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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

After years of using it, I finally just bought a Sublime license. It's about as close to perfect as an editor gets for me - fast, stable, powerful, extensible, portable, and very low cognitive overhead.

Kudos to the Sublime folks.

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I'm the opposite - bought a license years ago but don't actually use it for much except plaintext.

In my experience the core editor is fast and rock solid, but I think every single extension I've tried has been somewhere between glitchy and completely broken, and debugging/fixing them has soaked up more time than they'd save if they worked perfectly.

Part of the problem may be that extensions seem remarkably keen to take giant dependencies. I think one wanted a full node.js install to do JS linting.

Or maybe I've just been unlucky/incompetent.

> Or maybe I've just been unlucky/incompetent.

Every lint extension I've seen seems to drag a full install of whatever the popular implementation of the language is.

> seems to drag a full install of whatever the popular implementation of the language is.

This is the biggest problem with sublime plugins. dependencies. It is also 100% why I refuse to add non-python dependencies to any plugins I write (which has really just been JsFormat thus far)

> I refuse to add non-python dependencies to any plugins I write

Is there a Package Control channel that ONLY lists packages following that noble rule? I'd be a lot more willing to try things out from that.

All the ones I use (cppcheck, jshint, jsxhint, ruby, clang) require that you have the toolchains already installed. Seems like a pretty consistent design. Those are the official linters [1], though.

Edit: Checked a bunch of the others, including those for Lua, XML and Python. None of them come bundled with the underlying tool.

[1] https://github.com/SublimeLinter

You appear to be correct- my remark was based on what I guess is out of date experience.

That's my experience too, but I find it so superior to Emacs and Vim in other regards and keep using it. What are you using now?

For plaintext/markdown/HTML/JS/CSS I basically use vanilla Sublime as a better Notepad. It's not ideal; I bought WebStorm a while back but never got around to trying it.

For statically-typed code, a text editor can't compete with a refactoring IDE (e.g. VS or Eclipse) IMHO.

Atom is finally getting to the point that I feel it's competitive with ST. If you haven't lately, give it a try. There is a huge ecosystem of excellent plugins, too.

> I think one wanted a full node.js install to do JS linting.

To be fair, Atom requires node.js (recently moved to io.js) to even run (though it's embedded)

Agreed, but the extensibility is very limited.

Just look at the contortions this little package has to go through to apply a color to portions of text: https://github.com/Monnoroch/ColorHighlighter/blob/master/Co...

It has to create and apply a fake theme merged with your current theme so colors can be added "dynamically"[1].

The ancient Emacs (I hate a hate/love relationship with it) can do this is several ways, the "modern" one are overlays IIRC.

[1] As expected, this will lead to bugs related to the users' color schemes: https://github.com/Monnoroch/ColorHighlighter/issues

I get so sick of listening to people be so negative in the comments on this site. Can't you think of anything better to say than that it "sucks"

Fixed. But the criticism towards ST3 shall continue, since Jon doesn't seem to hear the community at all.

(But the strategy works for him, so...)

Likewise - It was over the winter, when I was back home in Canada, and remarked that I still hadn't purchased a license, but, in the last 6 months, had probably spent 3-4 hours/day in Sublime. In particular, making a lot of use of Sublimerge to do fast visual diffs, really won me over. Even though on remote hosts I still live in vim, I really, really love this tool when working locally.

Hopefully I'll be a little faster to purchase an upgrade license when a new version of Sublime is released. Probably One of the most important software tools I've used in the last year from a personal productivity perspective.

Personally I wasn't convinced until I also tried out the "Sublime SFTP" plugin..

I'm never going back.

I didn't know this existed, thanks for that!

Hopefully in this day and age, you are using that plugin to SFTP into a virtual machine locally.

No clue what that is meant to mean.

SFTP is as secure as any other SSH connection and people use those extremely regularly to remotely administer hosts which lack a VPN.

Aside from terrible Windows support SFTP is likely one of the best secure remote file transfer protocols around (in particular for freeform file transfers, rather than structured like AS2 or similar).

Certainly better than FTPS.

will is probably referring to version control/change tracking, and not to "security".

Correct, workflow. Even with the tools themselves, rather than "best practice" it seems mind boggling using SFTP within the editor. With things like SASS, bower, grunt, npm and the like - it doesn't even seem like it'd be compatible.

Well I use a dev virtual server instead of a local vm. I enjoy working in a windows environment, but would rather not struggle with the discrepancies between running an app on windows with something like xampp vs apache on centos which are my web servers.

I use a sftp atom plugin to workin on/save to my dev server and just use ssh to do git/etc right on the server. I don't see how this workflow is very different than working locally and using a command prompt for all of your tools.

That's still a silly point. For security reasons a lot of people don't hook their source control directly into production web-servers, and instead deploy from a secured environment hooked into secure control onto production (which would still require something like e.g. SFTP for the actual transfer).

Regardless their point was poorly explained/explored.

I only do web development occasionally so excuse my ignorance, but what is the common way to deploy a website now?

We use git and have branches designated as Dev, Test, Prod (etc) with webhooks or other scripts that automatically deploy the branches based on the workflow. At my last job (small webshop) it was automated, but my current job is more "Enterprisey" and we have separation of duties and other work flow constraints which mean that I never push anything to production myself (or test for that matter).

I do, and to be honest with you it is more fractured than it has ever been.

Back in the 90s "everyone" used FTP. Now the methods of deployment vary wildly including but not limited to:

- FTP (over VPN), "Shared Folders" (SMB, over VPN), RDC/RDP (seriously, often not over VPN)

- Git clients (and other source control, controlled over SSH), SFTP, FTPS, CMS (over HTTP/S), SCP, rsync/robocopy (over VPN)

- Virtualisation trickery: Like cloning, snapshots, and shared data storage.

The "best" way depends on a lot of factors. For example are you doing staging? Do you even have source control? How many servers? Etc. There is no one size fits all solution.

For a small host or personal site, you can likely do what everyone else does: SFTP on Linux/BSD, and FTPS on Windows (via Filezilla Server).

lmao i actually used to do that once but the overhead was too much (i save frequently), so i just bought a desktop and i x11 over ssh on the remote's sublime. SFTP was a really good extension though.

I develop from multiple machines depending on where I am. The dev server that then does all the version control bits as if it were the local server. It's also a lot beefier than my laptop. Also bear in mind these are my own one-man-job projects and websites. Made do with what I have else I'll spend years setting up the perfect system and have created nothing

I've been a licensed user for a couple years. I use it almost every day, quite happily.

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