
Just Use Sublime Text - blacktulip
http://delvarworld.github.io/blog/2013/03/16/just-use-sublime-text/
======
mbell
I use sublime text, its good for general text editing and some light weight
scripting.

That said, this is what I don't get....

Why choose a light weight code editor then add 30 plugins to it?

I've tried this approach with sublime text for Java, Groovy, Ruby, JS, etc. I
honestly don't get it, IntelliJ / Rubymine / PyCharm kicks its ass in every
way I've tried to look at it.

It seems there is some instilled fear of the term 'IDE' that scares people
away or people just really enjoy piece-meal assembling an IDE. But for me,
JetBrain's stuff just works 90% of the time and the last 10% is easily filled
with plugins or an open terminal. Anything that just lets me code efficiently
without a lot of mucking around is gold in my book.

If you like the minimalist approach, more power to you, Sublime Text is
awesome for that. If you like the 'almost everything in one app' approach, I'd
highly encourage you to at least try some IDEs, especially JetBrain's stuff.
Eclipse sucks, no doubt, but not all IDE's are like Eclipse.

~~~
wyager
I can't stand using IDEs like IntelliJ or Eclipse or just about anything else
I've tried. For some reason, all that crap that hangs around the editing area
makes me feel claustrophobic and distracted. I also feel like a lot of the
development process becomes a black box. Instead of understanding exactly how
your project is compiling (i.e. with what settings) and what external
resources you're including, the IDE kind of shields you from that. When you do
a project with UNIX-style tools, you have complete control and understanding
of every step.

And then there's also the fact that I can't _stand_ having IDEs underline
everything in red when I'm in the middle of typing a line.

~~~
mbell
> For some reason, all that crap that hangs around the editing area makes me
> feel claustrophobic and distracted.

I've heard this position before, I just don't get it. This is my screen while
working on an early stage of a side project: <http://i.imgur.com/B9boU26.png>

I find it far less cluttered than most editors. In particular compared to
sublime text, I hate that my only options are to have the 'project tree' view
there, or not, most of the time its wasted space. In the screen shot I click
on project on the left, it pops over the project structure, I open the file I
want, and it disappears. Similarly with the bottom bits, I run the project in
debug mode, it pops over with the process's output and disappears when there
isn't anything I need to see. For me, this is much preferable to changing
workspaces to see terminal output even though the OSX trackpad makes this
easy.

> I also feel like a lot of the development process becomes a black box.

I guess it depends on the IDE but at least for the given project it builds in
the IDE using maven, based on the pom settings just as it does using maven
from the terminal or on jenkins. The only difference is incremental
compilation during development which many people setup using a 'watch' plugin
or the asset pipeline in rails anyway.

> And then there's also the fact that I can't stand having IDEs underline
> everything in red when I'm in the middle of typing a line.

Changing the linting timeout is very simple.

~~~
wyager
>I've heard this position before, I just don't get it. This is my screen while
working on an early stage of a side project:

Looking at that just makes me twitch for some reason. It's all so distracting
to me. Maybe I have a poor attention span, but for some reason I feel like I
can be so much more productive with something like this:
<http://i.imgur.com/ADvQF6e.png>

I generally do text editing in Sublime (and like you said, the Apple trackpad
+ OS X's gesture detection algorithms is a very powerful combo) and I feel
like my development is very "zen".

>Changing the linting timeout is very simple.

What I mean is that most IDEs are incredibly annoying about small mistakes,
and sometimes something like a dropped semicolon can light up a whole file
with errors.

The only IDE that I feel is sufficiently non-annoying about static code checks
is Xcode. Xcode has very clever, non-distracting notifications about forgotten
punctuation, control flow errors, etc.

------
brodney
>Efficiency from Keeping your Fingers on the Home Row

I prefer to use just keys. I find the context switch distracting.

>I can’t stress how bad of an editor vanilla Vim is. Plugins are essential to
make Vim usable.

I love vanilla vim. I used it for a long time that way. Even now I barely have
any plugins running, just YouCompleteMe and a couple others.

>If you want to write a plugin you have to deal with Vimscript.

I thought one can write in Python and other languages for plugins now?

>Everyone remaps Leader from backslash to comma.

I didn't.

>Vim is hideous by design.

I find the minimalism allows me to work without distraction. If you hate it so
much, vim bindings are available in other editors. I use XVim for Xcode and
some other plugin in Eclipse.

>To code in Vim, you have to keep Vim in your head just as much as the code
that you’re editing. You have to constantly think about what you’re doing.

I barely think about the things I'm doing anymore. And I've only been at vim
for about a year.

This blog post needs a giant [citation needed]. So many unjustified claims
that are really just his opinions. Just use Sublime and get back to doing
something productive.

~~~
actf
> I thought one can write in Python and other languages for plugins now?

Yes and no. Technically this is possible, but it's almost as unpleasant as
just using vimscript.

Scripting vim in python involves using the vim module, which provides a very
limited api to interact with vim. It doesn't allow the interception of any
events, and interacting with vim more often than not seems to involve calling
vim.command() or vim.eval(), which take vimscript as a string.

That said, I still think this is the direction vim needs to go. I think if the
vim python integration improves in future releases it will be much
appreciated, and will provide a boost to the vim plugin community.

------
nthitz
Previous discussion from a couple weeks ago:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5411811>

~~~
Mahn
I was wondering what is this doing on the front page again. I guess HNers can
never get enough of discussing the virtues of Vim :-)

~~~
benmanns
It also has a new URL after the github.com -> github.io change.

~~~
Mahn
So basically OP realized he could resubmit it thanks to the url change and
went for it. I see.

~~~
benmanns
Or, they thought the article was interesting, and didn't realize that it had
already posted (since he used the new URL). Not everyone is out for karma :).

------
justizin
Vim is good to have in your toolkit because it will work on nearly any
terminal.

Don't use an old serial terminal? Well, you might actually get stuck only
having serial console access to a physical machine in a datacenter. Maybe
you're trying to fix a mean bug in production and everything is exploded and
you are using some person's laptop which for some reason has a horrible
terminal configuration.

I haven't used hjkl to move in years, btw. That's vi. Vim lets you use arrow
keys - it's VI iMproved. ;)

This sort of nonsense rambling not only leads to serious generational
knowledge gaps, which leads to people using utter shit like pico/nano, which I
would fire someone for doing.

It also ignores the fact that TextMate is totally awesome and has something
Sublime Text doesn't seem to : a command-line tool for opening files from the
shell.

~~~
rdouble
Sublime has the same sort of command line tool as TextMate. It's called
"subl."

~~~
brodney
It doesn't work out of the box though. Have to run this:

 _ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl"
~/bin/subl_

------
gfodor
This article is flawed because there are two questions: "is vim awesome?" and
"is learning vim worth the effort?" The first answer is yes. The second answer
is maybe. Getting up there and trash talking vim is stupid because anyone who
is proficient at vim (truly proficient, like 10-years-experience expert) knows
that it is great. But as a 15-year vimmer I won't discount the time and
suffering you need to put in to get to that point, and won't shove it down
people's throats because I know how painful it is.

I see it similar to typing on a dvorak keyboard. (or to a lesser degree, a
kinesis keyboard.) Extremely painful in the beginning, almost mentally
traumatic because one of your basic skills suddenly gets cut out from under
you, but something that pays small but regular dividends for the rest of your
life. (And contrary to Dvorak, vim is _everywhere_.) It's not for everyone and
is probably not worth the effort for many but to somehow try to then
extrapolate that to conjure up an argument that the tool itself is bad (which
this article seems to be desperately trying to do) is dumb.

I guess another way to look at it, is if you could download knowledge
instantly Matrix-style, would everyone use vim? Other consequences of the
Matrix being real life notwithstanding, I would say many more would.

------
hcarvalhoalves
I can't vouch enough for that.

As someone who used to develop in Vim, I can attest it can do a lot of things
and there are many useful scripts, but is neither intuitive or designed for
our era, there are too many obvious UX flaws - modes in particular is not the
magic pony people like to say it is, it's just archaic clunkyness.

You can replace Vim entirely with Sublime since it also supports scripting and
smart editing movements, and "Go to anything" in particular blows Vim away.

I just wish the author iterated ST2 more before starting ST3, I'm afraid of
another Textmate.

~~~
pekk
> I just wish the author iterated ST2 more before starting ST3, I'm afraid of
> another Textmate.

That's business...

------
cwilson
Why not just let people use whatever works for them? After reading through all
the replies here that's the only conclusion anyone can come to. Why do we need
one editor to rule them all?

~~~
JackMorgan
For real. When it comes to editors, it's a matter of taste. Do you like to
fiddle bits, stay on home row, never have to learn anything new, or push the
boundaries of development speed? Install every possible extension, never
install anything, or write your own plugins? There is an environment for
everyone! Enjoy your notepad.exe guy from my old job. Enjoy your emacs lisp,
old mentor. Enjoy your awesome rounded edges, IDEA user! Now, everyone go get
some work done, yeesh.

------
salimmadjd
These are just tools. Each tool has its place and its users. I learned vi
first and I still feel very efficient on it vs. sublime. But for something, I
prefer Sublime.

At the end of the day, it's like the meaning of life, everyone has theirs.

------
voidlogic
Not open-source, no thanks. I'll stick with LiteIDE for Go and Netbeans for
Java and C++.

------
habosa
I agree mostly, and this was surprisingly well put for this type of post.
However I do think that a good programmer should be able to get through a day
with Vim (no plugins) alone if he/she has to, as it's free and installed
everywhere. Beyond that just use what makes you happy. I do agree that it's
much too hard to get started with Vim as compared to Sublime Text, but if
you're a crazy vim ninja more power to you. I have never understood why you'd
care what editor your friends/enemies use. As long as you're not coding in MS
Word you're good in my book.

------
pekk
Vim is great and this article is mostly FUD.

The only good reason not to use vim (or anything else) is if you don't want
to. But don't let other people dictate to you whether you want it.

------
octix
I use Linux daily, I develop using open source technologies, it's not for
me... it doesn't feel right.

\+ I want my freedom! I don't to be stuck with one product...

------
drdaeman
As for editor wars, I believe using plaintext editor for editing code is ugly
whatever the editor is. Especially, if the editor (like bare ST2 or bare Vim)
has very low understanding of code semantics just enough to highlight the code
and do most primitive type-ahead suggestions.

Unfortunately, there aren't many structured editors/IDEs that operate on
AST/ASG instead of blobs of plaintext. And, sadly, none I could subjectively
call good.

------
TsiCClawOfLight
Or use Emacs.

------
Thiz
As long as the editor lets me type cmd+t and insert opening and closing html
tags that's all I need.

I read a lot, I scroll a lot, I browse a lot, I copy/paste a lot and my hands
are always on the trackpad and the arrow keys.

Sublime is good enough for me.

------
temes
A $70 text editor with pretty effects.. perfect for an Apple user, I suppose.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of free and open alternatives, such as Geany,
which I much prefer.

Pay with contributions to the project and also gain a reward to yourself.

------
juaninfinitelop
"or any other nasty way Vimmers have to use because of our archaic, ingrained
keystrokes.”

This is where I stopped reading. If you're trying to convince me to use
sublime try to be less subjective.

------
dale386
I'm all for supporting good, independent software shops, but $70 for a ST2
license is obscene. I use the free version and would happily pay to remove the
"Buy Me!" popup at a lower price point.

~~~
netcraft
think about any other profession and think about saying that you refuse to buy
the tools you need at a 70$ price point. Even if you wait tables, you would
likely have 70$ in clothes you would need to buy and wouldn't think twice
about it.

I can't think of any other job where you could even try the tools for free,
much less complain about them being 70$.

~~~
samnardoni
But what if you could pick up other clothes for free, but they weren't your
favourite colour?

~~~
netcraft
sure, then you would, but would you then go to the gap and complain about
their prices? Also, the difference is that they are using the 70$ tool, which
is obviously better than the free or cheaper price points, but complaining
that the price is obscene.

------
crazygringo
I know Sublime is what all the cool kids are using, but I switched from it for
a few months, to Chocolat (OSX only) and have never looked back. It's
definitely worth a try.

~~~
kaolinite
Out of interest, why do you prefer Chocolat? I've just taken a look at it and
it looks to be a really nice editor, but I can't quickly see any big
advantages of using it (especially as Sublime presumably has a lot more
plugins, etc).

It does look a lot cleaner, however - I'm not a big fan of the default UI of
Sublime.

~~~
crazygringo
Sublime just always felt like a "ported" app. Chocolat is native, fits in with
OSX perfectly, and at least for me, achieves the perfect sweet spot between
customizable and minimalist. I just find myself being less "distracted" by the
editor, and just getting my work done, than with anything else I've used. It
isn't really one single thing that does it, but just the sum total of it. Not
sure if that helps...

~~~
kaolinite
Sure, that makes complete sense. I develop on Linux about 30% of the time and
OSX 70%, so it's useful to be able to use the same editor on both, but I'd
definitely consider it if I was only using OSX.

------
saejox
I spend most of my time reading code or thinking about it. Typing speed
optimization is a premature optimization case.

------
mikec3k
I still prefer TextMate & BBEdit. Sublime Text just doesn't feel like a Mac
app.

~~~
bluedino
> Sublime Text just doesn't feel like a Mac app.

Of course it doesn't - it's multi-platform. Which is a good thing if you
bounce between Linux and Mac (and even Windows). But it does have a great feel
to it.

------
indubitably
poor guy can't understand vim

