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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Specifically:<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* Split windows are great, but the grouping in the sidebar is odd. What's group 1 vs group 2 vs group 3, etc.<p>* 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.<p>* 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!<p>* 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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>For text editing, Sublime just couldn't match vim & emacs because they're widely available on remote servers via SSH.
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.<p>Makes me wonder, why SL2 icon is so bad. Maybe the author had some unreasonable requests to the obviously talented designers?
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.
For those wondering, the theme / style he's using to make the tabs, side bar, and status bar pretty can be found here: <a href="https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme</a>
ST2 is a great text editor (I like vim more) - and a text editor is what it should be compared to.<p>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.<p>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.
I have been using ST2 for awhile and overall its pretty good. Although I still find myself opening Vim/Textmate a lot.<p>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.
>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.<p>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.
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.