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Comment by eob | Hacker News Reader

For the vim -> Sumblime switchers out there on HN, what caused you to switch?

I use vim exclusively but I'm not a religious zealot about technology. I've noticed all my students are using Sublime these days. Is it just the latest TextMate (i.e., the best GUI option if you don't like command-line editors) or are there truly features that will convert command-line folks to the GUI?

I'm really hoping for an editor like Brackets (Adobe) to take off, which has really good support for cross editor-browser communication for web development.

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I've tried a few times and just can't do it. The completion isn't actually that great (not that VIm completion plugins are very good either) and Vintage mode is at best a poor-mans VIm emulation. There is no sane way to control splits with the keyboard and block selections just don't work well. Search and replace functionality is also not great compared to my experience with VIm. Too many deal breakers for me.

You likely will still not be convinced, but some of those issues (off the top of my head, at least the splits with keyboard) seem to be addressed by Vintageous (and some [plugins][0] for it).

[0]: https://github.com/rodcloutier/Vintageous-Origami "Vintageous Origami"

I've used Origami before, but Sublime's splitting is just fundamentally flawed, simply having some keyboard shortcuts can't fix that.

I recently tried switching from Vim to Sublime, but its window splitting just didn't work for me. In Vim, I make :sp and :vsp splits for quick edits all the time. Sublime's splits were cumbersome and didn't have (easy) side-by-side views into the same file.

The thing that really makes it stand out is the multiple cursors. You can go very deep with them because everything that happens in the editor happens in parallel for each cursor. They each have their own clipboard, any scripts you run happen once per cursor. "Find all" can be made to select all the matches. You can do some crazy stuff. I love it.

However, if you've customised and become proficient in vim to any serious extent it likely won't be that impressive to you.

I prefer GUIs strictly for better window manager and system copy-paste integration, but I think that is irrelevant to vim/Sublime, as you can (and I do) use gVim or MacVim. I like vim movement and editing commands a lot, but I'm not much of a configuration fiddler - I fiddle if I must, but I find no joy in it. I switched to Sublime because it gives me adequate (if somewhat mediocre) vim commands, plus other fiddle-free features that I had to fiddle into my vim, most notably command-t file fuzzy-finding (which also works much better, on top of being fiddle-free). I also really like the command palette (which I haven't seen a vim corollary for) and the package manager (which is much easier than the various alternatives in vim IMO).

edit: For balance, it also has its annoyances, and I sometimes wonder if I should switch back.

If you are just looking for a Vim replacement don't.

If you want to code faster and easier and are willing to spend a couple of hours learning sublimes shortcuts, then you will like it.

Sublime's autocomplete and plugins can reduce your errors and clean up your code. (Linters)

It's cross platform and runs the same pretty much on any OS.

I don't use ST3 much but for remote editing with ST2 http://log.liminastudio.com/writing/tutorials/sublime-tunnel.... it works well enough for most cases. Where it doesn't I just mount an sshfs and work from there.

Real command-line folks will not easily move away from command-line apps, since one of their greatest advantages is that they run in a ssh shell from any terminal. For people who often log in remote servers for more than a few minutes a day, this is a dealbreaker :)

I've used Vim for years and recently switched to Sublime for Rails because of the fuzzy search. When working with so many different files, it significantly increases your productivity, such that it is a net gain despite losing Vim's editing paradigm. I tried Vim plug-ins that emulate fuzzy search, but they didn't work very well.

> I tried Vim plug-ins that emulate fuzzy search, but they didn't work very well.

What issues did you have with CtrlP? https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim/

I wanted to be able to search the files in the current project (I believe it determines this by recursively going up the directory structure until it finds .git or some other version control directory), but have those files weighted according to how recently they'd been opened. And the MRU (most recently used) mode would count all recently opened files, not just the ones in the current project.

The ease of which it is to get started with Sublime Text may be a factor. It's nice not having to worry about managing plugins and custom settings. Though I see no reason to switch if you have taken the time to customize vim to your liking. Once you get a decent package management system for it (Pathongen, Vundle) it's hard to beat.

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