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I still like Sublime Text

ohdoylerules.com

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Re: I still like Sublime Text

#251

I've used Sublime Text since it's initial release, and later on Sublime Merge, and i own licenses for every major version released. However, my ST4 license recently expired, and that caused me to look back at the previous 3 years to see what my money was actually buying me, and it turns out it was mostly bugfixes. There have been, rather consistently, 2 releases per year (november and august), and the last major feat…

Do you prefer the modern style of application that breaks your workflow every 6 hours with popups advertising the latest feature you don't care about?

I'm assuming "license expired" means losing just access to newer versions. Which you explicitly said that you don't need.

Why change the tool then?

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, but seems it has evolved quite a bit in the past year when looking at their new front page. I'll probably give it a shot. But in any case, I don't like their focus in collaborative features. It brings unnecessary bloat, that is not present in Sublime.

Fwiw you can disable all AI bloat and online features with a couple of config keys

But isn't that your "zed"'s selling point? What remains if you turn those off?

Does it have gamification too, in addition to "AI" and "social"?

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#253

Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.

I've used it for 15 years and ST is still the first thing I install on a new PC. All thoughts, meeting notes, journals, blog post drafts... everything is jotted down in ST first. I even went as far as writing my own to-do list syntax highlighter[1] which is the main reason ST is always open, at home and at work, even though I mostly use VSCode and IntelliJ for coding nowadays. [1]: https://github.com/mlagerberg/todo

I also use sublime for managing todo and IDE for coding as my work repo uses custom tooling for build and autocomplete which only supports Visual Studio.

I use PlainTasks [0] which is very similar to your plugin but also has a few keyboard shortcuts to toggle the item state. Using this with a watered down GTD setup has really brought a lot of peace in both my personal and professional life.

[0] https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#254

Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.

Why does sublime do code navigation in such a clunky way? Such as "go to definition". Control click does not work, instead you need to press the far away F12 key. It then opens up a new tab instead of an inline dropdown. Apparently that tab isn't normal text, it's clickable text. it contains usages as well as definitions so you need to manually scan and decipher the results. When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)

The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.

Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.

Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?

Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#255

Can’t not mention tonsky’s post about most important feature of Sublime: https://tonsky.me/blog/sublime/

Step 1. Write blog post about how unnecessary feature churn can make a product worse.

Step 2. Put an avalanche of moving snowflakes in the background of the blog post to make it nearly unreadable.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#256
post #246

So glad to see this. I have been down a long road of text editors: - Sublime - Vim - Emacs - Atom - VSCode - Jetbrains IDE - Neovim - Zed - Cursor And these aren’t just little flings. I’ve spent months if not years in most of these editors. However, at the end of the day I always come back to one: Sublime. It is a beautiful piece of software. It feels like writing with one’s “good pen and good paper”, that high quali…

Sublime is really snappy and responsive. But it also doesn't have as many fancy automation like jetbrains. Maybe that keeps the code "real", rather than some artifact that you have the computer manipulate for you.

That’s definitely part of it. Though even before I start typing and am just looking at the characters on the screen, they seem more dense, tactile, and real. Is there a categorical difference for how Sublime renders text vs other editors out there?

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#257
I find ST and the SFTP plugin (paid) a killer workflow combo, super useful for updating WordPress sites.

Update your file locally, hit the shortcut to upload, done. I find this experience superior to editing directly on the external file as I may want to save but not necessarily commit that change. And for smaller projects you are the only developer on, git can be overkill.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I immediately lost an important file Zed has an "autosave" setting, it's just off by default.

Sublime’s behaviour isn’t an autosave, it just never loses text in a window. You can upgrade the entire OS, start Sublime and your windows and text will be waiting for you, regardless of saved or unsaved state. I’ve got five-year-old scratchpad windows open that I’ve never saved.

That's still my favorite feature of all, it even remembers the undo history. Never lost anything to a crash.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#259

Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.

I've been a Sublime Text user for ten years, bought it and Sublime Merge multiple times. A year ago, I permanently moved to VSCode because of three things:

1. Solid coding AI integration with frequent improvements. Sublime Text at best gives you an option to plug an LSP with modest capabilities. It's behind the times.

2. Small community, infrequent extension updates.

3. Limited UI capabilities. Extensions have to contort hard to fit into available extension points.

What's your vision of ST future?

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#260
They finally fixed some syntax highlighting issues.

But yeah, it's the best editor out there, I still uses it.

I wish I could have more tab rows.

Still a bit expensive, in my view.

I tried sublime text projects/workspace once, but they are not that great.

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