Sublime Tutor – Interactive Sublime Text Tutor | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Tutor – Interactive Sublime Text Tutor

sublimetutor.com

197 pointsohyoutravel64 comments

Since I've been coding more, I was looking to make the switch from Notepad++ to Sublime Text, which is what everyone seems to recommend. I found this tutorial and went through it over the past few days. At first, I couldn't see the difference between ST and Notepad++, but now really see how well ST works. The key for me was having my own code open contemporaneously and trying what I was learning on my own code.

Anyways, definitely increased my productivity greatly! Thought I would share.

I remember when ST came out I immediately switched to it simply because of the aesthetics. I spend most of my time staring at code, it better look good.

I made the same switch 6 years ago. Occasionally, I miss the way Notepad++ showing binary file, Sublime will just show the hex code. I tried to pick up Atom/Visual Code last year but gave up. Sublime is fine for me.

I have been very happy with VS Code. Did you encounter any particular problems?

ST is cross platform where Notepad++ isn't. That's at least one advantage.

I find ST to be crashy, particularly if you pile on a few plug-ins. Notepad++ was a breath of fresh air in that department.

Interesting, I've never experienced a ST crash. Using Linux and Windows.

I've had the plugin host crash a handful of times in the last 5 years, but never had the editor itself crash due to plugins. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's why the plugin host exists in the first place.

The plugin host only exists in the beta version (v3), though, right?

Not sure, you might be right. I have been using v3 for a long long time now, so I can't say for sure.

Downvotes, really?

I was actually thinking just yesterday, "I wish there was some Sublime tutorial that just repetitively worked you through keystrokes to learn the muscle memory. That's been the biggest impediment to moving off of Textmate."

And then this. Thank you Hacker News AI for predicting exactly what I need to read today.

Now...is there something like this for Ubuntu?

Noo why leave Textmate? We remaining Textmate users have to stay strong!

Textmate is great. That being said, I would LOVE to use the same editor on all of my computers/OSes. In order to do so, I need one editor to support Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Yeah if you use different OSes frequently it makes sense to want to just use one. Or at least have the same key bindings.

Switched to Ubuntu. :-)

Like this? https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/sublime-text-3-win

> Now...is there something like this for Ubuntu?

As in a similar tutorial for Ubuntu? If that's what you're asking, then not really. Pretty difficult to learn an OS. Though you might be able to find some similar stuff for bash or vim if you look hard enough.

> Pretty difficult to learn an OS.

Ubuntu is not what I would call "pretty difficult to learn." Using it as your primary OS for 1-4 days is pretty much enough.

My point is that you can't really "learn" an OS. Linux distros are a combination of hundreds or thousands of tools. Yeah, you could get the hang of using Ubuntu in under a day, but you can't just "learn" all the stuff it can do.

Vim Tutor comes with vim (and therefore most unix systems)!

Just type `vimtutor` in a terminal.

Mainly thinking for shortcut keys for the desktop.

For those interested: you can use Sublime Text keyboard shortcuts in VSCode.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

It's a step in that direction but some key things don't work. Like the behavior of ctrl+shift+D is not available in VS code. Neither is multiple cursor copy/paste. Text drag & drop is missing. There are many other small quirks that won't let me make the move. A decent ftp client is also not there. The only one that works is shitty entire folder sync, I can't upload individual files. Their git and intelliJ integration is good though.

ctrl + shift + d in Sublime is shift + alt + down in VS Code. Multiple cursor copy & paste works fine.

No it's not. It copies the entire line in VS code. In sublime it copies the selected text. Huge difference.

Yup, this is what finally got me to make the switch. There are a few things that aren't the same like alt-click for column selection (alt+shift+click instead), but it certainly made the transition easier.

Keyboard commands are actually the reason I haven't stayed with pycharm for my day job. I'm hoping more IDE-like features make their way into the python extensions - like vagrant/docker integration with build systems.

After seeing evil-mode and now this I just have to ask: Is having the same shortcuts really that important to people?

I understand that you may have been using the same tool for X years and developed muscle memory and all that. But now you are putting yourself in a disadvantage because if you use someone elses machine you will not be able to get much done because despite using VS Code for Y years you still haven't learned the native controls.

Or maybe I am the only one thinking this way?

I thought this said 'Sublime Tour' and started to get excited the band was coming back and then I remembered. :(

Then you remembered you were on HN?

Sorry. That Brad died years ago.

I'm sure this is a great resource for those starting or just switching to ST3, but I wonder how the value holds up for those who have been using this editor for awhile now. Can anyone share their experience?

Idk, it's still best GUI editor in terms of performance, but I don't like it because of the price and it's not open source(but I can see the price being justifiable). I used ST2 for some time until I moved to Vim, and after few years of Vim I moved to Emacs.

And I think I've finally achieved what I wanted from the beginning, programmable environment. Editing speed is not nowhere near close to my proficiency in Vim, but the things that really make my code better in the end is not faster typing but REPLs, and all those nice interfaces and plugins (I don't like to call Emacs plugins, plugins, because I believe they are much more than that, they usually provide you completely new environment with huge array of possibilities). So in the end I think it always comes down to Vim and Emacs. You hit the limitations pretty fast with other editors, your needs and technologies you work with change, so ST3 can be fine for you for some period, or much longer than it did for me, but I think it is worth at least trying to learn one of those 2 pesky old editors that everybody goes crazy about. Because people go crazy about them for a reason. ST3, hmm, not so much.

I believe the parent was asking about the tutorial, not the editor itself

My bad, I thought of editor.

I go crazy about ST3. Don't feel the need to turn it into a silly holy war, though. Sublime Text is great. I much prefer it to Vim/Emacs for my day-to-day.

I too have come to that conclusion and I have started to learn VIM. Emacs is scary. How is spacemacs? Thats seems like the new cool kid in the block.

I didn't like spacemacs, but that's just me. Whole point of Emacs for me is customizing it to your own liking, spacemacs feels just forced to me. Even Emacs+EVIL feels much better, but then again, that is just me.

spacemacs kind of misses the point, I think. It feels very, very bloated.

To be fair, since you're someone who uses VIM it's not really fair to compare VIM vs an IDE or Editor like sublime.

I don't use Vim now. And it's good that you said that, cause I never used Vim as an IDE always felt wrong using it like that, but that's just my opinion.

The JS intellisense in Sublime is extremely slow.

How great is sublime compared to Atom? I'm at my wits end with Atom but feel like I have no other windows text editor that can compete (even though I detest atoms interface and how buggy it is).

Every time someone is frustrated with Atom, we are obligated to suggest VS Code, because VS Code is actually pretty awesome.

I keep Sublime Text around for ephemeral scratch space, for quickly opening and then closing files, and for browsing through large files. Otherwise VS Code for my editing.

I've tried Atom repeatedly and found its key input performance and overall bloat to be far and above the worst thing about it. Sublime Text (2 or 3 for that matter) does an excellent job in the performance department, and that's where I consider it to "count" as far as a developer app goes.

(I'm talking about latency on each key input. Pressing a key results in a character appearing on the screen faster in Sublime Text than in Atom.)

I've observed the same about performance, slight key input latency. On my home workstation (beast) it's unnoticeable, but it's an issue on less-snappy systems like many laptops out there.

For the life of me I can't understand how the core function of displaying text in a freaking text editor isn't optimized to hell and back. And I love Atom, but I don't get why the latency. It's like the most core of core functions... There's no excuse in my book, like cold french fries, or dirty restrooms. (Other editors are plagued by this too btw, it's a not an Atom-specific issue.)

I really hope this gets optimized eventually, because otherwise the whole JavaScript and CSS frontend (CoffeScript) is an awesome paradigm (I actually think this should be the way to make whole OS GUI moving forward, in a bid to make it easier to unify an app's appearance regardless of the platform. But I'm digressing).

Visual studio code: https://code.visualstudio.com/

I use vim for general purpose, but I do all JS dev in vscode now and recommend it.

I'm partial to Emacs on Windows. Install a few extra GNU utilities and for the most part you won't even be able to tell you are on Windows. :) (It's really only a few: I just use aspell, diff, grep and find.)

Atom is based on sublime text. They are quite similar anyway. The differences are that sublime text is faster, less buggy, almost never crashes, can open large files without freezing, and costs 70 dollars or you get an annoying popup every half hour or so.

Atom is great for small files. Sublime is super fast and can open much larger files.

For those who use sublime (I've moved to Atom and then VS Code), how is Sublime 3 ? (and is it any good for a JS/TS developer?)

I still use it after spending months with Atom and VSCode.

Currently I use it mainly for Python, Ruby and Elixir but it has great JS packages too.

If you're curious and want to see screenshots of a bunch of packages and how to install them, I whipped up a post about it a while back:

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/25-sublime-text-3-packages-fo...

ST3 is good, and I still use it as my default text editor, but for coding I've also switched to VS Code.

It’s been great! I’ve been using sublime since the first version. Sublime 3 is great, snappier and less of a memory hog than atom/vs code.

Also have switched to VS Code; incredibly productive environment for Typescript development

I've also changed to VS Code, IntelliSense is something that Sublime 3 lacks.

I've also switched over from Sublime to VS Code. Found the intellisense to be much snappier and I'm really liking it so far.

(Also found writing Python in VS Code much more pleasant than with Sublime).

I used ST3 exclusively for about 2 years, writing python mostly. Now I've switched to JS and feel like VS Code is noticeably better choice for it.

You can also check out https://sublimetextbook.com Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izk7yzcb-rE

This is pretty awesome! Thanks a lot.

I'll definitely give this a look, although given that I use Sublime almost exclusively in Vintage mode, I wonder how many of the tips will apply.

Congrats on catching up to Emacs which has had a tutorial built in for decades. pops open the champagne

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