Live data from Hacker News

I still like Sublime Text

ohdoylerules.com

471–480 of 620 posts

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it insane? Along with a terminal, I also use a database editor inside my code editor. That’s the point behind an IDE - integrated developer environment.

I get where you're coming from and generally agree. The trouble is that the integrated tools are all pretty bad, in my experience. If I can use DataGrip instead of some VS Code extension called "Database Client", I'm going to use DataGrip. I will often even prefer pgsql for many tasks. A mediocre tool might save time here and there because it's convenient, but I find their broader impact is poorer work done in worse…

Datagrip, of course, is just the integrated database editor of intellij packaged without the rest of intellij, so it's not a rule that integrated tools are always bad

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#472

I really want to like Sublime (it's so fast, I like the minimal UI), but VS Code has so much inertia, and does so much out of the box or with minimal extra effort that it's hard to not use it instead. At the end of the day, I have things to get done, I'm not here to tinker with tools. Same reason I never got into vim/emacs etc as a daily driver.

Emacs and Neovim are things one gets into in ones free time and gets good enough to make the switch at some point at the job. Of course that is mostly only feasible, if the projects at the job are set up in a tool agnostic way or choice exists in the first place. I also want to like Sublime, but I already have a well configured Emacs and I like using free/libre software. While Sublime was great when I used it in the…

Yeah, I got used to vim while I was in school and probably wouldn't have put in the investment otherwise. It was worth. I'm not an expert in it, nor do I have a ton of fancy things installed, but it's fast and works in basically any situation (esp over SSH). My coworkers keep getting forced to change IDEs while I stick with vim.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#473
post #47

Sublime is still my top choice for opening big data files, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But, since VS Code is becoming the new lingua franca code editor, I made the switch so as to play nice with others going forward.

+1 I was amazed the first time I opened a multi-GB sized sqldump in sublime

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#474

I use sublime as a copy paste buffer when I need excellent visual regex search and replace. Vscodes regex search has awkward semantics (or at least I don't know them as well as sublimes) so I usually paste things into sublime, edit them with the regexes, then go back to what I was doing. My work has some extensions that only work in vscode so I'm stuck with it but it's good enough. I also never close sublime tabs and…

I'm gonna start doing that, cause TextEdit can't even copy-paste reliably, and vim isn't super convenient for this either.

Edit: Wow Sublime is the nicest GUI text editor I've ever seen

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#475

I love Sublime Text. It's one of my favorite pieces of software. I have it running 100% of the time on every machine I work on. It's where I write all of my personal notes, blog posts, and it's where I wrote both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters". At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that'…

I feel exactly the same about it.

SublimeText is where I go to take some notes I want to write unformatted, or with some markdown.

It's where I go to paste some blob of JSON or logs from a random command that I want to parse out into something more readable than my terminal gave me.

It's where I write a random snippet of code to help someone who's asking me a question, or a bash script for a one-off job.

It's not my IDE and I don't want it to replace my IDE, just like I don't want my leatherman tool or swiss army knife to replace my power drill or pliers.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#476
I love it too, though I never use it for working with entire projects but rather for smaller text editing tasks because it's so snappy. It's my scratchpad for notes and stuff, I will investigate and edit single files, and I use it for find-and-replace within a directory.

Though for the single file operations, it really depends on how I'm currently interacting with the system. If I'm browsing the files in a GUI then I'll use ST. If I'm in a terminal I'll use neovim.

One enhancement I would love to see to ST is better large file support. If I open a 330MB CSV in Notepad++ it displays instantly and uses 350MB of RAM. If I open the same file in ST it takes a few seconds to show and uses 1.5GB of RAM. (This is with both editors using no plugins beyond whatever is default)

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#477
post #191

I often get asked why I still use Sublime. So I wrote this article singing it's praises.

I'm curious though- as somebody who is reasonably technical I get why you would prefer Sublime to something like VSCode, but why not Emacs?

I can answer the opposite of that question. Why Emacs?

For me, Emacs is valuable not for the things it can or cannot do, it's valuable because it gives me the perception of complete control over the things on my computer.

The other day, I was watching my teammate showing me some stuff over Zoom, and I didn't want to derail his thoughts by constantly stopping him: "hey, wait, don't scroll away, I'm still reading that," "wait a second, what was that URL again?" etc. So, the only thing I could do was take screenshots.

During the lunch break, I decided to solve this thing for myself. I wrote a command that checks ~/Desktop - it's where I drop my screenshots, then finds any .png file that was created no longer than 2 minutes ago, sends it to tesseract for OCR, and opens the text in a buffer. Took me less than 20 minutes.

Sure, there are many ways to get something like that done, but after trying so many different options, I was never able to extract the same feeling of control from any other alternative.

I have a command that inserts the url of my active tab in the browser, with description, in the correct format (e.g., markdown). I wrote that myself, because at some point it bothered me that I had to do that manually. There are many examples such that, where if I weren't using Emacs, I probably wouldn't even bother to acknowledge the existence of such small annoyances.

What makes Emacs truly exceptional isn't its vast feature set, but rather its ability to foster a problem-solving mentality - the "Emacs brain" - where no obstacle, regardless of size, goes unaddressed or unresolved.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#478
post #443

I love Sublime Text. It's one of my favorite pieces of software. I have it running 100% of the time on every machine I work on. It's where I write all of my personal notes, blog posts, and it's where I wrote both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters". At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that'…

Out of curiosity, what is it about an IDE that you find useful...? I'm probably just a heathen, but I've always done the build/run steps on the command line, and Sublime has LSP for all the syntax & semantics goodies other than that -- like for Python, I've got Ruff (syntax), Jedi (semantics), and CoPilot (autocomplete) running happily, with what I feel is an impressive amount of configurability. Are people just work…

couldn't imagine clicking on something to rebuild the program!

Do you really think that's how people use IDEs?

I've never used an IDE that didn't have comprehensive keyboard shortcuts, and I don't remember one that didn't allow customization of shortcuts.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#479
I use sublime text to edit all my notes for both work and personal. It runs on every computer and laptop I have.

I love sublime text. I'm on version 3, i think there is a 4 out but nothing is drawing me to use it.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#480
post #443

I love Sublime Text. It's one of my favorite pieces of software. I have it running 100% of the time on every machine I work on. It's where I write all of my personal notes, blog posts, and it's where I wrote both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters". At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that'…

Out of curiosity, what is it about an IDE that you find useful...? I'm probably just a heathen, but I've always done the build/run steps on the command line, and Sublime has LSP for all the syntax & semantics goodies other than that -- like for Python, I've got Ruff (syntax), Jedi (semantics), and CoPilot (autocomplete) running happily, with what I feel is an impressive amount of configurability. Are people just work…

You didn't mention debugging (breakpoints, step through, inspecting variable values at runtime). If you are writing code and aren't doing these things, you probably should be!
Post reply on HN