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Sublime Text 2.0 Released

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Re: Sublime Text 2.0 Released

#241

Post by skrebbel »

rapind wrote: post #235
jules wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much about typing less as it is about interactively learning to use an API or codebase. Suppose you have a comment object and you want to get the body text of that comment. With autocompletion you can just type `comment.` and you'll immediately see whether it's called "body" or "text" or something else, instead of having to browse around the codebase (which incidentally is also easier in an IDE that under…

To me what you're describing are imagined problems. They aren't real problems for someone who eschews autocompletion tools. No offence intended. I would argue that the autocompletion training wheels for learning a new API are really only useful if you're rarely going to use that API again. If you're going to be using it a lot, there's actual value in spending the extra effort to learn it's functions. It'll stick more…

Most APIs I use I don't intend to use many times again. If I'd be coding against the same 5 libs over and over again, chances are big I'm coding roughly the same thing over and over again. That sounds very boring. (that, or i'm coding something low-level like a db or a protocol - but are you?)

Re: Sublime Text 2.0 Released

#242

Post by grayrest »

5h wrote: post #69
moe wrote: post #20

As a die-hard Vim'er I like this more every time I look at it. What I'm still missing in vintage-mode is search/replace (mostly ':s' and ':%s') and block visual mode (^V in vim). The latter habit I could probably break, but the search/replace stuff gets me all the time. Is there perhaps a plugin/workaround already to get Vim-style search/replace or do I have to hold out for another version?

I haven't used ST beyond a trivial play, I'd like to use it more but I'm also a "die-hard" vim user, everytime I try to switch I discover some feature of Vim isnt there, like half decent macros (at least stored in a buffer and editable in the editor itself), or text objects, or pathname completion, or sensible shortcuts for switching panes etc ... Rather than spend a few hours before abandoning, do you think and adva…

The problem with answering this question is what exact subset of Vim features you use and whether you're willing to learn replacement commands or hack your missing features in.

Of the features you list, you can record macros into a buffer (qa...q, @a works) but you can't "ap to edit them. Text object support is pretty solid. I don't use pathname completion in vim so no idea, switching panes is reasonable (at least on OS X) but you can rebind to something more vim-like without too much trouble.

It's taken me about 9 months to migrate, the big holdup for was correct text objects (any multiline object was linewise for a while...) and ctrl-i/ctrl-o support. For the latter, I found a plugin that mostly did what I wanted and patched Vintage in about a half hour. Vim compatibility has improved greatly since guillermoo and msfio started hacking on the Vintage repo.

As for whether to switch, the advatage of ST is better plugin API, which matters to me since I do write my own plugins and first-class support for a lot of the things I had as plugins in Vim (snippets, project drawer, autoclose/surround, project fuzzy search). I keep meaning to do a vim-incompatible Vintage "s for select" plugin which would do text objectish multicursor selection but other projects have been more pressing.

Re: Sublime Text 2.0 Released

#243

Post by FireBeyond »

notJim wrote: post #177
drivingmenuts wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'd change editors before I changed to a different OS. These days, pretty much everything can be done from one machine. From where I sit, I can work with 6 different OS'es (yeah, it's a jungle) all from the comfort of OS X. I get that this is a programmer's editor and so maybe a certain amount of "roughness" in design is appropriate. But I'd rather spend my time customizing my own apps than trying to figure o…

You clearly have a different focus than the author of the software, and its fans. ST2's proponents are more concerned with awesome editing power than having a preferences pane. That being said, this is not the first time I've heard this line of criticism.

True. Even while I love ST2, have purchased a license, and swayed my boss on the subject, it remains, if nothing else, surprising that there isn't a Preferences / Control Panel / Options style option, even as a plugin / package.

Re: Sublime Text 2.0 Released

#244

Post by michael_fine »

cabalamat wrote: post #193
guns wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be haunted by something a good artist friend used to say: "Don't obsess over your tools. They are not the goal". This would ring in the back of my head as I spent many hours configuring my editor / shell / terminal setup. It felt like a guilty pleasure. It dawned on me however, that what had drawn me to programming in the first place was a sublime text editor (TextMate), and that my business is in fact…

> the time I invest into my tools have made my experience of sitting down in front of a computer incredibly enjoyable I've found that too, asnd it helps me be productive. I run MediaWiki on my PC as my internal documentation system. I used to use it with the default skin, which looks a bit meh, but I recently added my own skin, which looks a lot nicer. I found that every time I looked at the wiki after that, I got a…

Similarly, that's why almost always, the first thing I do when building a web app is to design it, because it makes those 40+ hours far more enjoyable to be staring at an attractive program.

Re: Sublime Text 2.0 Released

#245

Post by notJim »

heretohelp wrote: post #216
notJim wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like the main issue is age as much as that most people will be coming to VIM from either IDEs or editors that had built-in code-navigation features, so moving to something like vim involves the extra overhead of learning things like tags or rope even.

There's definitely an age-gap here. People who grew up coding C had to learn to use ctags, whereas, people who start out in interpreted languages are much less likely to encounter such. >involves the extra overhead of learning things like tags or rope even. Rope has no learning overhead. It works the same as any IDE. You use the functionality it provides like "go-to definition" or refactoring. Tags are just a file yo…

It's funny, I grew up writing C++, but in an IDE. You're probably right that older people may have started programming before IDEs were commonplace (?). I've actually never liked using IDEs for interpreted languages, but have always used them for compiled languages.

I'm talking specifically about tags, because it's the tool I'd need to use to get goto-anything functionality in vim using command-t or ctrlp.

Whenever there's a debate about something like ST2 or an IDE vs vim/emacs, the argument is always “well you can do all that stuff with vim, just install x, y and z plugins", and I was making the point that with ST2, the out-of-the-box goto-anything functionality is really excellent. I love vim, and can't see myself ever going back on that, but I certainly appreciated with ST2 that the baked-in, absolutely-zero-effort-required goto-anything functionality was really excellent.

Re: Sublime Text 2.0 Released

#246

Post by [deleted] »

lordlarm wrote: post #124

Hm, Am I the only one who spends hours in vim each day with ~15 lines in my .vimrc and almost zero plugins? At some point I think I realized that no matter how feature-rich my editor was, the main thing stopping me from writing good and fast code was _thinking_, not configuring my text editor.

[deleted]

Re: Sublime Text 2.0 Released

#247

Post by jules »

rapind wrote: post #235
jules wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much about typing less as it is about interactively learning to use an API or codebase. Suppose you have a comment object and you want to get the body text of that comment. With autocompletion you can just type `comment.` and you'll immediately see whether it's called "body" or "text" or something else, instead of having to browse around the codebase (which incidentally is also easier in an IDE that under…

To me what you're describing are imagined problems. They aren't real problems for someone who eschews autocompletion tools. No offence intended. I would argue that the autocompletion training wheels for learning a new API are really only useful if you're rarely going to use that API again. If you're going to be using it a lot, there's actual value in spending the extra effort to learn it's functions. It'll stick more…

> I would argue that the autocompletion training wheels for learning a new API are really only useful if you're rarely going to use that API again. If you're going to be using it a lot, there's actual value in spending the extra effort to learn it's functions.

Couldn't agree more with the second sentence: I actually print out a listing of common APIs and take the time to memorize them. But you just described 90% of the APIs in your first sentence. For those APIs having quick access to autocompletion lists (to see which methods an object supports) and quick access to documentation is tremendously useful. As for your theory, common sense would say that how much you learn is proportional to the time spend on it. So if you use the API 10 times by looking it up manually, and you use the API 10 times by looking it up in contextual autocomplete, then yes you're going to learn more with the manual lookup. But this is an unfair comparison: you'd spend much more time on the latter than on the former. In the same time to look up the API 10 times manually, you could have looked it up in contextual autocomplete 30 times and then you'd have memorized it just as well.

I sense a lot of irrational aversion to autocomplete, that it's for slow typists, it's training wheels, and Real Men don't use it. Look at it as an incredibly quick way to look up documentation. In fact unless the method name is really long I do not use autocomplete as autocomplete at all: I fully type the method name instead of hitting a key to accept the completion. It's just a way to short circuit the process of switching to a web browser, searching for and reading the documentation of the relevant class/module, and switching back to the editor.

Re: Sublime Text 2.0 Released

#248

Post by amatix »

bemmu wrote: post #198
simonsarris wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used sublime text and my interns all use visual studio. I love both, but I can give a few points: * No CTRL+D duplicate line in VS * Can't use middle-mouse in VS to select multiple columns * Can't place your cursor in many multiple locations at once in VS * You can use ALT+DRAG to select columns in VS but there's no way to put a carat at the end of each of a bunch of lines of varying sizes * CTRL+J to append the ne…

I use ST2 and have been learning about using multiple cursors, but I wonder what kind of things are you doing where that comes in handy? So far I haven't had a chance to use it, especially since there already is a shortcut for commenting things out.

Example: Take some log text, where all you're interested in is the messages, and you don't want hostname/date/time/etc cruft.

1. Ctrl+A Select all the lines

2. Ctrl+Shift+L to split into multiple cursors, 1 per line

3. Home/Ctrl+Shift+arrows/etc to select stuff to copy/delete

I find it easier than constructing a regex to pass to find/replace.

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