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Three Months with Sublime Text 2

50 points by steverandy 14y ago

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.

csulok 14y ago
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.
cageface 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- steverandy 14y ago
  I never really used IDE like IntelliJ or RubyMine. But I always feel they are too bloated. Maybe just different use case.
  - cageface 14y ago
    I can use IntelliJ for anything from Python to Ruby to Java to Go to Haskell. Sure it takes a little longer to start up than a no-plugin Emacs or Sublime Text, but it also does a lot more and I don't have to fiddle with it to make it work.
    - siodine 14y ago
      The Go and Haskell support is better in ST2 than in IntelliJ. For Python and Ruby, it depends. IntelliJ is unquestionably better for Java, though. Also, consider that ST2 is in its infancy and how developed its language support already is (see SublimeClang, for example). As ST2 becomes more popular, it might compete with the most developed IDEs.
      - cageface 14y ago
        And it will also become slow and bloated and people will move on to the next fast, lean editor that only needs feature x & y. Wash & repeat ad infinitum.
        siodine 14y ago
        I think that's unlikely. ST2 is already exceptionally fast and complete as an editor. As an IDE, ST2 requires plugins. These plugins are written in Python (which can use libs written in C) as opposed to vimscript or elisp. Moreover, these plugins aren't required for editing text files (or having SublimeClang isn't going to significantly slow down editing python files).
        collint 14y ago
        I'm only using ST2 because TM2 took forever to release and even the the alpha wasn't compelling. So I'm much more worried about developer fatigue than bloat in my editor choice.
        Olreich 14y ago
        Vim and Emacs kill that argument. Neither is slow, and both are older than dirt in computer years. Sublime Text may continue the march without becoming super slow as well. I'm sure a Java-focused IDE could be fast and excellent, but that's not their focus.
- president 14y ago
  Not everyone is coding Java. Not to mention, we're talking about a general-use text editor for all sorts of text files.
- siodine 14y ago
  1. The configuration time for stuff like this in ST2 is comparable with IntelliJ. 2. IntelliJ costs more. 3. IntelliJ is simply better for Java than ST2 (more significant time-saving professional features), but not necessarily so for other languages (it becomes less clear cut with languages like ruby). 4. ST2 replaces your standard text editor, IntelliJ doesn't.
- eswat 14y ago
  Yes, but I think many wouldn’t want to have all the other features a full-blown IDE offers. While ST2 requires configuration to add the bare-necessities people would take for granted from an IDE, if you went with the latter you still have to do configuration to pair things down to the most minimal-environment you’re comfortable with.
- batista 14y ago
  >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. Because we don't want a slow, Java based IDE, that goes over the uncanny valley in all platforms. I do use Eclipse, which is not much better than IntelliJ, for Java editing. But I wouldn't bother with it for JS/PHP/Python/Ruby etc...
- killedbydeath 14y ago
  I liked using IntelliJ IDEA for Java development. However the reasons I now use Komodo Edit and ST2 over PyCharm/IDEA for Python are: IntelliJ has slower startup times, does certain things slower, takes up a lot of memory, does not look as nice. I do not need most of the functionality it provides and prefer having something snappier.
- dbecker 14y ago
  I tried switching from vim to PyCharm about a year ago. I found it incredibly slow. With vim or ST2, I do my work and don't think about the editor keeping up. With PyCharm, my typing could briefly outrun the editor. The editor would catchup, but it was just distracting. I don't think the IDE gave me any features that justified this distraction.
- pathdependent 14y ago
  Ignoring what other users have said (bloat, speed, noise, etc), I find that my code in an editor like ST2/TextMate/VIM ends up being substantially better and more maintainable than code written in a full-blow IDE. The full-blow IDE may mask code smell by making it easy to push on when things get ugly. For a trivial example, if you can't remember the name of some function you wrote in another module, it may be the case that the function was poorly named or the code you are currently writing is trying to do too many things. In an full-blown IDE, it doesn't feel wrong; in a simple text editor, it actually hurts. (Yes, ST2 has autocomplete, but IIRC, it's based on a tokenizer, not a parser. In either case, I operate with it disabled.) IMHO, it's a trade-off. It requires marginally more mental effort to compose code without the features of a full-blown IDE. This marginal increase in effort may slow me down considerably in the beginning to middle parts of a project compared to someone using a full-blown IDE; however, by the time I "catch up," my code will probably be more conducive to safe expansion and maintenance, and for all but trivial projects, that's the majority of development time.
  - Flow 14y ago
    I find that with a good IDE I can regard every name as a temporary name till I feel I clearly know what the best name would be. A bit like a sketcher could draw a few lines and see where that leads.
    - msbarnett 14y ago
      That's less a property of IDEs than a side-effect of working with extremely static languages that are amenable to that kind of global-rename analysis.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  And to those of us that use it, it's obvious that you never have. Not trying to be dismissive, but I stand by that comment. Ugh, it's painful to read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247386 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247386 So much ignorant bias. Just try it. You don't know what you're talking about.
  - cageface 14y ago
    I've used ST2 quite a bit. It's a nice editor but I really don't see the point.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  Sublime is wicked fast. IntelliJ, Eclipse and NetBeans are all incredibly slow and bloated. Also, it has a modern architecture with useful, up-to-date plugins, not plugins written in 2004.
swombat 14y ago
I gave ST2 about three months too, but I haven't found enough to keep me. I've moved back to Macvim...
- steverandy 14y ago
  Anybody tried ST2 and moved back to TextMate?
  - schappim 14y ago
    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
    - steverandy 14y ago
      You can do that with ST2.
      - calinet6 14y ago
        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.
  - AngryParsley 14y ago
    I gave it a shot one weekend, but went back to my highly-customized TextMate. ST2 is still rough around the edges. It doesn't show source control status in the sidebar. TextMate has the ProjectPlugin plugin which solves a lot of those problems: http://ciaranwal.sh/projectplus http://ciaranwal.sh/projectplus. ST2's find-in-project was also kind of annoying, at least compared to AckMate (https://github.com/protocool/AckMate https://github.com/protocool/AckMate). I realized I don't want to make the same mistake that I made when I switched to TextMate: Using a closed-source editor. One day, Sublime Text 2 will stop being developed. It's not clear if they'll ever change the license to something that allows community development. ST2 will probably end up like TextMate: consigned to the graveyard of abandoned closed-source text editors. That's one advantage of Vim and Emacs: They're never going away.
jph 14y ago
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 14y ago
  At high risk of sounding like a broken record, give sshfs a try.
- uncr3ative 14y ago
  or use the sftp package from package control
flixic 14y ago
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?
- steverandy 14y ago
  I wanted to design an icon replacement for it. When you think about it, "Sublime Text" is really hard to describe as an object.
- willtheperson 14y ago
  I took a go at a replacement icon found here https://github.com/tw12lve/sublimetext2-icons https://github.com/tw12lve/sublimetext2-icons Feel free to submit your own as a pull request
  - steverandy 14y ago
    We need something other than an S key.
  - fiblye 14y ago
    Maybe it's just me, but it almost seems like the 'S' is bigger towards the top, contrary to the perspective.
- simplify 14y ago
  I personally use https://github.com/dmatarazzo/Sublime-Text-2-Icon https://github.com/dmatarazzo/Sublime-Text-2-Icon
- RubberMullet 14y ago
  I use this one http://dribbble.com/shots/357612-Sublime-Text-2-Replacement-Icon http://dribbble.com/shots/357612-Sublime-Text-2-Replacement-...
mistercow 14y ago
>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 14y ago
  Can you point out what it is? So far I'm happy with it.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    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.
ditoa 14y ago
I feel like I am the only person still using UltraEdit these days. It has always done me well as an advanced text editor.
tcoffee 14y ago
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 https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme
markokocic 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
hemancuso 14y ago
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.
- steverandy 14y ago
  I hope this comes true that the developer of ST2 will shift focus to the cosmetics and the interactions.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jay_kyburz 14y ago
  Ugg, I disagree with most of most of your points. I like the sidebar simple, use finder/explorer if you want more. Text for find results and config is great. Native ui is a huge amount of work to get right and maintain. Make the most of the beautiful text buffers I say!
- siodine 14y ago
  Search http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community for "scheme" and "theme." https://github.com/cafarm/aqua-theme https://github.com/cafarm/aqua-theme is what you're looking for, I think.
pwelch 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
  - LocalPCGuy 14y ago
    There is Print to Html plugin, works pretty good: https://github.com/joelpt/sublimetext-print-to-html https://github.com/joelpt/sublimetext-print-to-html
BerislavLopac 14y ago
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.
alttab 14y ago
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 14y ago
  You learn vim / emacs very well once, you use them for the rest of your life. It's time well invested.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - alttab 14y ago
    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.
- Peaker 14y ago
  Why so fancy? Just COPY CON.
lstrope 14y ago
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.

50 points by steverandy 14y ago

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.

csulok 14y ago

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.

cageface 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
steverandy 14y ago
I never really used IDE like IntelliJ or RubyMine. But I always feel they are too bloated. Maybe just different use case.
- cageface 14y ago
  I can use IntelliJ for anything from Python to Ruby to Java to Go to Haskell. Sure it takes a little longer to start up than a no-plugin Emacs or Sublime Text, but it also does a lot more and I don't have to fiddle with it to make it work.
  - siodine 14y ago
    The Go and Haskell support is better in ST2 than in IntelliJ. For Python and Ruby, it depends. IntelliJ is unquestionably better for Java, though. Also, consider that ST2 is in its infancy and how developed its language support already is (see SublimeClang, for example). As ST2 becomes more popular, it might compete with the most developed IDEs.
    - cageface 14y ago
      And it will also become slow and bloated and people will move on to the next fast, lean editor that only needs feature x & y. Wash & repeat ad infinitum.
      - siodine 14y ago
        I think that's unlikely. ST2 is already exceptionally fast and complete as an editor. As an IDE, ST2 requires plugins. These plugins are written in Python (which can use libs written in C) as opposed to vimscript or elisp. Moreover, these plugins aren't required for editing text files (or having SublimeClang isn't going to significantly slow down editing python files).
      - collint 14y ago
        I'm only using ST2 because TM2 took forever to release and even the the alpha wasn't compelling. So I'm much more worried about developer fatigue than bloat in my editor choice.
      - Olreich 14y ago
        Vim and Emacs kill that argument. Neither is slow, and both are older than dirt in computer years. Sublime Text may continue the march without becoming super slow as well. I'm sure a Java-focused IDE could be fast and excellent, but that's not their focus.
president 14y ago
Not everyone is coding Java. Not to mention, we're talking about a general-use text editor for all sorts of text files.
siodine 14y ago
1. The configuration time for stuff like this in ST2 is comparable with IntelliJ. 2. IntelliJ costs more. 3. IntelliJ is simply better for Java than ST2 (more significant time-saving professional features), but not necessarily so for other languages (it becomes less clear cut with languages like ruby). 4. ST2 replaces your standard text editor, IntelliJ doesn't.
eswat 14y ago
Yes, but I think many wouldn’t want to have all the other features a full-blown IDE offers. While ST2 requires configuration to add the bare-necessities people would take for granted from an IDE, if you went with the latter you still have to do configuration to pair things down to the most minimal-environment you’re comfortable with.
batista 14y ago
>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. Because we don't want a slow, Java based IDE, that goes over the uncanny valley in all platforms. I do use Eclipse, which is not much better than IntelliJ, for Java editing. But I wouldn't bother with it for JS/PHP/Python/Ruby etc...
killedbydeath 14y ago
I liked using IntelliJ IDEA for Java development. However the reasons I now use Komodo Edit and ST2 over PyCharm/IDEA for Python are: IntelliJ has slower startup times, does certain things slower, takes up a lot of memory, does not look as nice. I do not need most of the functionality it provides and prefer having something snappier.
dbecker 14y ago
I tried switching from vim to PyCharm about a year ago. I found it incredibly slow. With vim or ST2, I do my work and don't think about the editor keeping up. With PyCharm, my typing could briefly outrun the editor. The editor would catchup, but it was just distracting. I don't think the IDE gave me any features that justified this distraction.
pathdependent 14y ago
Ignoring what other users have said (bloat, speed, noise, etc), I find that my code in an editor like ST2/TextMate/VIM ends up being substantially better and more maintainable than code written in a full-blow IDE. The full-blow IDE may mask code smell by making it easy to push on when things get ugly. For a trivial example, if you can't remember the name of some function you wrote in another module, it may be the case that the function was poorly named or the code you are currently writing is trying to do too many things. In an full-blown IDE, it doesn't feel wrong; in a simple text editor, it actually hurts. (Yes, ST2 has autocomplete, but IIRC, it's based on a tokenizer, not a parser. In either case, I operate with it disabled.) IMHO, it's a trade-off. It requires marginally more mental effort to compose code without the features of a full-blown IDE. This marginal increase in effort may slow me down considerably in the beginning to middle parts of a project compared to someone using a full-blown IDE; however, by the time I "catch up," my code will probably be more conducive to safe expansion and maintenance, and for all but trivial projects, that's the majority of development time.
- Flow 14y ago
  I find that with a good IDE I can regard every name as a temporary name till I feel I clearly know what the best name would be. A bit like a sketcher could draw a few lines and see where that leads.
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    That's less a property of IDEs than a side-effect of working with extremely static languages that are amenable to that kind of global-rename analysis.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
And to those of us that use it, it's obvious that you never have. Not trying to be dismissive, but I stand by that comment. Ugh, it's painful to read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247386 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247386 So much ignorant bias. Just try it. You don't know what you're talking about.
- cageface 14y ago
  I've used ST2 quite a bit. It's a nice editor but I really don't see the point.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
Sublime is wicked fast. IntelliJ, Eclipse and NetBeans are all incredibly slow and bloated. Also, it has a modern architecture with useful, up-to-date plugins, not plugins written in 2004.

swombat 14y ago

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

steverandy 14y ago
Anybody tried ST2 and moved back to TextMate?
- schappim 14y ago
  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
  - steverandy 14y ago
    You can do that with ST2.
    - calinet6 14y ago
      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.
- AngryParsley 14y ago
  I gave it a shot one weekend, but went back to my highly-customized TextMate. ST2 is still rough around the edges. It doesn't show source control status in the sidebar. TextMate has the ProjectPlugin plugin which solves a lot of those problems: http://ciaranwal.sh/projectplus http://ciaranwal.sh/projectplus. ST2's find-in-project was also kind of annoying, at least compared to AckMate (https://github.com/protocool/AckMate https://github.com/protocool/AckMate). I realized I don't want to make the same mistake that I made when I switched to TextMate: Using a closed-source editor. One day, Sublime Text 2 will stop being developed. It's not clear if they'll ever change the license to something that allows community development. ST2 will probably end up like TextMate: consigned to the graveyard of abandoned closed-source text editors. That's one advantage of Vim and Emacs: They're never going away.

jph 14y ago

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 14y ago
At high risk of sounding like a broken record, give sshfs a try.
uncr3ative 14y ago
or use the sftp package from package control

flixic 14y ago

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?

steverandy 14y ago
I wanted to design an icon replacement for it. When you think about it, "Sublime Text" is really hard to describe as an object.
willtheperson 14y ago
I took a go at a replacement icon found here https://github.com/tw12lve/sublimetext2-icons https://github.com/tw12lve/sublimetext2-icons Feel free to submit your own as a pull request
- steverandy 14y ago
  We need something other than an S key.
- fiblye 14y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but it almost seems like the 'S' is bigger towards the top, contrary to the perspective.
simplify 14y ago
I personally use https://github.com/dmatarazzo/Sublime-Text-2-Icon https://github.com/dmatarazzo/Sublime-Text-2-Icon
RubberMullet 14y ago
I use this one http://dribbble.com/shots/357612-Sublime-Text-2-Replacement-Icon http://dribbble.com/shots/357612-Sublime-Text-2-Replacement-...

mistercow 14y ago

>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 14y ago
Can you point out what it is? So far I'm happy with it.
- mistercow 14y ago
  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.

ditoa 14y ago

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

tcoffee 14y ago

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 https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme

markokocic 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

hemancuso 14y ago

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.

steverandy 14y ago
I hope this comes true that the developer of ST2 will shift focus to the cosmetics and the interactions.
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jay_kyburz 14y ago
Ugg, I disagree with most of most of your points. I like the sidebar simple, use finder/explorer if you want more. Text for find results and config is great. Native ui is a huge amount of work to get right and maintain. Make the most of the beautiful text buffers I say!
siodine 14y ago
Search http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community for "scheme" and "theme." https://github.com/cafarm/aqua-theme https://github.com/cafarm/aqua-theme is what you're looking for, I think.

pwelch 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.
- LocalPCGuy 14y ago
  There is Print to Html plugin, works pretty good: https://github.com/joelpt/sublimetext-print-to-html https://github.com/joelpt/sublimetext-print-to-html

BerislavLopac 14y ago

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.

alttab 14y ago

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 14y ago
You learn vim / emacs very well once, you use them for the rest of your life. It's time well invested.
- deleted 14y ago
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- alttab 14y ago
  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.
Peaker 14y ago
Why so fancy? Just COPY CON.

lstrope 14y ago

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.