Coding Faster with Sublime Text Editor using Emmet Plugin

Both the sublime and sublime_plugin modules are provided by Sublime Text; they are not part of the Python standard library.

As we mentioned earlier, plugins reuse or create commands. Commands are an essential building block in Sublime Text. They are simply Python classes that can be called in similar ways from different Sublime Text facilities, like the plugin API, menu files, macros, etc.

Sublime Text Commands derive from the *Command classes defined in sublime_plugin (more on this later).

The rest of the code in our example is concerned with particulars of TextCommand or with the API. We’ll discuss those topics in later sections.

Before moving on, though, we’ll look at how we invoked the new command: first we opened the Python console and then we issued a call to view.run_command(). This is a rather inconvenient way of calling commands, but it’s often useful when you’re in the development phase of a plugin. For now, keep in mind that your commands can be accessed through key bindings and by other means, just like other commands.

Emmet (formerly Zen Coding[1]) is a set of plug-ins for text editors that allow for high-speed coding and editing in HTML, XML, XSL, and other structured code formats via content assist. The project was started by Vadim Makeev in 2008[2] and continues to be actively developed by Sergey Chikuyonok and Emmet users based upon the Zen Coding 2.0 concept.[3] The tools have been incorporated into a number of high-profile text editors, as well as some plug-ins developed by the Emmet team and others implemented independently. However, Emmet is primarily independent from any text editor, as the engine works directly with text rather than with any particular software.[4]

Emmet is open sourced under the MIT License.