Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

I know Sublime Text has a lot of momentum, especially on this site, but the one main ting which keeps me from adopting Sublime text is that I can't run it from a terminal. Simple as that.

If I'm going to invest time, effort and know-how into something as fundamental as a text-editor, I want to know that I can run it everywhere I need it.

I'm going to guesstimate that I spend at least 20% of my text-editing via terminals, via SSH, via remote sessions somehow. And there I can't use Sublime Text at all.

In those remote sessions I'm probably editing the same things I do locally, so why should I need to change my entire environment to suit that 20% of the same workload? It just doesn't make sense.

Other objections to Sublime text would be that it's not open source. With more and more (new) arm-based platforms popping up left and right, that becomes increasingly important. I want to know that I can take my tools with me to the places I go. Not being open-source severely limits those possibilities.

You can use the built in 'subl' command to launch Sublime Text 2 from the terminal.

http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html

Editing remote files is as simple as an SFTP mount.

That is for OSX, which I refuse to use on an principle of ethical software conduct. Apple is hostile to open software and computers as open platforms. They want to take away the open nature of computers which allowed them to exist in the first place and they use BS patent-lawsuits to hinder competitors willing to provide just that.

They are evil and I refuse to support them with a penny or any significant effort or attention.

Apart from that, talking about SFTP mounts is completely missing the point.

Sometime I'm in a terminal, on a router, NAS, cloud-server or whatever, and need to edit some files in the current folder.

What I do then is "$ emacs file", not change context, go to another local terminal and fuse-mount some completely remote FS with whatever keys and credentials I need to provide, in /mnt/remote/, and then fire up a local editor for /mnt/remote/the/actual/directory/i/was/working/in/file.

That's extremely inefficient.

When I say I need something to work in a terminal to be a proper solution, I mean any terminal.

I fell for the peer pressure and tried to use a macbook some time ago and I feelt like I was in the movie "the island", but I wouldn't say that apple are any more evil than other companies in the IT industry.

So here I am running linux once more.

I have a lot of time invested in emacs but I have switched to sublime since early versions of v2-beta. My main reason was at that time the ruby and RoR modes for emacs wasn't really up to speed.

I like sublime text and I don't regret jumping on that train. Easy to get started, lots of features and plugins, highly configurable. I use sublime as my main "desktop" editor now.

When editing over ssh emacs is my preferred editor, after 15 years of using emacs as my primary editor I think I have enough emacs keystrokes deeply imprinted in my brain to last me a lifetime ... :)

Now, I know you mean running it within the terminal a la vim/emacs/nano etc, but you can set up sublime to run from terminal in linux (I set it up successfully on fedora, after ten minutes googling).

The downside of that is that it runs as an x windows in comparison to directly in terminal, which is a bit of an bummer when trying to work remotely. As much as I'd love for it to run in term, it'd pretty much just be a vim-alike, and why reinvent the wheel.

Then stick with emacs. It sounds like its the perfect tool for your needs. Which is perfectly fine, right tool for the job and all that. That said, I would suggest that the ubiquity if vim (and latterly that of nano) renders your point a little pompous. No need for the same old pious rhetoric.

That little rant seems like some significant effort and attention. That said, Sublime clearly isn't the editor for you, but it can be invoked from a command line, which I use every day.

Sublime is more for software development. It sounds more to me like you're needing to edit config files and such. In that case, look no further than vi/emacs. They fit your needs. If you're looking to do development of anything more than a quick Perl/Python/Ruby/Bash script, then you might want to consider a development environment... which Sublime fits perfectly. For editing my apache.conf, I use Vim.

In every sublime text thread there's someone praising Vim.

If you want a terminal text-only editor, and already have one like emacs, then you don't need or want sublime text.

Sublime Text does not try to work in the terminal and I love that it doesn't.

Very different use cases. I suspect you are simply a very subtle forum troll.

There is always nano.

I use ST2 when working on large, involved python projects or latex files. If I have a small file, vim or nano is sufficient to pound out the changes.

``subl`` also works in both Windows and Linux.

If you're a huge OSS proponent though, then Sublime is quite clearly not for you anyway.

way to miss the point. op needs it to run _in a terminal_.

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