Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

Serendipitous, as I'm planning on doing a lightning talk on ST2 tonight.

Editors seem to raise a lot of religious issues, and not to totally discount the distinctions that can be made between them, but I think it's more important to know your editor well than to worry about "the best editor." (If such a thing exists.) As Hunt & Thomas say in The Pragmatic Programmer: "use a single editor well."[1] You'll be most productive if you learn your editor from head to toe, than if you half-assedly know several. That takes some effort and conscious practice, sitting down and memorizing key combinations and the like. And a cursory glance at any editor might leave you unimpressed until you've gotten somewhat fluent with its features.

Just a couple of suggestions if you do use ST2:

+ get package control: http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control/installati...

+ For rails, a couple of nice packages are RubyTest and SimpleRailsNav

+ Learn the multi-edit commands

+ Familiarize yourself with cmd-P/ctrl-P (osx/win)

+ Keyboard shortcuts: WIN: https://gist.github.com/1925069 OSX: https://gist.github.com/1207002, or look at Default (OS).sublime-keymap

[1] I would amend that to add "and also know vim at least a little" for stuff like sshing in to servers and whatnot.

>>As Hunt & Thomas say in The Pragmatic Programmer: "use a single editor well."[1] You'll be most productive if you learn your editor from head to toe, than if you half-assedly know several.

If this advice is to be taken seriously the only editors you can learn is vim and Emacs.

Shiny editors like Sublime Text come and go every 2-3 years. And putting effort learning them, only brings you back to your statement: "You'll be most productive if you learn your editor from head to toe, than if you half-assedly know several."

Sublime Text definitely runs that risk by not being open. Look at Textmate.

    "use a single editor well...learn [] vim and Emacs"

What prevents me from using cmd-P is that I usually just open my entire project folder in Sublime. When I do cmd-P to open for example "foo.py", it doesn't understand that I mean the foo.py which is in the same directory with the file I have currently open. Instead it lists all the foo.pys I have in any project I have ever created.

I think you can avoid this problem by setting up projects and then switching projects you're working on to contain the search space.

This can be mitigated a bit by the fact that you can type any portion of the path to shrink the result set. So if you have

  abc/def/ghi/foo.py
  jkl/mno/pqr/foo.py
  stu/vwx/yzz/foo.py

...you can type command-P, then "kfo", and you'd get the second foo.py, as it's the only one of the set with "k" in its path.

look forward to your talk tonight. I blew half my morning in vim playing with different plugins for a better file search experience, and finally caved and installed ST2.

I'm happy so far, but hope they add multi-window support and terminal integration (unless they already have).

If I understand you correctly, ST2 has both of these things already.

edit: Sublime has a CLI, but can't be run inside terminal.

My vim setup has typically been two vertical split buffers, one with whatever code I'm looking at, the other running either another piece of code, or ConqueTerm (bash console within vim).

Ideally I'd like the same environment mixed with some nearly "ide-looking" find-and-replace/refactoring support.

ST2 supposedly has these features from what I've read, just haven't dug into em yet.

I don't know of any full fledged terminals that you can embed in st2 at this time. There's a plugin called Shell-Turtlestein that allows you to run a single command. \

also, know emacs a little if you're an OS X user -- the emacs bindings provided in OS X text fields are amazing.

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