Now, as to the text editor packages that will make your life easier, I definitely have a few thoughts. I have been introduced to many new packages at this point in my career, but I will focus on the plugins that will make your life easier right away. In this blog, I will discuss Atom packages, as that is my preferred text editor, but each of these individual packages will have an equivalent in Sublime. Also note, that Atom packages can be installed easily, but Sublime Text will require some additional setup.

1. First and foremost, I have to recommend the autoclose-html package. It is extremely simple and something no developer should be without. In a nutshell, this package will automatically close your HTML tags immediately once you finish the opening tag. So you will not have to write a closing tag ever again, cutting your time writing HTML in half.

2. Next, we have the autocomplete-ruby package. This is a must for any Ruby developer. It will do essentially the same as the autoclose-html package, but for your Ruby code instead. So the next time you start writing a method, autocomplete-ruby will add your end tag for you so that you can’t forget!

3. Keeping on our Ruby theme, next we have the Atom-erb package, and this one I could not live without. This allows the shortcut shift-ctrl-period to produce the ruby erb tags for use in html documents. This has saved me more time than I can begin to describe as actually typing out each caret and percentage sign is excruciating.

4. Our next package is Ruby-block, which will allow you to check the end keywords of your blocks and make sure they are all accounted for. Basically, this is similar to checking on a closing tag in HTML, only for Ruby. This will let you click on an end keyword anywhere in your ruby code, and it will highlight the beginning of that method. It also works the other way, if you click on the def keyword of your method, or even the if statement, it will show you where the method or block ends. This is a great way to make sure all your methods have their end tags and it really helps when you are getting an unexpected-end-of-input errors.

5. My final recommendation is for the Language-slim package. I was recently introduced to the slim way of writing your html pages. Slim is a new format for your files that removes the need to include closing or end tags for both your html and your ruby. That’s right, you will never have to write the closing html tag and you will never have to write the word end for erb ruby methods. After installation, this is a pretty simple package to implement. You simply change your view files to html.slim rather than html.erb, and then you just follow the multitude of syntax references online and you are coding with slim!