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Comment by jscheel | Hacker News Reader

I think everything has been said that can be said about the ridiculously-long release cycle of textmate, but I still don't get what is so great about sublime. The only thing it seems to have over textmate is split panels and the code overview (which looks cool but has never been very practical, at least for me). Am I missing something?

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1. python console for easy plugins (but Python env is way too stripped down unfortunately)

2. it's fast

3. very good ctags support (jump to definitions between files)

4. go to anything (jump to files)

5. vim-like cursor position stack

6. vertical tabs

7. decent multiple-syntax highlighting (javascript/css in html pages)

What do you use for ctags? https://github.com/SublimeText/CTags?

Mostly. I patched that package to support global search (show all tags across all files that roughly match this string) and I fixed a number of bugs where file paths didn't get normalized correctly. And I refactored the indexing logic (moved it to the crontab) so all libraries I use also get indexed properly.

Since I use it for Python/Django/CSS/JS work I also had to add some rules to ~/.ctags to correctly identify JS and CSS declarations.

Ah, I've been missing the functionality to auto-complete symbols from other files in the project (or libs).

Mind sharing your work?

It doesn't do auto-complete (even though it's trivial to add). For that I just use SublimeCodeIntel.

What does "Go to anything" offer versus TextMate / ST2's Command-T file jump feature? As far as I can tell the two do exactly the same thing.

Go to anything allows you to go to methods/functions, do a find in file and go to the line in a file. For example, if I know I want the getWidgets method in Widgets_Controller, I can type Widgets Con[stop typing when the right file is at the top]@getWidgets. To find, replace the @ with a #, and to go to a line, replace the @/# with a :.

I don't if TextMate does this or not, to be honest.

Ah, thanks, that's a combination of the TextMate go to file / go to symbol. I've been using Command-T/(Command-R/Control-G) in ST2 since the magic syntax for symbol or line navigation wasn't obvious.

Also ST2's go to file will do fuzzy matching on the full path, instead of just the filename. This is huge when you have a lot of files named __init__.py, for example.

Goto Anything, multiple cursors, practically no lag when working on remote files, no hangups on files with long lines, set-mark functionality etc. In general, ST2 feels way faster and much more solid.

Not to mention the fact that I can use the same text editor across multiple operating systems.

Not really. Sublime is great. As good as TextMate. But but the killer feature is that it exists and gets updated.

It has updates.

Multiple cursors. Amazingly useful.

Plus, the internal API lets you create much more powerful extensions. For example, I replaced Sublime's somewhat idiosynchratic autocompletion to match TextMate's: https://github.com/alexstaubo/sublime_text_alternative_autoc...

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