Sublime Text 2 and Arduino

If you’re looking to get into Arduino, and you’re a programmer, the first thing that will jump out at you is the Arduino IDE. It’s best described as “spartan” (to say the least). As I’m used to full featured IDE’s I started looking for a replacement to the default Arduino IDE.

There are extensions to use Visual Studio, but that means me starting up a VM to run Windows which I don’t really want to do for Arduino development. There is a another IDE which looks promising called Maria Mole - but it’s Windows only so not really a contender for me. I need something for OS X. I looked at setting up Eclipse as my default IDE, but ran into some issues with that. Nothing to major, but as I don’t like Eclipse in the first place I wasn’t to motivated to sort things out, so I abandoned Eclipse as an IDE choice.

The next thing I tried was Sublime Text. There is an Ardunio plugin called Stino that turns Sublime into a not bad IDE. In terms of writing your programs, Stino can pretty much do everything the Arduino IDE can do: compile programs, upload them to your Arduino board, import libraries, etc.

Installing Stino isn’t that bad:

1. First make sure that you have downloaded Arduino 1.0.3. I’m not to sure how well Stino will work with the current beta.
2. In Sublime Text, go to Package Control, and type Install Package.
3. Search using the keyword Arduino, you should see a couple of packages - one contains Stino and the other are a couple of snippets.
4. Next open a .ino file in Sublime Text. When you do this the Arduino menu should appear in the Sublime toolbard.
5. From the Arduino menu, specify the location of the Ardunio directory, i.e. /Applications/Arduino.app.

Done!

To monitor the serial port, I’m using CoolTerm. Seems to be “good enough” for what I want to do, and it’s free. On Windows, I’d probably use something like puTTY.

[1] Blog post for Stino: http://kaixin.netii.net/stino-a-sublime-text-2-plugin-for-arduino.html