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Comment by dtalen | Hacker News Reader

As a longtime vim user I'm interested in knowing if there's anyone that's switched to Sublime Text (or TextMate, or any other similar contemporary editor) and if so, how has it gone? There seem to be a lot of cool features here but do they outweigh the benefit of knowing that they key bindings you've learned will continue to serve you for decades?

Please, this is not flamebait. I'm interested if anyone's made a switch from an old standby like vim/emacs to a new editor and how they've fared. Maybe it's time for me to start looking at all the new editors out there.

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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 routinely edit files of 5-10k loc and have never had a problem. It blows ide's (eg eclipse) out of the water in terms of speed.

Maybe it's picked up since version 1. Also, it was a rather large file I was dealing with. Maybe I'll give it another go.

My understanding/impression at the time was that Sublime was at least in part using Python, although perhaps I'm mis-remembering. Once I observed that, the slowdown "made sense" to me. It may have also had to do with (regular expression) find/replace. So, altogether, my use may not have been "typical".

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