Sublime Text 2: Beta

The big question is: how proficient are you with Vim?

Some people adapt very well to Vim's method of input and control. If you're one of those people, it's doubtful that switching to an editor like Sublime Text or TextMate will benefit you much.

I'm a TextMate user first, but I do so much Linux sysadmin work that I need decent Vim skills. I'd estimate my skills at about a 4 out of 10. I use some plugins and have some of my own custom key bindings, but I take the long way around to many operations, and I've seen people closer to the 10 side of the scale that run circles around me. I like Vim. I like it a lot, but I feel like I'm the limiting factor when I use it, and I can't seem to get over the hump on my way to 5+. It's probably because I don't use it enough.

TextMate (as is any good GUI editor) for people who do a lot of text editing, but not a lot of text editing. I'm not a full-time developer. I'm a manager who knows how to code and is responsible for sysadmin duties. GUI editors have the advantage of guiding you through menus, on which the keyboard shortcuts are shown, so you get continual reinforcement.

TextMate has "Bundles", which are similar to Vim plugins. My favorite feature of TextMate is cmd+control-t. This brings up the "Select Bundle Item" dialog. You type words in to the box and the dialog box filters all available bundle commands for the current "scope" (e.g., ruby.source, html, ruby.source.string). This offers a high degree of discoverability for Bundle items that have either key bindings or tab triggers. It's a kind of training wheels for Bundles. Great for learning, and great for digging up features you know exist, but can't remember how to trigger.

I have the same problem. However, I originally came from Textmate and switched to Vim when Textmate essentially became vaporware. I do miss the fluid scrolling though. And decent project management. And I hate those pseudo-graphical ASCII-art boxes that Vim so loves.

And then I found Vico (vicoapp.net), which is basically a modern OSX text editor with Vim keybindings. There is still a lot of stuff missing, like macros and ci(, but it is already enough to make me prefer it to Vim most of the time. And it has full support for Textmate bundles, too.

On Windows, E-texteditor and Visual Studio plugins like Vsvim or Viemu achieve this, too. On Linux, Gedit can do it. Oh, and Emacs can do that, too, though that is a somewhat odd choice for a vimmer ;-)

I think you probably want to check out Vico: http://www.vicoapp.com/

When you fingers crave Vi but your eyes crave OS X.

I'm a big gui guy and vim has just been too much a pain to learn. Something tells me if you have been using vim for that long there is really no good reason to switch.

I'm a hardcore Vim user. Just recently I've switched over to about 90% Sublime Text. It's not as configurable as, say, Emacs -ie., you can't do Vim keybindings in it, but you can customize most things very easily.

Documentation currently sucks for Sublime Text 2, but it's not too hard to poke around and try stuff out on your own.

I've almost completely remapped Sublime Text 2 to use the subset of Emacs keybindings that I actually learned and committed to muscle memory.

The only real problem is that Sublime Text isn't free. I haven't registered yet, but I do intend to once an official release draws out and the documentation is fleshed out.

Also keep in mind that Sublime Text 2 works on OSX, Linux and Windows.

I switched from Vim to Gedit few years ago, but I can still use Vim keyboard shortcuts thanks to ViGedit plugin (https://launchpad.net/vigedit). There is also Vim input mode in Kate editor.

Kinda language driven. The haskellers, erlang and clojure people are heavily invested in emacs, I use intelliJ for scala, komodo and textmate for ruby/python, and I've always used vim on whatever unix boxes i found myself on.

(Still waiting for MS to gift me a free copy Visual Studio Ultimate :)

I gave the Sublime v 1.something a try when I was in a particular situation. It was ok; however, it was quite resource intensive. Start editing large files, and be prepared to wait...

I've been using it for awhile as well and what's totally nuts is that the entire interface (colors, images, tabs, scrollbars, buttons) are all described in a CSS-like language inside a configuration file. I actually changed all the PNGs out to make the tabs look different and go for a Lion-like scrollbar and it was no sweat. Everything in the entire app is described in JSON config files so you can literally muck around with the internals as much as you want. The best is when you miss a comma, restart Sublime Text and the entire interface is garbled :)

Me too, exactly the same. I used to work exclusively in E on Win and TextMate on OSX but Sublime 2 is the perfect bridge.

Yeah, you're probably not the target of a full GUI editor... question probably isn't even worth answering.

What would be really cool would be if the sidebar would jump to the file you were working on when you're editing it ... I have many projects open at a time, and I hate having to mouse down to find the file I'm currently working on ... to open ... say ... and associated or related file.

Not only that, but it's mostly compatable with things like .tmLanguage files, so there's even some cross-portability there.

(I've never used Textmate, being a Linux user, but being able to benefit from the ecosystem to get e.g. .pp file highlighting is great)

And it works on WINDOWS. I use to edit my python and ruby projects on mac and windows without having to learn 2 different tools. Love it.

I'd love to try it out, but I need a mirror...

Have you been having a problem with a particular language? I've been using Sublime Text to work on code with comments in Japanese without a problem for almost 2 years now (well, the fonts were squished at first, but that bug was fixed a long time ago).

When I last worked on a Java project, I ended up going back and forth between Sublime Text and Eclipse.

ST makes navigating the code more quick and smooth - the minimap takes away the feeling of looking at code through tunnel vision, you can preview files much more quickly, and view more code at once with minimalist full-screen mode settings and multi-column layout. The regex search with active highlighting in both the minimap and the file is also nice, and multi-select is pretty helpful for refactoring repetitive code.

That said, ST is just a text editor, not an IDE - while some features, like autocomplete, are partially compensated for, it doesn't do type checking or follow references across files, so other features that stem from those will be missed; e.g. refactoring across multiple files is usually faster in Eclipse. I would usually do most of my editing in ST, and then type-check, compile, and debug in Eclipse.

That screenshot makes it look like there's no text folding arrows for Sublime, is that true? I wouldn't even try it out if it's missing that feature because I use it in Textmate dozens of times a day.

Sublime Text 2 is not open source and will never be included in Ubuntu or (likely) any other Linux distro. However, I will say that it is one of the very few software packages I have ever purchased. That's saying quite a bit coming from a dyed in the wool GPL guy like myself. :)

CS works for me. Just get the bundle for TextMate.

Yep. You hit CTRL+SPACE and it'll give you a drop down list of possible completions. It'll also have your previously typed variables in the list.

I'm more of a tab user myself though. So I'll type array_p and hit tab once for array_push. (for example)

it sorta does. If you hit tab while typing a method name, it'll guess at which one you're trying to type and populate the args as well. It's not particularly useful, but it does indicate that there is code in the app that is trying to do this, and could be improved.

This is one drawback ... so far it doesn't (from what I've seen anyway)

Probably because it will take you between 3 to 5 years less time to learn how to be proficient at your text editor if it's ST rather than emacs?

Saner keybindings some will say.

There's a hotkey that brings up a search with all of the methods in a particular file (apple-r on a mac) that does the trick for me. Be nice if it did a bit more, but it does enough for now.

This is the only downside I've found to using vi/vim full time. Wanting and expecting the keybindings everywhere, even in things like html text areas.

When I last tried Sublime Text back in 1.X, there were no Vi bindings out of the box, but it's powerful enough to allow you to make your own. Some guys on the Sublime Text forum already have.

The "Add Folder to Project" isn't to your liking?

It's actually got very good support for projects — take a look at the Project menu.

Once you have an editor window open, just drag stuff into the sidebar. Then save the project to make it persistent.

With a discoverable, well-designed GUI, you shouldn't need one. Emacs and VIM are very powerful, but not very discoverable.

I think maybe the name of the software might be a more trivial thing to worry about in a text editor.

A good reason for a Linux guest on VBox, I spose.