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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

What is the use-case for opening images in a text editor?

I'm not a user of Sublime text, but at least the landing page doesn't mention being able to edit images ... Except as raw binary I guess, but that doesn't sound like something you do very often.

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You wouldn't be launching the editor to view an image. It's more for previewing images that happen to be in the directory hierarchy you already have open as a project (which is shown as a treeview in the sidebar).

At the very least, being able to see a quick preview + dimensions of the image is way better than seeing a huge chunk of binary code.

Considering how often web developers have to muck around with images, this should have been baked in from the start.

There's a pretty neat Sublime plugin[0] which shows the base64 string of any image you open in the editor. This has saved me time on a lot of occasions.

[0] https://github.com/tm-minty/sublime-text-2-image2base64

Since dimensions are also displayed, it's pretty handy for writing sprites in CSS. Although it doesn't display coordinates when you hover your mouse.

If anyone is looking for the dimensions like I was, they're in the status bar area along with the file size. I feel like this information should be a bit closer to the image, but I understand not wanting to break conventions.

This is great for hand editing SVG's, unless sublime is only handling bitmaps. I use SVG previews all the time in emacs for making little fixes.

Checking assets would probably be the main use-case.

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