Sublime Text 2 is by far my favourite text editor and I use it to edit/code practically everything. I was working on an assignment for my CSC401H1 Natural Language Computing course in it when I realized something. It happened when I was writing a final discussion text file and I needed to do some calculations.

One of the set of lines in the discussion file was like this:

TheOnion
    precision = 429/(429 + 126 + 75 + 79 + 36 + 156) = 47.6%
    recall = 429/(429 + 216 + 63 + 50 + 126 + 115) = 42.9%
nytimes
    precision = 522/(216 + 522 + 145 + 147 + 94 + 114) = 42.1%
    recall = 522/(126 + 522 + 56 + 79 + 170 + 46) = 52.2%
torontostarnews
    precision = 197/(63 + 56 + 197 + 131 + 75 + 130) = 30.2%
    recall = 197/(75 + 145 + 197 + 75 + 454 + 54) = 19.7%

I had to manually calculate those percentages using the math expression to the left. Since it was already in text, I decided to copy and paste it into PowerShell and copy paste the results back into Sublime Text. And that’s when it hit me. There has got to be a more efficient way of doing this. I remembered a friend showing me that TextMate is able to pipe commands from the shell back into the text file inline. I am not sure if it replaces the highlighted text with the results of executing it but that’s what I envisioned something like this would do. I did some Googling to see if such a thing existed for Sublime Text. It didn’t turn up anything and I think that my bad search engine skills are to blame :( but it gave me an opportunity to try making something of my own. Despite the fact that the Sublime Text Plugin API is rather poorly documented, I was able to put something together quickly by looking at examples and browsing their forums. It’s a neat little tool and you can grab it at GitHub: https://github.com/snasirca/SublimeText-PowerShell-Inline Put the plugin folder under %APPDATA%\Sublime Text 2\Packages\. You can get to that folder by typing it into the Run command window. To use it, simply type in a command that can be executed in PowerShell in the Sublime Text editor:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
date

Highlight the text “date” and press “CTRL + SHIFT + R”, and the command will be replaced with the result of its execution in PowerShell:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
February 9, 2013 8:11:55 PM

Another handy usage is when you need quick math calculations:

The accuracy of the classifer was 252/(23+344+234+234+344)
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...

With this plugin, it becomes:

The accuracy of the classifer was 0.213740458015267
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog....

And since PowerShell treats a command as a .NET object, you can do things like this:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog....
"watch out for the dolphins!".ToUpper()

Becomes:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog....
WATCH OUT FOR THE DOLPHINS!

Let me know what you think!