Comment by Camillo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Camillo | Hacker News Reader

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I really want to like ST2, because it seems to have the fastest text engine of the current crop of editors; but as a Mac application, it's just barely better than Emacs.

1) The GUI is incomplete: look at the preferences, for instance. To change a setting, you have to open the defaults settings file, find the setting you want, copy it into a different file (user settings), and change it there. Actually, I take it back: it's worse than Emacs in this regard.

2) What GUI is there often works strangely. For example, if you open a folder you get both a sidebar and a tab bar. You can put files in the tab bar by double-clicking them, or you can browse the directory in the sidebar. But if you select a file in the sidebar which is not open in a tab, you end up with a tab bar with no selected tabs, which is quite jarring, since tab bars in all other applications always have one active tab. If you only have one tab visible, it looks like it's active even if in fact you have selected some other file in the sidebar (the fact that active and inactive tabs look very similar in the default theme does not help).

3) The default theme gives you a window that is a strange mix of light gray and dark gray, with no apparent logic. It looks like parts of two different applications got mashed together. I have yet to find a theme that looks satisfying.

The fact that settings are in a text file that I can easily sync is a GOOD thing. I don't have to rely on some godawful third party service to sync settings, I can just export them to Dropbox or throw them on a Git repo. This is one of the many things people love about Vim too, that you can set up your editor in a minute instead of trawling through GUI menus.

While flat files are a good thing, that doesn't preclude having a good interface in your app that lets you edit them. Furthermore, that is not an unfair expectation for an app that wants to be considered a good Mac citizen.

The last bit is in response to the parent post by frou_dh:

  I feel ST2 is healthily past "good enough" as a Mac application.

The difficulty here is to ensure said interface doesn't make trivial changes to the flat files. Emacs has this down. As a counterexample, Visual Studio 2010 stores its settings in an XML file that, after pretty-printing, is quite human-readable. But, formatting aside, VS tends to reorder elements in this file even when you don't change anything, making sensible source control unnecessarily difficult. The somewhat manual workaround is to store important settings in a well-formatted settings file and use this as what VS calls "team" settings, because the IDE doesn't write or rewrite team settings files; this is also a nice solution because you probably don't want to sync things like window sizes and positions between a desktop with a 27" monitor and an 11" MacBook Air, and team settings only override local settings when they're defined.

> that doesn't preclude having a good interface in your app that lets you edit them.

I've never ued ST, but it being an text editor, you'd think that they would have _that_ down right, FFS

I 100% agree with this. I was able to easily sync my settings between Linux, Windows and OS X for ST2, and easily find options because they are all in ONE file (Ctrl+F -what I need-), esp. considering they are very well documented. Still not as good as Netbeans for PHP/HTML (especially since it's not free), but a good settings system.

I have no issues with the settings. They are well documented and can easily be transferred from computer to computer. This is an editor targeted at developers, and as such I think we are capable of editing a config file.

Regarding point 1, that's one of my favorite features. TIL Mac users actually want wizards and gizmos everywhere.

I second the other commenter here. I love the way settings are managed in ST2.

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