Editing

Sublime Text is brim-full of editing features. This topic just scratches the surface of what's possible.

Multiple Selections

Multiple selections let you make sweeping changes to your text efficiently. Any praise about multiple selections is an understatement. This is why:

Select some text and press Ctrl D to add more instances. If you want to skip the current instance, press Ctrl K, Ctrl D.

If you go too far, press Ctrl U to deselect the current instance.

On Windows, you can also create additional selections with the mouse by holding Ctrl and clicking with the left mouse button. Clicking and dragging while holding Ctrl selects text and adds it to the current set of selections.

Transforming Multiple Selections into Lines

Ctrl L expands the selections to the end of the line.Ctrl ⇧ L splits the selections into lines.

You can copy multiple selected lines to a separate buffer, edit them there, select the content again as multiple lines and then paste them back into place in the first buffer.

Column Selection

You can select a rectangular area of a file. Column selection makes use of multiple selections.

It's possible to add blocks of text to or remove them from the selection.

Using the Mouse

Windows & Linux

Description	Shortcut
Select Block	⇧ + Right Mouse Button
Add to Selection	Ctrl + Left Mouse Button
Add Block to Selection	Ctrl ⇧ + Right Mouse Button
Remove from Selection	Alt ⇧ + Right Mouse Button

macOS

Description	Shortcut
Select Block	⌥ + Left Mouse Button
Add to Selection	⌥ ⌘ + Left Mouse Button
Remove from Selection	⌥ ⇧ ⌘ + Left Mouse Button

Using the Keyboard

System	Shortcut
Windows	Ctrl Alt ↑ and Ctrl Alt ↓
Linux	Alt ⇧ ↑ and Alt ⇧ ↓
macOS	Ctrl ⇧ ↑ and Ctrl ⇧ ↓

Other Ways of Selecting Text

The list is long; all available options can be found under Selection. To name a few:

• Select subwords (Alt ⇧ ← and Alt ⇧ →)
• Expand selection to brackets (Ctrl ⇧ M)
• Expand selection to indentation (Ctrl ⇧ J)
• Expand selection to scope (Ctrl ⇧ ␣)

Transposing Things

Need to swap two letters or, better yet, two words? Experiment with

Ctrl T.

Arithmetic

Need to create a series of numbers? Try Ctrl ⇧ P and "Arithmetic".

Best used when having multiple selections.

Expression	Selection	Result
1+i		1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ...
30+(i%3)		30, 31, 32, 30, 31, 32, ...
(x*2)+i	10, 20, 30	20, 41, 62
math.ceil(x)	0.25, 2.25	1, 3
len(s)	house, tree	5, 4
format(s, '^10')	fish	'   fish   ' (centered string)

You can use the following variables:

• i being the index of the selection
• x being the selected number
• s being the selected string

As you can see above you can even use a certain set of built-in python functions:

• docs.python.org/3.8/library/math.html
• docs.python.org/3.8/library/functions.html
• docs.python.org/3.8/library/string.html#formatspec

And much, much more...

The Edit, Selection, Find and Goto menus are good places to look for handy editing tools. You might end up using just a few of them, but the rest will still be there for when you need them.