Sublime Text 2 Build 2181

I never used Coda so I don't know if this is what you mean. But Sublime has "projects", you basically add a folder as a project and then you get a nice sidebar that has your folder's structure displayed, and then you can open files from there. (http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/projects)

For the first time I am seriously considering whether to replace Emacs as my primary text editor on Linux.

I've been compulsively using Emacs for the past 5 years. Thanks to Emacs I felt in love with (a dialect of) Lisp and experienced the freedom brought by a truly programmable text editor. An enlighting experience.

About a couple of weeks ago I began using Sublime Text 2 and... wow, it gets so many things right and out-of-the-box that I'm now fighting an inner battle to make a choice.

I am by no means an "hardcore" Emacs user but over the years I accumulated more than seven hundred lines of elisp code in my ~/.emacs.d/init.el. A large portion of that file glues together stuff like ido-mode, ido-ubiquitous, smex, AutoComplete, find-file-in-project, etc making my Emacs a lot Sublime-like.

I recently threw most of that stuff away and began working on sublime.el, which tries to emulate Sublime Text 2 as closely as possible.

However Emacs is showing a lot of warts: ido's fuzzy matching becomes painfully slow when dealing with lots of entries, I have yet to make find-file-in-project behave the way I want, provide most-recently-used heuristics to ido (for any use case not covered by smex), there's no consistent way to set a unique indentation level across major modes, long startup times (though the emacs-as-a-daemon/emacsclient pair mitigates the issue somewhat) and, in general, the UI is antiquated¹.

My only gripes with Sublime Text 2 are that there's nowhere near the amount of documentation Emacs has (for obvious reasons) and that it is a (mostly) proprietary piece of software. What if Jon is hit by a bus², looses interest in his project or finds it unprofitable and decides to stop all development? I would really, really hate to depend on a piece of software which is never going to get at least bug fixes. I honestly hope that Jon is considering open-sourcing it, should he go AWOL for any reason.

By switching to Sublime Text 2 I feel like I am betraying Emacs and all it represents in the name of convenience. Choice, how paradoxical thou art!

I am sorry if you find this disquisition boring but I had an urge to write it down somewhere. How liberating!

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¹ E.g. there's probably a way to get like find-file-in-project to show stuff as neatly as Sublime Text 2 does but as far as I know nobody has done it, yet.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

> rather than one by one in the "Open With ..." dialog

That option means don't just open this .txt file, but all .txt files. That is the option that associates .txt with this editor, yes. But then you have to do it for .php files. And .rb files. And .py files. Etc., one by one.

I'd completely forgotten this, though I have it as a preference pane. Thank you for reminding me.

SublimeText 2 is recognized in the app list, with a long list of extensions supported, with a single checkmark to add it as an "Open With" option to all of them and a button to allow making it the default.

(Note, it's not always what one wants as the default, consider .html for example, so more granular settings may be in order.)

Hm, the best I can think of is slightly better than one by one: In the finder, command click to select as many different file types as you can, right click, hold down option and "Get Info" turns into "Show Inspector" which pops up a dialog for the aggregate of all the files. In that dialog, I think you can assign Sublime Text to be the default program for all instances of each of those file types.