Sublime Text As An Arduino IDE

If you’ve played with an Arduino, you’ve probably been frustrated by the IDE. It works, but it’s not the best editor. It’s especially painful for bigger files and larger projects. The Stino plugin for Sublime Text aims to solve this issue by bringing the full functionality of the Arduino IDE to the Sublime Text editor.

Sublime Text is a powerful text editor with support for most programming languages. What it’s missing is support for compiling and uploading code to an Arduino. Stino bridges that gap. Sublime is a commercial product, and retails for $70 USD. However Sublime does have an indefinite trial period, so Stino can be evaluated for free. Stino itself is an open source plugin written in Python, and you can contribute to the project on Github.

After installing Sublime and Stino, you point the plugin at an Arduino install folder. It then allows you to build and flash directly from the editor. For anyone who’s been frustrated with the Arduino IDE, this looks like a slick solution.

[Thanks to Matt for the tip!]

40 thoughts on “Sublime Text As An Arduino IDE

    1. inotool looks like it requires an Arduino install. Using stino is instead of using the Arduino IDE altogether, not just using the Arduino IDE with an external editor. I don’t have to launch the Arduino IDE to program a board with stino.

  1. Sublime Text is a beautiful editor. It’s a shame that open source projects rarely measure up to this level of UI polish.
    Of course there are exceptions to this. But this is a general trend I have noticed.

    1. The Arduino IDE lets you use an external editor – see prefs->”Use external editor”

      The trick to writing large programs in the Arduino IDE is to split it into various “.h” files (nb. NOT “.c” or “.cpp”) files) then #include them in the main one where setup()/loop() are.

      1. At least in the older versions (pre 1.0) it was possible (and quite useful) to split programs into multiple *.cpp and *.h files.

        I have a couple of sketches which are larger than 1k LOC and spread over multiple files.

  2. Well it is great for those already working with sublime text like me. I came from netbeans but that froze up too many times so I had to change and now I’m able to also program my arduinos – win situation that made my day!

  3. Great editor but there is no reasonable C/C++ code completion plugin (at least on Linux)
    There is one outdated, not supported (sublime clang) so it is not best ide for arduino since there is no real support for C/C++ inside editor.

  4. I figure out how to install it. Now it won’t compile a simple blink demo. I also don’t see my standard arduino hardware list. Now all the menu or arduino are gray out.

    I see a lots of great feature for the few minutes of use. I will un-install it. I will stick with visual micro even if there is some bugs.

    Also Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use.

      1. I did this by following those steps. I close and reopen the software. No luck.
        Go some good tutorial?

        Click the menu Preferences->Show Arduino Menu, Arduino Menu will appear.

        Click the menu Arduino->Preferences->Select Arduino Folder.

        Select your Arduino Application Folder in the quick panel. This is the location where Arduino.app is installed.

        Once you’ve selected the appropriate directory, you will see the message like the Step 4 in the following figure.

      2. One thing that was a little unclear for OS X Mavericks, I thought you needed to type in the directory path of the Arduino.app location. DOH! It took me a while to find out how to do it. Turns out you need to click below the prompt, and then it pulled up a directory path click link. Don’t type it, it doesn’t work if you type it.

  5. Well I had a look and its not “Simple” is it . I use Arduino IDE and its simple. Why change .Keep code snippets in text files and you don’t need much more .
    Thiis is just an advertising beat up and they probably paid for it too.
    Rubbish

  6. Sublime is the core of my workflow for web design and arduino and whatever. Now that I finally have some money I will be purchasing it in the next couple of days. If you don’t want to pay $70 for a text editor that’s perfectly understandable, but for those people like me that spend all day working with text documents of all types it’s worth it. I could use some other editor sure, but I’ve grown accustomed to Sublime and it’s got some really neat features. The only thing I dislike about Stino is you have to close the serial monitor tab before you can do an upload. Not a terribly big deal, but it’d be nice to avoid that.

    1. Pat, I agree fully with you. I’m in Subllime like 80% of my work hours and good portion of my free time for hobbies as well. Now I can ditch the Ardu IDE and use ST a bit more. Not that I use arduinos that much, but it happens every now and then.

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