

Three Months with Sublime Text 2 - steverandy
http://steverandytantra.com/thoughts/three-months-with-sublime-text-2
Sublime Text 2 is a text editor with great responsiveness, flexibility and accuracy for coding. After three months of using it, I discover many amazing features and ways to make it even better.
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cageface
I read feature lists of editors like this and wonder why people just don't use
a good IDE like IntelliJ. It does everything in this list and a lot more with
minimal configuration.

~~~
jared314
It is hard to pin down the author's bias, or yours, without understanding what
kind of development the author has done. I look at this as more of a Text Mate
2 vs Sublime Text 2 post.

~~~
andrewbinstock
Thanks for explaining this, b/c editors I use (albeit inside IDEs) all do what
the OP is drooling about. I figured he had to be comparing Sub 2 with some
other editor that he doesn't specify.

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hemancuso
The most consistent pushback against ST2 is how ugly and non-native folk find
it. Lots of us get past that and really give it a chance, but I can't help but
hope that Jon reads this and considers spending a couple weeks/months purely
on styling, possibly with the help of a specialist.

It doesn't improve the editor's functionality, but sales and adoption wise I
think it would go a long way. Especially on the Mac.

Specifically:

* The file browser is really odd. Very non-native. No in-line name updates. Odd sliding around of items coming in and out. No drag and drop. It works, but it is death by a thousand paper cuts.

* Find results tab - also really odd. It's a real buffer, you can edit text in it - but it doesn't change the source material. Just the result tab. Very odd.

* Split windows are great, but the grouping in the sidebar is odd. What's group 1 vs group 2 vs group 3, etc.

* The color scheme is ugly. Very few text editors on Mac default to light text on a dark background. The dark chrome tabs are odd.

* While I love how flexible the configuration settings are, rooting around in a .js file is kind of a pain in the ass. Some basic scaffolding that throws up a configuration dialog [that looks native!] would be great. If for option discovery, if nothing else!

* If you have split panes active, there is no way to quickly tell which tab has the cursor. Each split has a set of inactive tabs and a single active tab. It's hard to figure out exactly which tab has the cursor if you're flipping back and forth from a terminal.

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FuzzyDunlop
Totally disagree on the config point. In fact I think the system should be
made more simple, so you can keep your editor settings in a dotfile repo. It's
not so simple to do this when the settings files themselves are buried in a
packages folder, and you have to take care not to accidentally commit your
license along with it all.

Hell, even just having the option to parse settings and load plugins from a
local dotfile, like vim or emacs, would be nice. The rationale for wanting
this is that the config is just text, and is something you'll progressively
hone over time (esp. with keybindings).

Split windows would be much better if you could mix and match the size, or
have a non-standard layout.

One of ST's real benefits could be its position as a beginner's introduction
to vim and/or emacs. It's already immediately more accessible.

~~~
hemancuso
Agree with you. Just mean I'd like UI to wrap what is there.

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alttab
Does anyone else feel like if we spent all the time masterbating about our
text editor writing software instead in something that just works the world
would have better software? The amount of text editor posts I see on HN lately
is astonishing.

The less emphasis we put on tools the more we can rely on skill. We should all
just use notepad for a year and see what all that extra time produces.

~~~
BadassFractal
You learn vim / emacs very well once, you use them for the rest of your life.
It's time well invested.

~~~
alttab
I use vim. That's kinda my point when it comes to see fancy GUI editors. Even
with vim, here are the only commands I use regularly: n, b, dw, dd, u, w, :/,
home, end, and :wq.

Coupled with Grep -r, I literally use nothing else. My productivity is not
bound by how fast I can use vim, but how much effort it takes me to understand
the real problem I'm trying to solve.

If everyone else worries about how they can jump around code more than
actually decomposing the true motivation behind their work, they are either
unbounded geniuses, or far more likely, writing a lot of code that could be
completely avoided. All of these bells and whistles distracts from the
problem, and focuses on code instead of problem solving. This worries me.
Especially when at the end of the day all we are talking about is how fast we
can introduce bugs into the code base or writing code that doesn't help the
customer directly.

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jph
I tried Sublime and it works well, but RubyMine still won me over for Ruby
because it finally feels polished and it's fast thanks to new hardware with
plenty of RAM & CPU.

For text editing, Sublime just couldn't match vim & emacs because they're
widely available on remote servers via SSH.

~~~
mixmastamyk
At high risk of sounding like a broken record, give sshfs a try.

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flixic
It's quite funny that he complains about the icon (quite bad, I agree) that
was made by the Iconfactory, and then links to a replacement, again, by the
Iconfactory.

Makes me wonder, why SL2 icon is so bad. Maybe the author had some
unreasonable requests to the obviously talented designers?

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willtheperson
I took a go at a replacement icon found here
<https://github.com/tw12lve/sublimetext2-icons>

Feel free to submit your own as a pull request

~~~
fiblye
Maybe it's just me, but it almost seems like the 'S' is bigger towards the
top, contrary to the perspective.

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csulok
having started my programming career with web stuff, i just cant stand the
full blown IDEs because of their slowness and bloatedness. sublime text feels
like having my cake and eating it too. it has most of the required features
but its still amazingly fast and extendable.

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tcoffee
For those wondering, the theme / style he's using to make the tabs, side bar,
and status bar pretty can be found here: <https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-
theme>

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lstrope
ST2 is a great text editor (I like vim more) - and a text editor is what it
should be compared to.

Intellij/RubyMine are slow to start (initially) because they are indexing and
giving you some of the most powerful refactoring support you could ask for. I
sincerely doubt ST2 could will ever match this functionality.

They can be bloated but so can Emacs with all its plugins and so can ST2 by
the time it starts to resemble an IDE in features.

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ditoa
I feel like I am the only person still using UltraEdit these days. It has
always done me well as an advanced text editor.

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pwelch
I have been using ST2 for awhile and overall its pretty good. Although I still
find myself opening Vim/Textmate a lot.

It may be archaic but my biggest issue is not being able to print from it.
Along with coding I usually use my editor of choice for random things and
sometimes this means I have to print something. No print option in ST2 is a
slight annoyance.

~~~
pathdependent
I agree. When I start feeling stressed out about some code, I usually like to
print it out and walk away from my computer to review it. Sitting outside with
a copy of code that I cannot edit is very helpful sometimes.

Right now, I often will minimize (metaphorically) my ST2 editor; open up a
copy of my code in gEdit; print it out; close gEdit; and, maximize ST2. That's
not cool.

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LocalPCGuy
There is Print to Html plugin, works pretty good:

<https://github.com/joelpt/sublimetext-print-to-html>

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mistercow
>By default, the scope of autocomplete is only for the current file. “All
Autocomplete Package” extends the scope to all open files in the current
window.

Slightly buggy (alas, so many Sublime packages are), but even so, I'm really
glad to see a plugin that tackles my only major disappointment in ST2.

~~~
steverandy
Can you point out what it is? So far I'm happy with it.

~~~
mistercow
In my brief testing with some CoffeeScript files, I had a few autocomplete
suggestions that got the last few letters clipped off. Not a big deal, but a
little odd.

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markokocic
I really liked Sublime Text, but each time I try to search for some word in
20MB log file it reminds me how slow and unresponsive it is compared to Emacs.
The closest to my ideal editor would be Emacs with visual appearance of ST2.

~~~
calinet6
Hm, that's pretty odd, I found its handling of large files to be pretty fast
for a GUI editor, and "slow and unresponsive" accurately describes the
opposite of why I like Sublime.

Especially since it's always non-blocking, e.g. when you load a large file, a
progress bar appears as it loads into memory but the rest of the editor
continues to work without a hiccup. Quite nice.

Besides, it wasn't designed to search log files. That's what grep is for.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
The speed of ST's find function never fails to take me by surprise. Even with
thousands of files it'll never take more than a second. In fact, it's
sometimes only slow when it _can't_ find something.

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BerislavLopac
I keep Sublime Text 2 as my generic text editor, but I still keep coming back
to Komodo IDE (6, on Linux) for any code editing.

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swombat
I gave ST2 about three months too, but I haven't found enough to keep me. I've
moved back to Macvim...

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steverandy
Anybody tried ST2 and moved back to TextMate?

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schappim
That would be me. The one feature it misses is multiple line editing by
holding down option and dragging.

Though the op's tips make me want to has another look.

Cheers

Marcus

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steverandy
You can do that with ST2.

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calinet6
To be fair, you can't drag a box selection like you can in TM.

However, Sublime's multiple-cursor support is far superior otherwise.

