Just Use Sublime Text | Hacker News Reader

Just Use Sublime Text

delvarworld.github.io

51 pointsblacktulip64 comments

I use sublime text, its good for general text editing and some light weight scripting.

That said, this is what I don't get....

Why choose a light weight code editor then add 30 plugins to it?

I've tried this approach with sublime text for Java, Groovy, Ruby, JS, etc. I honestly don't get it, IntelliJ / Rubymine / PyCharm kicks its ass in every way I've tried to look at it.

It seems there is some instilled fear of the term 'IDE' that scares people away or people just really enjoy piece-meal assembling an IDE. But for me, JetBrain's stuff just works 90% of the time and the last 10% is easily filled with plugins or an open terminal. Anything that just lets me code efficiently without a lot of mucking around is gold in my book.

If you like the minimalist approach, more power to you, Sublime Text is awesome for that. If you like the 'almost everything in one app' approach, I'd highly encourage you to at least try some IDEs, especially JetBrain's stuff. Eclipse sucks, no doubt, but not all IDE's are like Eclipse.

I can't stand using IDEs like IntelliJ or Eclipse or just about anything else I've tried. For some reason, all that crap that hangs around the editing area makes me feel claustrophobic and distracted. I also feel like a lot of the development process becomes a black box. Instead of understanding exactly how your project is compiling (i.e. with what settings) and what external resources you're including, the IDE kind of shields you from that. When you do a project with UNIX-style tools, you have complete control and understanding of every step.

And then there's also the fact that I can't stand having IDEs underline everything in red when I'm in the middle of typing a line.

> For some reason, all that crap that hangs around the editing area makes me feel claustrophobic and distracted.

I've heard this position before, I just don't get it. This is my screen while working on an early stage of a side project: http://i.imgur.com/B9boU26.png

I find it far less cluttered than most editors. In particular compared to sublime text, I hate that my only options are to have the 'project tree' view there, or not, most of the time its wasted space. In the screen shot I click on project on the left, it pops over the project structure, I open the file I want, and it disappears. Similarly with the bottom bits, I run the project in debug mode, it pops over with the process's output and disappears when there isn't anything I need to see. For me, this is much preferable to changing workspaces to see terminal output even though the OSX trackpad makes this easy.

> I also feel like a lot of the development process becomes a black box.

I guess it depends on the IDE but at least for the given project it builds in the IDE using maven, based on the pom settings just as it does using maven from the terminal or on jenkins. The only difference is incremental compilation during development which many people setup using a 'watch' plugin or the asset pipeline in rails anyway.

> And then there's also the fact that I can't stand having IDEs underline everything in red when I'm in the middle of typing a line.

Changing the linting timeout is very simple.

>I've heard this position before, I just don't get it. This is my screen while working on an early stage of a side project:

Looking at that just makes me twitch for some reason. It's all so distracting to me. Maybe I have a poor attention span, but for some reason I feel like I can be so much more productive with something like this: http://i.imgur.com/ADvQF6e.png

I generally do text editing in Sublime (and like you said, the Apple trackpad + OS X's gesture detection algorithms is a very powerful combo) and I feel like my development is very "zen".

>Changing the linting timeout is very simple.

What I mean is that most IDEs are incredibly annoying about small mistakes, and sometimes something like a dropped semicolon can light up a whole file with errors.

The only IDE that I feel is sufficiently non-annoying about static code checks is Xcode. Xcode has very clever, non-distracting notifications about forgotten punctuation, control flow errors, etc.

>Efficiency from Keeping your Fingers on the Home Row

I prefer to use just keys. I find the context switch distracting.

>I can’t stress how bad of an editor vanilla Vim is. Plugins are essential to make Vim usable.

I love vanilla vim. I used it for a long time that way. Even now I barely have any plugins running, just YouCompleteMe and a couple others.

>If you want to write a plugin you have to deal with Vimscript.

I thought one can write in Python and other languages for plugins now?

>Everyone remaps Leader from backslash to comma.

I didn't.

>Vim is hideous by design.

I find the minimalism allows me to work without distraction. If you hate it so much, vim bindings are available in other editors. I use XVim for Xcode and some other plugin in Eclipse.

>To code in Vim, you have to keep Vim in your head just as much as the code that you’re editing. You have to constantly think about what you’re doing.

I barely think about the things I'm doing anymore. And I've only been at vim for about a year.

This blog post needs a giant [citation needed]. So many unjustified claims that are really just his opinions. Just use Sublime and get back to doing something productive.

It's a blog post. It's his opinion.

For all I've tried VIM and Emacs I just didn't understand what the point of learning all that was for just editing text. Even when I did assembly I couldn't be bothered with anything more than gedit. The text editor really has terribly little to do with my skills as a programmer.

Also now I just used intellij for everything. Although it's terrible as javascript, absolute shit at it. Gives me thousands of terrible ctrl-space options.

> I thought one can write in Python and other languages for plugins now?

Yes and no. Technically this is possible, but it's almost as unpleasant as just using vimscript.

Scripting vim in python involves using the vim module, which provides a very limited api to interact with vim. It doesn't allow the interception of any events, and interacting with vim more often than not seems to involve calling vim.command() or vim.eval(), which take vimscript as a string.

That said, I still think this is the direction vim needs to go. I think if the vim python integration improves in future releases it will be much appreciated, and will provide a boost to the vim plugin community.

Previous discussion from a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5411811

I was wondering what is this doing on the front page again. I guess HNers can never get enough of discussing the virtues of Vim :-)

It also has a new URL after the github.com -> github.io change.

So basically OP realized he could resubmit it thanks to the url change and went for it. I see.

Or, they thought the article was interesting, and didn't realize that it had already posted (since he used the new URL). Not everyone is out for karma :).

Vim is good to have in your toolkit because it will work on nearly any terminal.

Don't use an old serial terminal? Well, you might actually get stuck only having serial console access to a physical machine in a datacenter. Maybe you're trying to fix a mean bug in production and everything is exploded and you are using some person's laptop which for some reason has a horrible terminal configuration.

I haven't used hjkl to move in years, btw. That's vi. Vim lets you use arrow keys - it's VI iMproved. ;)

This sort of nonsense rambling not only leads to serious generational knowledge gaps, which leads to people using utter shit like pico/nano, which I would fire someone for doing.

It also ignores the fact that TextMate is totally awesome and has something Sublime Text doesn't seem to : a command-line tool for opening files from the shell.

Sublime has the same sort of command line tool as TextMate. It's called "subl."

It doesn't work out of the box though. Have to run this:

ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl

You can learn enough VIM to make quick server edits in about 5 minutes. I know about a half dozen VIM commands and that's enough for me to edit files on servers pretty much every day.

- Arrow keys - i - esc - o - shift g - cw - / - :x - :q!

Done and done.

This article is flawed because there are two questions: "is vim awesome?" and "is learning vim worth the effort?" The first answer is yes. The second answer is maybe. Getting up there and trash talking vim is stupid because anyone who is proficient at vim (truly proficient, like 10-years-experience expert) knows that it is great. But as a 15-year vimmer I won't discount the time and suffering you need to put in to get to that point, and won't shove it down people's throats because I know how painful it is.

I see it similar to typing on a dvorak keyboard. (or to a lesser degree, a kinesis keyboard.) Extremely painful in the beginning, almost mentally traumatic because one of your basic skills suddenly gets cut out from under you, but something that pays small but regular dividends for the rest of your life. (And contrary to Dvorak, vim is everywhere.) It's not for everyone and is probably not worth the effort for many but to somehow try to then extrapolate that to conjure up an argument that the tool itself is bad (which this article seems to be desperately trying to do) is dumb.

I guess another way to look at it, is if you could download knowledge instantly Matrix-style, would everyone use vim? Other consequences of the Matrix being real life notwithstanding, I would say many more would.

I can't vouch enough for that.

As someone who used to develop in Vim, I can attest it can do a lot of things and there are many useful scripts, but is neither intuitive or designed for our era, there are too many obvious UX flaws - modes in particular is not the magic pony people like to say it is, it's just archaic clunkyness.

You can replace Vim entirely with Sublime since it also supports scripting and smart editing movements, and "Go to anything" in particular blows Vim away.

I just wish the author iterated ST2 more before starting ST3, I'm afraid of another Textmate.

> I just wish the author iterated ST2 more before starting ST3, I'm afraid of another Textmate.

That's business...

Why not just let people use whatever works for them? After reading through all the replies here that's the only conclusion anyone can come to. Why do we need one editor to rule them all?

For real. When it comes to editors, it's a matter of taste. Do you like to fiddle bits, stay on home row, never have to learn anything new, or push the boundaries of development speed? Install every possible extension, never install anything, or write your own plugins? There is an environment for everyone! Enjoy your notepad.exe guy from my old job. Enjoy your emacs lisp, old mentor. Enjoy your awesome rounded edges, IDEA user! Now, everyone go get some work done, yeesh.

These are just tools. Each tool has its place and its users. I learned vi first and I still feel very efficient on it vs. sublime. But for something, I prefer Sublime.

At the end of the day, it's like the meaning of life, everyone has theirs.

Not open-source, no thanks. I'll stick with LiteIDE for Go and Netbeans for Java and C++.

I agree mostly, and this was surprisingly well put for this type of post. However I do think that a good programmer should be able to get through a day with Vim (no plugins) alone if he/she has to, as it's free and installed everywhere. Beyond that just use what makes you happy. I do agree that it's much too hard to get started with Vim as compared to Sublime Text, but if you're a crazy vim ninja more power to you. I have never understood why you'd care what editor your friends/enemies use. As long as you're not coding in MS Word you're good in my book.

Vim is great and this article is mostly FUD.

The only good reason not to use vim (or anything else) is if you don't want to. But don't let other people dictate to you whether you want it.

I use Linux daily, I develop using open source technologies, it's not for me... it doesn't feel right.

+ I want my freedom! I don't to be stuck with one product...

As for editor wars, I believe using plaintext editor for editing code is ugly whatever the editor is. Especially, if the editor (like bare ST2 or bare Vim) has very low understanding of code semantics just enough to highlight the code and do most primitive type-ahead suggestions.

Unfortunately, there aren't many structured editors/IDEs that operate on AST/ASG instead of blobs of plaintext. And, sadly, none I could subjectively call good.

Or use Emacs.

As long as the editor lets me type cmd+t and insert opening and closing html tags that's all I need.

I read a lot, I scroll a lot, I browse a lot, I copy/paste a lot and my hands are always on the trackpad and the arrow keys.

Sublime is good enough for me.

A $70 text editor with pretty effects.. perfect for an Apple user, I suppose. Meanwhile, there are plenty of free and open alternatives, such as Geany, which I much prefer.

Pay with contributions to the project and also gain a reward to yourself.

"or any other nasty way Vimmers have to use because of our archaic, ingrained keystrokes.”

This is where I stopped reading. If you're trying to convince me to use sublime try to be less subjective.

I'm all for supporting good, independent software shops, but $70 for a ST2 license is obscene. I use the free version and would happily pay to remove the "Buy Me!" popup at a lower price point.

If you use sublime as your main editor and your job is software development then $70 is really not much at all considering it's a core part of your livelihood

Such considerations aside, it's quite possible that they'd make more money if they priced it lower. I would think the potential market for a $20 or $30 editor is much larger than that of a $70 editor.

Then again, I assume they considered this carefully and made an informed decision when they set their price point. I'm definitely in the "I'd buy it if it were cheaper" club, though.

Agree with this. If it's the best tool it's not that much money. But the other argument is: is $70 worth the change in productivity compared to other similar products? In that sense, comparatively, it could be considered overpaying. But to each their own, and I'm sure for some that answer is "yes".

Sure, and I'd like Tesla Roadster at a lower price point too.

I'm a carpenter and it's obscene that my lathe wasn't free.

think about any other profession and think about saying that you refuse to buy the tools you need at a 70$ price point. Even if you wait tables, you would likely have 70$ in clothes you would need to buy and wouldn't think twice about it.

I can't think of any other job where you could even try the tools for free, much less complain about them being 70$.

Probably because many can get by on cheaper / free tools. I used Sublime for X days and loved it but still can't justify spending $70 for it. It's a nice-to-have.

The problem with this job is that there are tools which would do essentially the same job, but completely for free.

But what if you could pick up other clothes for free, but they weren't your favourite colour?

sure, then you would, but would you then go to the gap and complain about their prices? Also, the difference is that they are using the 70$ tool, which is obviously better than the free or cheaper price points, but complaining that the price is obscene.

How much do you think is good?

>$70 for a ST2 license is obscene

Oh come on. I think that's a very fair price if it's a tool you'd use daily (especially in a professional capacity).

Whether or not that price is reasonable is not dependant on how often I use the tool, it depends on how much value I gain. If the tool is a tiny improvement to my life vs a free editor, then I will only pay a tiny amount to use it. With sublime I don't see anything it offers to make my life better/easier at all compared to say, notepad++. So why would I pay $70 for it?

How much value do you expect for $70?

$70 worth? It is pretty hard to put into words, but if I am paying $70 for an editor, it needs to be $70 better than the free options. As far as I can tell, sublime is $0 better.

same thing you could say for a better, but more expensive IDE... it will pay off pretty quickly

I happily would pay 10x that for a good editor; thankfully, I use Emacs and don't have to. But skimping on tools is the falsest of economies.

It's like 6 hours of your work if you are really bad paid, I use my license for 2 years already, it paid off on the first day.

I can't afford it right now, but when the day comes that I'm making $70 per hour using it, I'll have no problem paying for that license.

That's the thing people feign to ignore: SublimeText might be the rage these days, but TextMate was the bee's knees a few years ago and has now been replaced. The reason for that is that despite being expensive, there was no guarantee that the maintainer would put the effort needed to make it a world-class editor fully capable of competing against the big boys.

SublimeText seems to be the same kind of editor: you pay for it (a hefty price), it brings you features, but it's still very young, non-standard, non-ubiquitous and seems to be going at too fast a pace for its own good.

My bet is that as good as it is and as much as it wants to be the new vim or emacs, those editors will still be around in 20 years from now, because they've been thoroughly tested, augmented, improved upon, they're free in all sense of the word and they benefit from HUGE ecosystems of plugin developers, sane choices of underlying language support for scripting and customization (vim less so than emacs but you get the point), i.e. they deliver HUGE value.

Kid, when Double Dragon came out for Nintendo in 1987 it cost $54.95 (I remember because premium games up to that point were usually $49.99). That's $112.30 in 2013 dollars. You can afford to pay $70 for your bread and butter tool for a job that typically pays $50-$100k.

That popup, which I only see twice a day, is not annoying enough for me to upgrade from the free version. If they really wanted people paying for it, they would have premium features, not a lower price point.

I know Sublime is what all the cool kids are using, but I switched from it for a few months, to Chocolat (OSX only) and have never looked back. It's definitely worth a try.

Out of interest, why do you prefer Chocolat? I've just taken a look at it and it looks to be a really nice editor, but I can't quickly see any big advantages of using it (especially as Sublime presumably has a lot more plugins, etc).

It does look a lot cleaner, however - I'm not a big fan of the default UI of Sublime.

Sublime just always felt like a "ported" app. Chocolat is native, fits in with OSX perfectly, and at least for me, achieves the perfect sweet spot between customizable and minimalist. I just find myself being less "distracted" by the editor, and just getting my work done, than with anything else I've used. It isn't really one single thing that does it, but just the sum total of it. Not sure if that helps...

Sure, that makes complete sense. I develop on Linux about 30% of the time and OSX 70%, so it's useful to be able to use the same editor on both, but I'd definitely consider it if I was only using OSX.

Another +1 for Chocolat. I made the choice between this and Sublime and really like Chocolat. Besides, what does one really use the minimap for anyways?

I spend most of my time reading code or thinking about it. Typing speed optimization is a premature optimization case.

I still prefer TextMate & BBEdit. Sublime Text just doesn't feel like a Mac app.

> Sublime Text just doesn't feel like a Mac app.

Of course it doesn't - it's multi-platform. Which is a good thing if you bounce between Linux and Mac (and even Windows). But it does have a great feel to it.

That's a feature for me. I use it on linux and mac and it feels the same.

poor guy can't understand vim

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