, there's the panel switcher. And this is a pop up menu that let's you choose a number of panels that will add themselves to the bottom of the window and you can choose which one is displayed or hide them entirely.

Over on the right, you have the file indentation mode. And you can see that based on opening this file, Sublime Text 3 has guessed that I'm using two spaces for indentation, which is correct. If you want to change these settings, you can click in this area and choose the number of spaces and whether to indent with tabs or spaces. At the far right, we have the syntax highlighting mode and you can see once again that Sublime Text 3 has guessed correctly that I'm working on an HTML file. Using the dot htm file name extension to detect this.

If you want to change this, you can click and select from a list of all the different syntax highlighting types that are supported by Sublime Text 3 out of the box. Over on the right there is perhaps the most distinctive element of the Sublime Text interface. And that's the mini map. This is a miniaturized version of the entire file. And there's a shaded area indicating what the current view port is showing. And for types of files like this one you can eyeball the different types of code that exist in the file. So this white area here is the main content of the page and I can just click on it to jump to that part of the file.

It's a real handy way to get around large files in Sublime Text. So there you go, that's the Sublime Text 3 interface out of the box. Come on in and make yourself at home.