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Good article. Sublime Text has a lot of power up its sleave. I think a lot of people ditch Sublime for vim or emacs because they want a more powerful editor wit

Good article. Sublime Text has a lot of power up its sleave. I think a lot of people ditch Sublime for vim or emacs because they want a more powerful editor without trying to learn the more advanced features of Sublime and customize it to their liking. I was one of these people, I spent 6 months using Vim and 6 months using Emacs, but eventually came back to Sublime because I could customize it with plugins (like Vintageous) that made it even more powerful and productive than Vim or Emacs. Especially because I wasn't constantly wasting time debugging bugs created by interactions between the piles of hacks all the Vim/Emacs plugins used. I spent 6 entire months contributing to Spacemacs fixing bugs and broken things and there was no end to them in sight. I realized that while I switched to Emacs to get more work done on my projects, I ended up ditching all my projects in order to fix broken Emacs things. That's when I switched back to Sublime.

hawski 10y ago
I started to wonder if Sublime would suit me. I am for many years now primarely vim user. I use it now mainly, because I've got used to it and it's available everywhere. I was once a no-mouse-only-keyboard user, but now it all seem like busy-work. I would prefer just to point out what I want. I am not affraid of typing as I mainly use command line and like to use ocasional pipeline with some awk scripting to achieve output that I want. I find Unix toolset more approachable than vim. It's just that I feel like every magic incantation of vim commands spends my mental energry. I feel smart after some complex edit with only a couple of keystrokes, but a bit less focused at real issues. Editing is such a small part of programming. I understand that people may not have such problems, but that's me. My dream editor would be something like Acme [0], but a bit more modern. I even started doing my own experimental editor [1] inspired by Acme. I mainly want a mouse driven editor with easy ties to shell. Unfortunately my development pace has been glacial for some time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) [1] https://github.com/hadrianw/werf https://github.com/hadrianw/werf
- Philipp__ 10y ago
  I am kinda thinking the same way. What I liked so much about your comment is that I found myself in pretty same position. I used vim for a few years, got used to that zsh+tmux combo, and my environment was mostly wrapped around Vim (not UNIX like I thought it was). Then after I gave Emacs a shot, I used GUI version, and I saw that it is not the end of the world because I didn't use it as in-terminal editor. I am seriously reconsidering ditching everything and go to Sublime. Why? It's fast, sleek and it does the job. With Emacs I start working on something, and few hours later I am like "why the fuck am I writing lisp and tweaking emacs". I get it, people that used it during 90s, and for 10+ years, they are set in the stone, and why would they switch. But now I really reconsider my options. Vim is much better in that aspect, I spent years with it and have it much or less to my liking, but I always come to some edge case where I change editor. For example, I want to practice few exercises from SCIP I need Emacs, because Lisp programming in Emacs is so effortless and good. I want to write some Go I jump to Vim because vim-go just works perfectly for me. When I am doing some admin work on system I run Vim, but when I want to play with Clojure I need to go back to Emacs. You see the trend? How would Sublime cover all those functional languages, is it any good? If I could have extremely light version of Emacs, that worked in terminal, much better and much more flexible than og Emacs, with good support for REPLs. When you break the no-mouse barrier, you see huge boost of productivity, but later after some time it diminishes and returns. I know I do not want Electron based editor. Terminal preferably but not the key. Something swift and clean. Vim does the job 80% of time but functional languages just work better inside Emacs. I am holding my breath for Xi Editor [0]. It's written in rust, has some interesting abstractions and implementations, native is priority, and overall looks like potential checker for all my boxes. But it is nowhere near to the point of replacing vim or emacs for me. I rambled too much... [0] https://github.com/google/xi-editor https://github.com/google/xi-editor
  - trishume 10y ago
    I really suggest you try out Sublime with Vintageous vim emulation. Part of the reason I spent so much time tweaking emacs is that I work in a lot of different languages, and I had to spend many hours setting up each one. Installing and working with new languages in Sublime tends to just work. With Sublime I tend to use a separate terminal app for doing all my code running and things. So if I'm working in a REPL-like language I do it there. There's also plugins for most languages that do the editor integration I actually want, like autocomplete and highlighting.
- trishume 10y ago
  Sublime sounds like exactly what you want. I use the mouse all the time, especially when I'm doing a lot of reading and navigating. For these tasks the mouse is actually substantially faster. But when I already have my hands on the keyboard I can use vim commands to do quick navigation instead of moving my hand to the mouse. I think mouse based interfaces are much better for reading code, which is a lot of what I spend my time doing, and Emacs and Vim don't support that very well. People may think their ace-jump and fancy motions are faster than the mouse, and they may be faster than the overhead of moving your hand to the mouse, plus the clicking, but when your hand is already on the mouse, the mouse is so much faster. One great thing about Sublime's vim emulation is it is better about interacting with mouse use than other vim-things, including vim itself. I also find Sublime is great at not taking "mental energy" like you mention. Multiple cursors can do basically the same thing as vim macros, but with macros I have to think hard about whether my commands will generalize and exactly what I want to record, but in Sublime I can see immediately if things are working (yes Vintageous works with many cursors). Similarly the infrequently used commands take much less memorizing. I can do weird finds like "find in all .rb files in project, whole words, case insensitive" and then immediately convert my command to a replace without retyping all the other conditions or using an entirely separate command. In Emacs I'd have to Google how to do this since I do this kind of thing infrequently. For tying to shell there are Sublime Text plugins that could do that, and writing your own would be easy. Personally I use one that allows me to run my selections through a Ruby script, or even evaluate my selection as Ruby. Example: I wanted to sum a comma separated list of arguments, so I select the first comma, spam "cmd+d" to select the rest I wanted (but not the whole file), type "+", select in parentheses, then replace the selection with the ruby evaluation. It was super quick.

hawski 10y ago

I started to wonder if Sublime would suit me. I am for many years now primarely vim user. I use it now mainly, because I've got used to it and it's available everywhere. I was once a no-mouse-only-keyboard user, but now it all seem like busy-work. I would prefer just to point out what I want. I am not affraid of typing as I mainly use command line and like to use ocasional pipeline with some awk scripting to achieve output that I want. I find Unix toolset more approachable than vim. It's just that I feel like every magic incantation of vim commands spends my mental energry. I feel smart after some complex edit with only a couple of keystrokes, but a bit less focused at real issues. Editing is such a small part of programming. I understand that people may not have such problems, but that's me. My dream editor would be something like Acme [0], but a bit more modern. I even started doing my own experimental editor [1] inspired by Acme. I mainly want a mouse driven editor with easy ties to shell. Unfortunately my development pace has been glacial for some time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) [1] https://github.com/hadrianw/werf https://github.com/hadrianw/werf

Philipp__ 10y ago
I am kinda thinking the same way. What I liked so much about your comment is that I found myself in pretty same position. I used vim for a few years, got used to that zsh+tmux combo, and my environment was mostly wrapped around Vim (not UNIX like I thought it was). Then after I gave Emacs a shot, I used GUI version, and I saw that it is not the end of the world because I didn't use it as in-terminal editor. I am seriously reconsidering ditching everything and go to Sublime. Why? It's fast, sleek and it does the job. With Emacs I start working on something, and few hours later I am like "why the fuck am I writing lisp and tweaking emacs". I get it, people that used it during 90s, and for 10+ years, they are set in the stone, and why would they switch. But now I really reconsider my options. Vim is much better in that aspect, I spent years with it and have it much or less to my liking, but I always come to some edge case where I change editor. For example, I want to practice few exercises from SCIP I need Emacs, because Lisp programming in Emacs is so effortless and good. I want to write some Go I jump to Vim because vim-go just works perfectly for me. When I am doing some admin work on system I run Vim, but when I want to play with Clojure I need to go back to Emacs. You see the trend? How would Sublime cover all those functional languages, is it any good? If I could have extremely light version of Emacs, that worked in terminal, much better and much more flexible than og Emacs, with good support for REPLs. When you break the no-mouse barrier, you see huge boost of productivity, but later after some time it diminishes and returns. I know I do not want Electron based editor. Terminal preferably but not the key. Something swift and clean. Vim does the job 80% of time but functional languages just work better inside Emacs. I am holding my breath for Xi Editor [0]. It's written in rust, has some interesting abstractions and implementations, native is priority, and overall looks like potential checker for all my boxes. But it is nowhere near to the point of replacing vim or emacs for me. I rambled too much... [0] https://github.com/google/xi-editor https://github.com/google/xi-editor
- trishume 10y ago
  I really suggest you try out Sublime with Vintageous vim emulation. Part of the reason I spent so much time tweaking emacs is that I work in a lot of different languages, and I had to spend many hours setting up each one. Installing and working with new languages in Sublime tends to just work. With Sublime I tend to use a separate terminal app for doing all my code running and things. So if I'm working in a REPL-like language I do it there. There's also plugins for most languages that do the editor integration I actually want, like autocomplete and highlighting.
trishume 10y ago
Sublime sounds like exactly what you want. I use the mouse all the time, especially when I'm doing a lot of reading and navigating. For these tasks the mouse is actually substantially faster. But when I already have my hands on the keyboard I can use vim commands to do quick navigation instead of moving my hand to the mouse. I think mouse based interfaces are much better for reading code, which is a lot of what I spend my time doing, and Emacs and Vim don't support that very well. People may think their ace-jump and fancy motions are faster than the mouse, and they may be faster than the overhead of moving your hand to the mouse, plus the clicking, but when your hand is already on the mouse, the mouse is so much faster. One great thing about Sublime's vim emulation is it is better about interacting with mouse use than other vim-things, including vim itself. I also find Sublime is great at not taking "mental energy" like you mention. Multiple cursors can do basically the same thing as vim macros, but with macros I have to think hard about whether my commands will generalize and exactly what I want to record, but in Sublime I can see immediately if things are working (yes Vintageous works with many cursors). Similarly the infrequently used commands take much less memorizing. I can do weird finds like "find in all .rb files in project, whole words, case insensitive" and then immediately convert my command to a replace without retyping all the other conditions or using an entirely separate command. In Emacs I'd have to Google how to do this since I do this kind of thing infrequently. For tying to shell there are Sublime Text plugins that could do that, and writing your own would be easy. Personally I use one that allows me to run my selections through a Ruby script, or even evaluate my selection as Ruby. Example: I wanted to sum a comma separated list of arguments, so I select the first comma, spam "cmd+d" to select the rest I wanted (but not the whole file), type "+", select in parentheses, then replace the selection with the ruby evaluation. It was super quick.