
Sublime Text 2 Build 2181 - pshken
http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-build-2181
======
seclorum
I feel the same way about Sublime Text 2 as I do with Reaper
(<http://reaper.fm>).

Both of these applications represent astounding value for money - Reaper is a
Digital Audio Workstation, Sublime, a text editor. Both of these applications
offer features found in much larger, far more expensive packages - but still,
the author keeps them affordable (its an easy, easy buy when the price is
right) and competitive. We get updates for free, and each update cycle I find
myself almost squealing like a kid getting nintendo for Christmas, jumping in
right away to find out whats new.

This is commercial software, done right. A great price, great features, and
superlative relationship with the users. Well done Jon, and thank you for
todays update excitement!

------
lvillani
For the first time I am seriously considering whether to replace Emacs as my
primary text editor on Linux.

I've been compulsively using Emacs for the past 5 years. Thanks to Emacs I
felt in love with (a dialect of) Lisp and experienced the freedom brought by a
truly programmable text editor. An enlighting experience.

About a couple of weeks ago I began using Sublime Text 2 and... wow, it gets
so many things right and out-of-the-box that I'm now fighting an inner battle
to make a choice.

I am by no means an "hardcore" Emacs user but over the years I accumulated
more than seven hundred lines of elisp code in my ~/.emacs.d/init.el. A large
portion of that file glues together stuff like ido-mode, ido-ubiquitous, smex,
AutoComplete, find-file-in-project, etc making my Emacs a lot Sublime-like.

I recently threw most of that stuff away and began working on sublime.el,
which tries to emulate Sublime Text 2 as closely as possible.

However Emacs is showing a lot of warts: ido's fuzzy matching becomes
painfully slow when dealing with lots of entries, I have yet to make find-
file-in-project behave the way I want, provide most-recently-used heuristics
to ido (for any use case not covered by smex), there's no consistent way to
set a unique indentation level across major modes, long startup times (though
the emacs-as-a-daemon/emacsclient pair mitigates the issue somewhat) and, in
general, the UI is antiquated¹.

My only gripes with Sublime Text 2 are that there's nowhere near the amount of
documentation Emacs has (for obvious reasons) and that it is a (mostly)
proprietary piece of software. What if Jon is hit by a bus², looses interest
in his project or finds it unprofitable and decides to stop all development? I
would really, really hate to depend on a piece of software which is never
going to get at least bug fixes. I honestly hope that Jon is considering open-
sourcing it, should he go AWOL for any reason.

By switching to Sublime Text 2 I feel like I am betraying Emacs and all it
represents in the name of convenience. Choice, how paradoxical thou art!

I am sorry if you find this disquisition boring but I had an urge to write it
down somewhere. How liberating!

__________

¹ E.g. there's probably a way to get like find-file-in-project to show stuff
as neatly as Sublime Text 2 does but as far as I know nobody has done it, yet.

² <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor>

~~~
kstrauser
You're not alone. I've used Emacs for over a decade, but I fell in love with
ST2 almost immediately. And although it may cost me some cred with diehard
Emacs users: I'd much rather extend my editor with Python than elisp.

Still, Emacs is my bus factor backup plan. I prefer ST2 today, but it's nice
knowing there's a pretty darn excellent fallback if it disappears for some
reason.

~~~
reddit_clone
I actually use other IDE's when appropriate (Eclipse, Visual studio and XCode
etc.).

But it is OrgMode that makes it impossible to ditch Emacs.

~~~
nieve
Org-mode is a big stumbling block for me as well and it seems like most of its
features would be possible in Sublime Text 2, but the sheer degree of
integration that it's managed with Emacs' various hooks and processes might be
much harder. The various org-insinuate functions, the packages to hook it into
magit (or rather ST2's equivalents) & Mew, etc. are all pretty important to
me. I haven't looked deeply into customizing ST2, but is it actually feasible
to hook into it so deeply?

[ETA: There's a stab at an ST org-mode here that I tried previously, but
really isn't very far along and development stopped almost a year ago:
<https://bitbucket.org/theblacklion/sublime_orgmode/> There's a fork at
<https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode> that seems to be somewhat more
active.]

------
mise
My main objective with Sublime is to master the keyboard shortcuts. Stuff like
(on the PC) Ctrl+D to select the current word, and repeat for next
occurrences. This starts up a multiple-selection that you can just type and
all selected occurrences are replaced.

I forked a GitHub Gist from others and tweaked it a bit, for reference to
useful shortcuts: <https://gist.github.com/1736542>

~~~
biaxident
That reference is super useful. If you're on a Mac you can substitue Ctrl for
cmd.

~~~
axelav
there's also this for Mac

<https://gist.github.com/1839777>

------
_feda_
As much as I think sublime is beautiful and rather useful, I think I'll have
to stick with vim. I've invested too much time learning how to use it and
configuring it to throw all that away, and besides, it's that effort that has
made me so efficient in the environment. There is a "vintage" mode
(<http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html>) that supports some vi
bindings, but until I can use vim proper from within sublime, I can't really
use the program seriously I'm afraid.

~~~
adimitrov
Same here…

Additionally, I also use boatloads of plugins that I've come to rely on. Among
the most important ones are Fugitive, syntastic, and gundo (seriously,
branched undos have saved my life in the past, and visualizing them in a tree?
Hell yes.) But there's also more basic ones, like surround, tagbar, and eclim
(if I were a full-time Java dev, I'd _need_ eclim.)

It's a chicken-and-egg problem, really. Vim is here, Vim is good, Vim is good
enough. It's got its warts. VimL is the biggest.

And that birds-eye view in Sublime really does look sweet! I wonder how useful
it is in day-to-day programming.

~~~
Derbasti
Sublime Text 2 has a plugin that emulates Surround. It has a pretty good mode
for Git interaction. Even its Vintage (Vim emulation) mode is really
surprisingly good. Hell, it even has a mode that is beginning to emulate
Emacs' org-mode. Only time will tell how far it will go.

------
54mf
My cycle:

1\. Use Sublime Text for a few weeks. 2\. Get annoyed at a tiny issue. Ugly
icon, window UI, font rendering, etc. 3\. Consider switching to TextMate 4\.
New version of Sublime Text fixes one/all of my issues. 5\. Use Sublime Text.

I'll never learn. Incredibly impressed with the dev cycle and how far it has
come in a matter of months. At this point, Coda 2 might not even be enough to
pull me away.

------
davidw
Reading some of the comments here, it's evident that planet Emacs, where I'm
from, is in a galaxy a long ways away from planet "I give a shit about the
icons".

Sounds like the guy behind the project is quite responsive, and doing a good
job for a good price, but I'm just way too attached to having open source
tools for my work.

~~~
sho_hn
Oh, it's closed source? OK, there goes all my interest.

It's odd how you just expect certain kinds of software to be open source
today.

Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted as-is, let me flesh out this posting with
some more explanation for my stance: My text editor is an application I will
invest a lot of time in learning and customizing, and it's important to me
that this investment will end up being worth the effort long into the future.
With a closed source text editor, I don't have the same level of confidence
that the product will continue to exist and be maintained. Closed source also
means that parts of the application are off-limits to customization, and I
don't want to be beholden to another's determination of what part of the app
is on that side of the fence.

~~~
kstrauser
I actually agree with you completely: at this point you'd just assume that
text editors would be free.

That said, I work faster in ST2 than I did in Emacs and I can very quickly
repay its purchase price in increased productivity. Should ST2's author get
hit by a bus tomorrow and every copy of ST2 in the world instantly stop
working, I could go back to Emacs and _still_ have benefitted from having ST2
in the mean time.

Suppose someone offers you a golden goose that earns you $1 an hour but costs
$100. If you get your $100 back out of it before the goose dies, you've broken
even. If you get $101 out of it, you've turned a profit. If you get $500 out
of it, you've made a good investment. I've already made my money back on ST2.
If I lose the use of it, I've still come out ahead.

~~~
sho_hn
Let me be clear though that I wasn't talking about price. Rather I was
genuinely surprised to learn that it wasn't _open source_ , perhaps because so
many of the top editors are, because of its persistent popularity in these
circles and its dalliance with open solutions, and because I would expect
someone starting a new high-end text editor today to want to put the project
on solid long-term footing, which to me implies open and community
involvement.

~~~
sho_hn
It's pretty interesting to see that I'm still getting down-voted for posts
that I think, at this point, do a fairly reasonable job of communicating their
point, do it in a civil manager and pose a legitimate question re:
expectations of the use of the open source paradigm in certain kinds of
software.

I wonder if it's really just because I'm saying something negative about a
popular piece of software, and people exercise the downvote purely because
they _disagree_ rather than have quality objections?

~~~
mhartl
I've just upvoted the downvoted entries to try to counteract this. The
downvotes were not deserved in my view. Nevertheless, as I noted in a commend
a couple of months ago, they still sting:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3422539>

------
twiceaday
Oi, that is a rough looking icon. There is a severe lack of contrast. The one
from this article [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/sublime-
tex...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/sublime-text-2-tips-
and-tricks/) is worlds better.

~~~
colinramsay
Yes, I'm not a fan either. Here's another alternative:

<https://github.com/dmatarazzo/Sublime-Text-2-Icon>

------
tommyd
I'll join the others in saying that the icon doesn't look good to me. On my
Mac's dock, the white outline around the key looks really poor at a small size
- it's clear what it is when magnified but just looks like an outer glow at
dock size. At least we can change it though :)

Fantastic editor however. I'm finding it's pretty much replaced vim for me
with vintage mode - I've never been a particularly hard-core vim user however,
so I'm sure there's plenty that more knowledgable users would find is missing
from Vintage mode. Features like the Cmd-P fuzzy filename matching are just
too useful (the vim plugin equivalent is really slow in comparison)! Quite a
few colleagues have switched from various editors and IDEs (e.g. jEdit,
Eclipse) after I introduced them to it also.

------
Terretta
Does anyone interested in this editor know how to associate file types with
this app in bulk, rather than one by one in the "Open With ..." dialog?

Any other editor I have, informs the OS, and a:

    
    
        /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
    

(or the equivalent for your particular version of OS X) will rebuild all those
correctly. Sublime Text never appears in the file associations after a
rebuild.

Background:

\- [http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/remove-duplicate-
ap...](http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/remove-duplicate-applications-
from-open-with.htm)

// Note: In Safari on Lion, that code line above is long and scrolls,
invisibly here on HN.

~~~
skithund
Try RCDefaultApp, which lets you choose default applications per file
extension (amongst other means).

<http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/>

~~~
Terretta
I'd completely forgotten this, though I have it as a preference pane. Thank
you for reminding me.

SublimeText 2 is recognized in the app list, with a long list of extensions
supported, with a single checkmark to add it as an "Open With" option to all
of them and a button to allow making it the default.

(Note, it's not always what one wants as the default, consider .html for
example, so more granular settings may be in order.)

------
FooBarWidget
The new icon is better, but I still prefer this third party icon:
[http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/sublime-
tex...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/sublime-text-2-tips-
and-tricks/)

~~~
sant0sk1
There are a bunch of 3rd party icons that are all better than the new icon. I
aggregated them last month:

[http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2012/01/sublime-text-2-icon-
repla...](http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2012/01/sublime-text-2-icon-replacement-
roundup/)

~~~
bryne
The Icon Factory does (highly acclaimed and visible) work. The new icon is
about a million times more polished than any of those options, in my opinion.

------
carterschonwald
One of the nicest things I discovered about sublime text 2 personally is that
it handles ginormous files very well. Having a text editor that doesn't crash
on that occasional 1gb text file you need to look at is a nice thing

------
Derbasti
It is amazing at what pace Sublime Text 2 is being developed! It feels like
there are new updates every day.

I love it!

~~~
olimortimer
There are pretty much new updates every couple of days -
<http://www.sublimetext.com/dev>

------
twodayslate
Is anyone else disappointed with the icon? It doesn't feel very polished which
is surprising since it is from The Iconfactory. I expect better from them.

------
politician
I'm using ST2 for CoffeeScript/js development, and Visual Studio with
ReSharper for backend C# development. The difference is night and day -- it
feels like ST2 is designed with the sole goal of helping me write code as fast
as possible with as little friction as possible. I used to wish that Visual
Studio supported tmbundles, now I'm trying to figure out how to fit a C#
development process into ST2.

~~~
freeman478
Please keep us posted if you make progress on the C# front. I also like quite
a bit ST2 but I don't think it could replace VS for now

~~~
politician
Agreed, it certainly wouldn't replace VS for debugging, but it's just such a
nice, fast, well-behaved editor... I almost want to try.

------
imjared
Pretty amazing that the one repeated pain point here seems to be the icon.

------
fletchowns
Why must he always put spaces in the filename?

~~~
ricardobeat
Why shouldn't he? Are you using MS-DOS?

~~~
LokiSnake
I still prefer to not have spaces in file names. I then don't need to use
quotes or escape spaces when typing the file name in the shell.

~~~
erikpukinskis
backslash-space isn't any harder to type than shift-underscore.

~~~
LokiSnake
Or you could just use the dash or period as delimiters.

------
qwertyuiopop
I wish you could tell it to not load some *.py files (they aren't part of the
plugin and are included so I can use additional functionality).

The plugin's unload_handler() isn't run when quitting the app, which isn't
very nice. @atexit.register also didn't work.

The plugin also won't reload when the source is changed. At least when there
is a symlink in the Packages directory pointing to the plugin folder.

But the editor seems nice and will be a good editor after some UX and API
work.

~~~
jskinner
These issues are best addressed on the Sublime Text forum, but for the first
one at least, .py files in a subdirectory under a package won't be loaded as
plugins, so you can place libraries there (this is done for
Packages/Default/send2trash, for example).

------
dedward
I'm on 2180 - why does an update say "2180 is the most current version?"

I've been on the fence between vim, textmate, and sublime text 2...... liking
st2 more and more, though not for any particular reason. It will be
interesting to see what the community comes up with as it grows...... tons of
room for awesome expansion as far as I can see. (needs more default syntax
plugins)

~~~
davepeck
2180 is a dev build; 2181 is a beta build. If you're using dev builds, beta
builds (which ship about once a month) won't be part of your update stream.

------
zippy123
ST2 is the only editor that has managed to pull me away from GVim - and I've
been using that as long as I can remember. Great job.

------
strongorder
Ubuntu/Unity user might find the following unity dash helper/launcher useful.
ST2 does not currently come with Linux launcher shortcut.

[http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=345...](http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3457&p=24156#p24156)

------
jaequery
i tried hard to like sublime but at the end, i still go back to the trusty old
zend studio 5.5. and i love emacs and it's great for editing scripts here and
there but when working on a big project where you have atleast 10 files open,
it's not really the best way to do things.

~~~
outworlder
Could you elaborate?

I find it hard to work on projects where I have many files open, _unless_ I am
using Emacs (with ido-mode). Tabs are just too slow, cumbersome and don't
scale.

~~~
kstrauser
ST2 handles this much like ido-mode. Press cmd-P to open the "Goto Anything"
dialog and type a few letters from a filename to get a list of matching files
from the current project. I'm not exactly sure of the weighting algorithm, but
it seems to almost always highlight files that are already open so that
pressing enter will take me directly to the tab I wanted.

Whether you have 100 Emacs buffers open or 100 ST2 tabs, it's pretty easy to
navigate to the one you want with a few keystrokes.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Why keep 100 ST2 tabs open when like you've said it's so fast to just cmd-p to
pull up the file you need, open or not (unless you have a very large number of
files with the same name)? I summon and dismiss files like crazy, but I
generally only keep a few things open at any time.

~~~
kstrauser
Let me flip that around: why _not_ have all the most recent files you've
worked on open at once? It's easy to navigate through them, you get to keep
undo history, and you can always close them later if you get overwhelmed.
There's not a huge advantage to keeping them around but the penalty for doing
so is trivial, so I default to not closing tabs unless I specifically need to.

------
rtud
Personally I really like the new icon.

------
techiferous
Have any TextMate users out there tried Sublime? I'd love to hear a
comparison.

~~~
jguimont
Much better than TextMate. Faster, actually actively developed. Just cmd-t and
cmd-p makes it worth the switch.

~~~
seclorum
I bought Sublime as soon as I accidentally hit cmd-R and realized what it was
showing me. ;)

~~~
gulbrandr
What does cmd-R do?

~~~
Brajeshwar
Helps you jump to functions, methods. I love it when developing on large CSS
files (and/or Sass files).

------
speg
I've been using it more and more, but still use Coda for larger projects just
so I can use the code navigator to get my head around the larger code base. I
haven't seen anything like that for sublime yet...

~~~
CWIZO
I never used Coda so I don't know if this is what you mean. But Sublime has
"projects", you basically add a folder as a project and then you get a nice
sidebar that has your folder's structure displayed, and then you can open
files from there. (<http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/projects>)

------
Shank
On Windows you can't do much better, all the paid text editors are crap
(Textpad anyone?), and Notepad++'s plugin system falls short of Sublime's (hot
installation vs. restarting).

As usual another fantastic build.

~~~
megaman821
Komodo Edit/IDE is a good choice also.

------
pacomerh
I love this editor, it's fast with big files. Bought my license last week.
Some useful shortcuts here <https://gist.github.com/1207002>

------
frou_dh
Great stuff. I like the selection matching highlight.

I wonder what the plan for coming out of beta and formally launching is. It
seems imminent because both the theme and icon got spruced up recently.

------
Rayne
Darn. Still doesn't even come close to correctly indenting Clojure.

------
hybrid11
This is awesome, finally they have implemented real Word Highlighting (a lot
better than the current ctrl+d feature), now you don't need to rely on half
working plugins!

------
hopeless
Be aware that the download page is aggressively cached. I was downloading
Build 2165 and wondering why I wasn't seeing the new icon.

~~~
Hovertruck
Much easier to just open the app and get prompted to download the latest.

------
mistercow
It's really coming together. Now if they will just allow autocomplete to
search across all open files, my life will be perfect.

------
arostrat
Still no File Compare feature. I think I'll stay with notepad++.

~~~
zumda
If both of the files are in the side, highlight both (with cmd-click). Then
right click -> Diff Files...

------
ShaneOG
Sub-pixel rendering! :)

~~~
kellishaver
I was amazed at how much of a difference this has made in text quality.

Funny story: I thought the blurriness I was noticing before was due to my new
interocular lens implant that I got in December-nope.... turns out it was the
font rendering all along and my vision was too bad before the surgery to
notice it.

So, better rendering all around, really. :)

------
vwoelm
Finally a new dock icon!

------
mansolo
Is there a "print" function with Sublime Text, for the odd time I need to
print something out? How about converting a file to PDF?

------
sadovnychyi
Icon was not very pleased. However it's best text editor in the world.

------
username3
Reasons to install Sublime Text 2 (1p1e1.tumblr.com)

35 points by 1p1e1 69 days ago

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3356413>

