I tried to like Sublime, I really did. Bought a license and used it for four months, before going back to Emacs. Sublime is nice, and easy to extend, but it only extends so far, while Emacs is infinitely extensible. You can practically live in Emacs[1]; some things I wanted to do in Emacs were hard to pull off, but I'm yet to find something it can't do. And it does so for years. Fashionable editors come and go, but E…
> [1] I'm not the one to start wars. vi might be just as good, but I'm not going to learn it this side of the river Styx
Of course you aren't, as long as it is one of the two editors you approve of.
"The default website, icon, and theme are ugly to say the least" I can't be the only one who completely, utterly disagrees with this? I absolutely love the default theme and I think the icon looks great (much better than the alternative provided). That being said, I don't want to start a whole pointless discussion about taste here, it just kind of bothered me to read something like that in a blog post that talks abou…
I think the main problem with the ST2 icon is that it looks like a disk drive. I often ignore it because in my brain, I assume it's a disk and not an editor.
I actually like that the preferences are stored in JSON. This is one of the features that pulled me in to Sublime Text.
I'd love it if they were stored in dotfiles (something I like about Textmate 2), but at least all your config gets stored in a nice User package.
+1
Actually, things are stored in a few directories. It took a while to figure out where Sublime stores everything so I could write a dotfiles script for it.
Having to set things up through Package Manager is a pain. Not sure why that's the first step whenever I read an article on Sublime. A simple package file script that git clones/pulls plugins is more maintainable.
I find it odd that Sublime is so widely loved. It seems like a way-station between Notepad and Vim/Emacs. The extensions are nice, and the GUI is easy on the eyes, but it seems that most of my peers outgrew their Sublime Text/Notepad++/Textmate stage by the time they completed their first year of undergrad. I would hate to be stuck in the slow world of Sublime Text limbo as a result of being too lazy to learn and cus…
It shouldn't be that surprising. I tried vim for a while, but I prefer sublime text. It's true that vim is more powerful, but for me that power seems to mostly theoretical. It doesn't seem to make me significantly faster in the real world. On the other hand, the basic text navigation keys in sublime text are the same as they are elsewhere in my os, so I don't have to switch in and out of "text editing mode" frequentl…
A bit off topic, but the big win with Vim (and, from what I hear, emacs) isn't the speed per se; it's the lack of cognitive load. "I need to replace everything after the equals sign", for example, takes less concentration than "I need to move my cursor to the beginning of the word after the equals sign, hold shift, move it to the end of the line, and then hit backspace". Once I got past the terrible learning curve, being able to use those kind of abstractions made a noticeable difference in how much program state I can hold in my head while I'm changing it.
You shouldn't set "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true unless you work alone, otherwise you're going to have random whitespace changes polluting your diffs.
It only pollutes your diffs if you're using a crappy diff tool. Whatever tool you use should have full control over showing leading, trailing, consecutive, or all whitespace differences.
I find it odd that Sublime is so widely loved. It seems like a way-station between Notepad and Vim/Emacs. The extensions are nice, and the GUI is easy on the eyes, but it seems that most of my peers outgrew their Sublime Text/Notepad++/Textmate stage by the time they completed their first year of undergrad. I would hate to be stuck in the slow world of Sublime Text limbo as a result of being too lazy to learn and cus…
Interesting that you pin it down to laziness. In my opinion it has more to do with the fact that the learning curve of Vim/Emacs outweighs their usefulness.
I can understand their use being much more of a necessity in previous years, but I think their time of unparalleled performance and productivity are over. Having used Vim for a few years (having studied it for many hours) and then switching to Sublime Text - I don't see any productivity decrease.
That being said, if you are happy using Emacs - by all means continue to do so!
Our coding guidelines at Stripe specify that whitespace is to be stripped. It works if everyone does it. On the occasion where whitespace does pollute the diff, GitHub has a convenient feature where you can append '?w=1' to any diff URL and whitespace changes will be omitted.
The number of pull requests I get where the diffs are completely unreadable because someone has this feature enabled is insane. On certain whitespace dependent languages (I'm looking at you Python) simply supressing the whitespace in the diff is not an option. What are the arguments for having whitespace removal as a coding standard?
I'd love it if they were stored in dotfiles (something I like about Textmate 2), but at least all your config gets stored in a nice User package.
+1 Actually, things are stored in a few directories. It took a while to figure out where Sublime stores everything so I could write a dotfiles script for it. Having to set things up through Package Manager is a pain. Not sure why that's the first step whenever I read an article on Sublime. A simple package file script that git clones/pulls plugins is more maintainable.
I keep my ST2 package manager config stored in my dotfiles repo, so setting up a new Sublime instance is as easy as just opening ST2 for the first time and letting the package manager fetch the appropriate plugins automatically.