Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

There is one feature in TextMate that's not in Sublime which I really love to the point, where it's an absolute requirement for me: when I edit a file in TextMate and my account lacks permission for saving the file, TM would allow me to sudo right from the GUI in order to still save.

This is much better than seeing that I can't save, copy the whole file to the clipboard, reopen it with 'sudo vim' and then pasting it (no. Not even 'sudo subl' works)

One of the main reasons I use an editor like TM or S2 for is system administration which often requires root. For development I'm usually using the JetBrains IDE with the respective plugins.

View on HN

This drives me crazy.

Sublime Text guy, if you're reading, please fix it. I will do a little dance in front of my desk the day I see that in the changelog.

Oh yeah and the duplicate saving of renamed files thing.

Speaking of missing features, Sublime Text 2 doesn't support printing. Also, full-project searching is dog-slow.

Having said that, it is my editor of choice, but I'm not happy about those two points.

I guess ST2's author read this, because this morning's new beta release notes include:

    *OSX: Prompting for elevated privileges when saving protected files*

Bitch and ye shall receive!

Further evidence for my theory that complaining is the root of all human progress: Jon pushed a new beta today that fixes this. (Build 2147)

I really didn't want to seem bitchy about the issue. In fact, aside of voting for it on their userecho feature request page and writing that comment, I haven't done anything else - surely no trolling.

If my post came over as bitchy, I apologize. I really just wanted to tell the world that there's one missing feature preventing me from using Sublime more - also in the hope of maybe getting a good hint on how to solve it.

Sorry, I meant "bitch" simply in the generic sense of "to complain about x", not that your comment came across as bitchy.

I'm glad you did bring it up in public, and glad the issue was fixed, since I use ST a lot but this was a rather glaring omission for a Mac text editor.

Try sudoedit (aka sudo -e): makes a copy of the file you can edit, and replaces the file using superuser privileges when you $EDITOR exits.

Would something like this work for you?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/95072/what-are-your-favor...

No blow should pass, without two blows returned:

* http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SudoSave

* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/95631/open-a-file-with-su...

(I jest. Vim is an awesome editor and I recommend it to all my friends using Eclipse, Visual Studio, and XCode. But true enlightenment lies in Emacs, where vim is only another mode called evil: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil)

With emacs you can use TRAMP (included by default in recent versions) with something like:

C-x C-f /sudo:root@localhost:/etc/config_file

Sorry, but there is no true enlightenment, in any text editor.

Other than vim off course ;-)

If I was willing to use vim (or emacs, nyellin) for my daily editing needs I wouldn't be comparing TextMate to Sublime and listing missing features in the latter :-)

Besides, I knew about the vi trick you referenced, but it often screws up something with the terminal, causing all sorts of issues. Admittedly I didn't try it again since moving to iTerm (I'm suspecting a terminal.app issue), mainly because I have a working solution (TextMate).

It's just that weren't it not for this sudo-feature, I would really prefer sublime (I bought both, by the way, in order to support their respective authors)

Every time a textmate post comes up on HN i think of this quote.

"Those who fail to understand Emacs/vi are condemned to reinvent it"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com