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Better Syntax Matcher for Sublime Text 2

Team Avatar - Mikel Lindsaar
Mikel Lindsaar
October 8, 2012

If you haven’t tried Sublime Text 2 yet, and you code for a living, you should. It really is a great text editor that gets out of your way.

But I found when I was flipping between rails, ruby, features, specs, ERB, sass etc that the syntax matching wasn’t so good.

After hunting around the web, I found various patches and fixes, but none really handled everything I needed, nor gave me a way to properly define what files were which syntax. For example, a file ending in rb should be Ruby syntax, but if it is inside a Rails application, should have the Ruby on Rails syntax, and if it has _steps as the last part of the base file name, it should be Cucumber steps.

What was needed was a more powerful way to match each file and get the right syntax. I hunted around and found this solution but it didn’t solve the whole problem, and was just a gist.

So I took it, packaged it up into a proper Sublime Text 2 plugin and published it for anyone to use.

Behold, the new, improved and oh so shiny Sublime Text 2 Syntax Matcher!

This just uses a bunch of python to match the file types with context taken into account.

Feel free to fork and send pull requests to add the syntax of your choice.

Mikel