Sublime Text 2 Beta released with Auto-complete and Improved UI

Anyone using this editor should install this plugin first:<p><a href="http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control" rel="nofollow">http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control</a><p>It's fantastic and gives you a simple in-editor way to add/remove other plugins, direct from their github repos, without needing to leave or restart the editor. It also automatically keeps them all up to date.<p>Once it's installed, you can just use the command palette (ctrl+shift+p) to install any of these plugins: <a href="http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community" rel="nofollow">http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community</a>, plus any others that you add via their github repo.

It makes me sad that the best tools available for writing code in so many otherwise exciting languages are still resorting to text-based autocompletion. And blogging about it as though it's something to be proud of.<p>This is certainly a pretty editor. But at its heart, it's still a <i>text</i> editor. And what I do for a living is edit <i>code</i>.<p>Code has a lot more information about it than text. I can imagine looking at a line such as:<p><pre><code> item.hide() </code></pre> in this editor, knowing that my codebase has half a dozen classes that expose a .hide member. I hesitate even to ctrl+click on it in this editor, because I know it'll either do nothing or take me to the wrong definition.<p>In a perfect world (and in IDEs for statically typed languages since 1998), the editor would know exactly which .hide we were talking about. And it could gracefully send me there with a single click or keystroke.<p>I'm still waiting for something equivalent to appear for the Ruby/Python/Javascript portion of my world. But years keep ticking by and the best we get is text editors that try to guess by looking at text.<p>Maybe next year.

My favorite feature (already added in an earlier development release, but now finally in the beta track): On OSX, if you are editing a file you don't have write access to and you want to save it, Sublime now asks for authentication than then saves the file.<p>This is very convenient and not having this was <i>the</i> reason for still having TextMate around.

Favourite Option: When you close the editor, it just shuts down, saving all your buffers and restoring them when you reload. That means you can close the app, reboot your computer, whatever, and the edits you've been making aren't lost, and you aren't bugged for filenames.<p>Definitely a 'why don't all apps work like this?' feature.

My favorite feature: a dedication from the developer to fix bugs even on Linuxes they aren't personally running (Arch Linux in this case).<p><a href="http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&#38;t=4473" rel="nofollow">http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&#38;t=447...</a>

Just so you know, these features have been available for weeks now in the dev builds. They get updated almost every day sometimes, the developer is an absolute machine.<p><a href="http://www.sublimetext.com/dev" rel="nofollow">http://www.sublimetext.com/dev</a>

The great thing about ST2's autocompletion is that it is totally extensible, allowing you to hack your own completion routines.<p>I wrote an indexer for Objective-J code last year, that scans a set of folders (which can include the Cappuccino frameworks if you like) and creates a completion index of all the class names, methods, functions, etc. It was trivial to make an ST2 plugin that completes using that data.<p>The abilitity to write your own autocompletion plugins for the freaky/obscure kinds of files you use really rocks. Even without heavy-duty semantic analysis of the code, you can get 90% of the way there and it is really useful.<p>The main problem right now is that the UI is still too narrow. Voting this issue up could help get that fixed:<p><a href="http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/85632-need-the-completion-menu-to-be-wider/" rel="nofollow">http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/85632-need-the-complet...</a>

I really wish Emacs had smooth scrolling, indent guides and that Minimap. Those are some killer features that you can't just implement in Emacs' scripting language.<p>edit: minimap exists! (Obviously only in GUI Emacs)<p>Animated sub-line scrolling probably requires hacking the Emacs source. Indent guides might be possible just in elisp, but I don't know how good they would look.

I don't know if it's something wrong with my eyes, but with the new theme I get confused all the time searching for the active tab. Old theme had more contrast.<p>Edit: installing Soda theme[1] solved it!<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/</a>

This guy has to be on caffeine, modafinil, and love for his product. Incredible velocity here.

All it's missing now is a better icon; preferably not another blue one. Normally end up with this one (blue I know). <a href="http://www.designkode.com/blog/sublime-text-icon" rel="nofollow">http://www.designkode.com/blog/sublime-text-icon</a>

This is such a great editor. Each update adds things I really appreciate. (How did I ever live without indent guides?)<p>I've been working in XCode so much lately that I've gotten really used to this style of autocomplete, so this update is very welcome.

Sublime Text 2 is amazing. I bought it and used it for a bit. Even with vintage mode, I missed vim too much and switched back.<p>I do wonder if the arrival of Sublime Text 2 was the impetus for TextMate 2 development after so many years.

Split-screen support is still very clunky. I don't understand why you need to define a new "group". Layout-wise it makes sense as preset layouts, but other than that the group doesn't help at all.<p>The best split-screen implementation is E-Text Editor. In E, you can drag the tab to create a new split, then "Cmd T" in ANY tab will bring you to the previously opened file in the split. Basically I don't have to remember where the file is opened, as long as I know its name, I can just jump by typing the name. That is how quick jump should be. Also, you can arrange the windows by dragging-and-dropping to another split. I stop using E after version 1 because I made the switch Mac and I have to use Textmate, which does not support split-screen at all (what a shame!). And I miss E dearly.<p>Currently Sublime Text quick jump is still bad, because it still requires a context switch (switch to the group that has the file opened, then Cmd T), or worse, complete loss of current context (Cmd T would open the file in current group, thus you lose the view of the current file you're working on).<p>So as long as split-view doesn't get implemented properly, Sublime Text is still just another editor.

Is this just me but no-one seem to talk about it. How can I get the Sidebar to have a similar color scheme with my main theme? I like the default Monokai but the Sidebar is light. The Soda theme &#38; Color Scheme was nice but the new UI improvement in the IDE is so good to sacrifice it for Soda.

Still no block cursor. :(<p>I've found/modified a little plug-in to simulate it, but it's not ideal.<p>I love Sublime, and I'm sure it seems trivial to most folks, but as a developer with poor eyesight, this is the one feature I want the most.<p>At least fonts can be larger now.

A small bug with the auto-complete update when you edit a new C++ file (I've checked this only on Mac):<p>When you start writing #in... Sublime will suggest you #include ... pressing Enter will actually double the pound sign. You end up with something like ##include ....<p>I've noticed the same pattern for int m... the suggested completion was main(). Pressing Enter ends up repeating the return type of the main function, something like:<p>int int main(int argc, char *argv[]) ...<p>Maybe this a Mac only bug or it has something to do with the way the C++ syntax is parsed by the Auto-complete algorithm.

I've recently started using Sublime Text 2 for iPhone development on Windows. Okay I admit, I've been doing it for a while. Rather strange setup perhaps, but with Synergy it's a fairly seamless workflow between my Macbook Pro and Windows desktop. I keep telling myself I'll get around to purchasing a license and this finally did it for me. I wouldn't say it's purely on guilt, more of a slowly growing relationship. Auto complete is an enormous help, why wouldn't I return the favor?

If you use vim be sure to check out the Ex mode package: <a href="https://github.com/SublimeText/VintageEx" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SublimeText/VintageEx</a>

Wow, this is seriously nice. Never heard of it before. Just today I've been trying out Netbeans as I'm a vim addict but my colleagues keep telling me how wonderful their IDEs are - Netbeans was much too heavyweight for my liking, but this looks like just the right balance between features and simplicity/speed.<p>Loving the mini-map and package manager particularly. The vim emulation seems to cover most of the key ones I use too. Nice work!

For those wondering, auto-complete is quite fast.<p>I've always avoided IDEs that offered this because they seemed to be terribly slow -- pleasantly surprised so far.

&#62; If you’re feeling adventurous, you may want to enable the auto_complete_commit_on_tab file setting: This will make tab accept the current completion, and enter operate as normal.<p>I've had this on for about a week now, and although it was initially very disorienting, it's very easy to get used to it. I'd certainly recommend it, since it allows you to add a new line even if a suggestion is there.

Has the ability to navigate via UNC been added? Or more importantly, has search/replace with regular expressions improved?<p>I did a search/replace of [a-z] to 0 in a 50 meg text file before as a comparison between Sublime Text 2, UltraEdit, and gVim. UltraEdit was slower than I would have liked, gVim was &#60; 10 seconds, and Sublime crashed. That's a deal breaker.

New release looks great. One problem I have with ST2 is dragging tabs from one window to another window. The actual dragging of the tab works but if it's the last tab in the window and I remove it and put in another window, I'm left with a window with no tabs in it. Can this "empty" window automatically close please?

How do people deal with remote files? I love Sublime, but always end up reverting back to VIM as it is so slow when accessing files over a network connection.<p>I've tried the SFTP plug-in, but find it really clumsy. Ideally I'd just love to be able to add a remote folder over SFTP the same way you do local ones.

I love the new look of the tabs, really nice improvement. Great to see autocomplete is built in now, I was using this one before: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3064171" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3064171</a><p>The new autocomplete even has lorem ipsum in it :)

I love Sublime, but I'm not really a fan of the new theme. It tends to be lighter in areas where the previous version was dark, especially in the tab-bar when using a theme like SpaceCadet.<p>Anyone know if it's possible to change the default tab background color for themes that don't support it?

Doesn't the new auto complete and the plug-in SublimeCodeIntel do the same thing? One of my concerns is that say you are using a plug-in for a feature that is later implemented into Sublime, now you haven't read the what's new so you have no idea. What happens then?

I've paid for Sublime Text and think it's awesome. I primarily do Scala development and would like to use ST for it but the one thing I miss are highlighting errors in the source. Does anyone know a way to do this? I searched the ST forums to no avail.

Does anyone know how to display edge lines? I usually pass files through Code Sniffer before committing, so generally i try to keep lines 120 characters or less, seeing where that 120th character is; is really helpful.

I love the git package, superb. Managed to write a few custom commands to tweak things to suit my requirements, haven't tried that with any other editor / IDE :)

I'm torn between using a nice proprietary editor like this, or a fine open source one like Scribes, or even going further into the command line world like Vim.

Was hoping for some sidebar love in the new theme (file and folder icons, renaming files in place), but the changes seem good so far.

I don't want to put the looks over functionality but when we are talking for a GUI application we need a good icon.

I'm confused, doesn't it already have auto-complete? Mine's been doing that for a while now. What's new about this?

primarily as a web dev, the only two things preventing me from switching from NP++ is the poor and non-customizable matching bracket styling. and the buggy html matching tag highlighting (and styling as well)<p>once those get addressed more fully, i'm ready to cough up the cash.

Anyone know how to get the Soda Theme working again?

Love the auto-complete! Keep up the great work.

Still doesn't feel like a Mac app...

What I really miss in all these fast small editors is the quick-jump features that actually analyze the code and let me do things like<p>1) Jump the the function/method definition (even if it's in a different file) when I press Ctrl and click on the function name. Eclipse does this.<p>2) Quick find of the function/method definition across the whole project. Eclipse does this as well (Ctrl + R).<p>I don't use Eclipse that much, because it's ridiculously slow, but it has cool features.

No doubt Sublime has all kinds of nice features, but to me the best thing is the aesthetics. It's simply a pleasure to work in this editor. Sometimes I just like to have it sit there on the second monitor, while I do something entirely different on the first one. :)

Only at HN will you find people gushing about a $50 text editor.<p>It's totally pathetic yet oddly endearing at the same time.