9 ms·

Show HN: Sublime Text Book

163 points by wesbos 12y ago

jaset 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8424337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8424337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8418552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8418552
- jackmoore 12y ago
  In fairness, this time it was submitted by the author and he is responding to comments.
ghshephard 12y ago
Love the concept - but reading the sample chapter, the layout was extremely distracting. Tons of widows/orphans, and even some images that were cut across pages. When you are selling a book for $36, the bar is a little higher in terms of the quality of the presentation.
- wesbos 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback - I have a newly formatted version of the book coming out later today which remedies the orphans and adds in some new bookmarking features.
  - mamurphy 12y ago
    I will check back later today for the newly formatted version. In the sample, some sentences were split between pages (with the top half of the letters on the bottom of one page, and the bottom half of the letters on the top of the next page), and that low production quality really threw me off.
  - DanSmooth 12y ago
    Can you also make sure to improve the keyboard shortcuts. Judging from the sample you mix upper- and lowercase. If one reads "CTRL + P" or "CTRL + R" one might be tempted to add the shift automatically to get the uppercase p, while later on you specifically write "CTRL + Shift + p". I also suggest a new version of the sample as soon as the new version of the book itself is done.
danso 12y ago
Nice...I generally skip over the endorsements section but Addy Osamni's statement of confidence caught my eye, and it reminded me why I should even be interested in such a narrowly-tailored book: optimizing workflow. I've clearly lost brain cells as I've gotten older, but I think I've been able to maintain a constant rate of learning new things by reducing the amount of slack and drag in how I work (and read)...I really like the selling point of "As a developer, I value my time at $100/hr and this book will save me 30 min/day...This means I will have an extra $12,500 per year". That's a nice way to think about it, though it probably underestimates the impact of more time in life. I like the pricing of the video (at least at the launch price)...I almost never learn via video (yes, I'm that old) but for an extra $9 (or +$5 of the regularly-priced book)...that's not at all a bad deal. And I've been trying to make screencasts on workflow and tooling and am always interested in how the pros teach with video. So, sold.
- prottmann 12y ago
  I don't think that it will save me 30 min/day, but when it saves me 1 min/day, it will be enough too.
  - dbtc 12y ago
    To add to this, I think the hidden value of workflow optimization is avoiding interruptions. If the optimization itself is only worth a few seconds but it allows me to remain focused on whatever I'm actually working on, it becomes much more valuable.
  - dbla 12y ago
    To be fair, you should also subtract the time it will take you to learn the skills that will end up saving you that time. As long as it's less than 365 minutes it should pay off for you in less than a year.
    - Raphmedia 12y ago
      Well, this is "book reading time" and it's spent reading a book. If I wasn't reading this and optimizing my workflow, I would be reading some other book anyway.
wesbos 12y ago
If anyone wants $10 off either package, use coupon code LAUNCHDAY - 100% money back guarantee
- j_lev 12y ago
  Does that work with the $5 off coupon code?
  - wesbos 12y ago
    So you found it ;) Only one can be used, so the $10 off is better than the $5 one.
- Krowbar 12y ago
  I used this code for the $45 bundle. The site showed $35 before purchasing but my credit card was charged $45! Hopefully Wes will refund me that $10 Edit: And in the time it took me to complain, he already responded. Way to stay on top of things!
  - wesbos 12y ago
    This goes for anyone who bought it before seeing this code - email me and I'll refund the $10 right away!
- stuntmachine 12y ago
  Even better, use CSSDEVCONF for $15 off. I bought it for $10 off and then found this code after, and now I'm kicking myself as much as the guy who bought it for $5 off. :)
wnm 12y ago
i love sublime, and i love to learn new things that make me more productive or efficient, so i'm your target audience. if i'd want to convince my boss to buy this (as you suggestest on your salespage :)), i'd probably need a paperprint version... but i'm actually thinking about buying this just for myself. great work on the sales page! looks very well done. one thing you can think about: why not let users give you their email address to get the free chapter?
sergiotapia 12y ago
Shame you only accept Credit Cards, I live in South America and only have access to PayPal for online payments.
- wesbos 12y ago
  I have a FAQ on my site that says to email if you wish to do paypal - I'll set you up for sure!
- derengel 12y ago
  Not sure what you mean here, what country in south america doesn't have credit cards?
  - sergiotapia 12y ago
    I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but Bolivia.
    - ivanca 12y ago
      That's... strange. In Colombia we do have credit cards.
- code_chimp 12y ago
  I have a debit card with plenty of cash in the account backing it, but Stripe keeps rejecting it. This is probably the first time I've tried to use Stripe - not impressed. I will contact Wes for the PayPal information.
Silhouette 12y ago
Looking at the sample chapter, this book seems reasonably well written and might be a good buy for someone new to ST who wants to get up to speed quickly. I think calling it a book for power users is highly optimistic. Much of it seems to be more like the manual ST should have had but never has, describing routine tools and pointing out keyboard shortcuts that you could find for yourself just exploring the default keyboard map. That is certainly a useful gap to fill, but there seems to be little if anything in the table of contents about real power user features like defining or customising languages, templates/snippets, themes, plugins, etc. I hope the choice of title doesn't lead to disappointment from actual power users while causing those who would enjoy and benefit from the book to go elsewhere. I did notice that the sample chapter PDF has quite a few obvious layout problems, and that the expanded TOC on the web site has obvious typos, so the jury is out on editorial/production quality. As a final comment, the author seems very keen on ST3, which makes me hesitant. I gave up and installed ST3 myself a little while ago, after too many packages I relied on self-updated into just not working any more on ST2. Now instead of a productive text editor that I enjoyed and recommended a year or two ago, I have a crash-prone, bug-ridden mess, which just has different packages I used to rely on that don't work reliably instead. So I'm pretty down on the whole fragmented ST ecosystem and lack of progress/support for existing customers right now. While I assume none of this is the author's fault, perhaps the timing of this book launch is unfortunate; it might be a better buy if and when ST3 and its package ecosystem are up to production quality, updated to reflect whatever the best available supporting packages are at that time.
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  I've been using ST3's dev builds with no issues whatsoever so I don't see how it's a crash-prone, bug-ridden mess. Maybe your crashes are a result of plugins you use?
  - Silhouette 12y ago
    It seems to crash occasionally (or at least hangs for long enough that it might as well have) even with no plugins at all installed, with build 3065. Certain plugins, particularly more heavyweight ones like SublimeCodeIntel, crash so often for me that they are completely unusable with ST3. But the bottom line is it doesn't really matter whose fault it is. I used to have an editing suite using ST2 and powerful plugins like SublimeLinter and SublimeCodeIntel that worked very well for me. Now I don't, and no combination of ST version and available plugins for that version will get me back there short of figuring out which packages I used to have and then going back to ST2 and manually installing historical versions of each of them assuming they are still available. Since ST without those powerful plugins is a decent text editor but nowhere near adequate for professional software/web development, the currently fragmented and broken ST ecosystem is their problem one way or another even if it isn't supposed to be their fault.
DevX101 12y ago
I've been planning on registering my sublime for some time. Gonna do it now. I just did a trial of WebStorm and realized my Sublime setup is still the superior editor (with the right plugins: VIM, git, git gutter, Origami, HTMLPrettify). I've evaluated it for the past 6 months but looks like they finally convinced me to fork over the cash. If you've been evaluating for more than a few months and you're not a student, pay up!
- Lambdanaut 12y ago
  I know this might not be kosher, but I have to ask, why? I'm all for supporting the artist, but is that the only reason? Edit: I expected the downvote, but honestly believe that a discussion on this could be valuable. If you're going to downvote me, in return please tell me why you think this question shouldn't be asked.
  - Silhouette 12y ago
    You're asking why you should pay for software that is offered for free as a trial? Because otherwise you're breaking the law, not to mention screwing whoever put in the hard work to create something you obviously find valuable.
    - Lambdanaut 12y ago
      Yes, I'm asking that. The unbelieving condescension is unnecessary. You're breaking the law? No, you're not. On the download page it explicitly says "There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation." Screwing them over? Ridiculous. They've explicitly given me permission to not pay them! I'd be doing them a favor if I paid them. I would be showing them a lot of respect. That is a good thing, but it is not inherently bad to accept their charity and use the software freely. As far as I can tell, it's a clever business strategy for disseminating free software, with the hope that people will purchase it out of respect for the art. It's a clever business move because it gets the software out there in mass so that it becomes popular. They shouldn't expect everyone to buy the software when they explicitly say they don't define a time limit in which one has to pay. I would bet that they even don't expect this.
tsax 12y ago
Bought!
- tsax 12y ago
  Why is this downvoted? Would the author not like to know if a commenter purchased his work?
bhaumik 12y ago
First thoughts via @tholex. http://i.imgur.com/7me4WYG.png http://i.imgur.com/7me4WYG.png
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jawns 12y ago
Let's talk about the price of the e-book, $36. For a standard nonfiction e-book, that price is fairly high, but when it comes to software/programming books, you expect it to be a bit higher than average. I took a look at some O'Reilly titles around the same price point, and specifically at books that are similar to this, where you're really learning about how to make use of a particular software program's features, rather than how to write in a particular programming language or understand a particular abstract concept or niche in software development. "Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac" is 200 pages, $30 for a print edition. "Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought" is 346 pages, $30 for a print edition. "Learning GNU Emacs: A Guide to Unix Text Processing" is 536 pages, $36 for an e-book. It seems to be generally the case, and these examples bear it out, that e-books are priced lower than physical copies, and shorter books are priced lower than longer books. I would add that niche books (where the information is hard to find elsewhere) also command a premium. Based on that, I would suggest that this Sublime Text book should probably be priced a bit lower. It's an e-book, it's only 220 pages, and though it's nice to have all of the information conveniently packaged in one place, it seems like the majority of the book talks about stuff you can easily Google about (and typically find a high-quality answer, precisely because the Sublime Text community is so large and active). Edit: I don't usually complain about downvotes, but it's pretty evident that people are downvoting this because they disagree, not because they think it doesn't add anything substantive to the discussion. I'm an author myself, so I know how much work goes into producing (and marketing) a book, and I'm totally supportive of the author trying to make the project worth his time. I'm merely pointing out that if you look at the market, its list price should probably be closer to the "with coupon" price.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- enknamel 12y ago
  On the pricing, The Pragmatic Programmer is about the same price and gives you a ton of tips related to writing code and more.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
kendallpark 12y ago
I can't find a text editor superior to Sublime. Maybe one day I'll buck up and learn vim then join the superiority-complex crowd, but until then Sublime all the way. I was hoping that Atom would be better or comparable, but just doesn't feel as solid as Sublime. So laggy. Has anyone read this book? Good reviews?
- shubhamjain 12y ago
  > Maybe one day I'll buck up and learn vim then join the superiority-complex crowd Is that the sole reason for learning vim? I mean I am all for investing in productivity, but vim seems to be a tool for geeks to boast about and surprise a lay-person how fast they can work. Is it worth the time you invest to get used to it when you compare it to Sublime Text?
  - andrepd 12y ago
    Don't listen to those people. Vim was very much worth the initial learning curve, for me at least. I never really used Sublime that much, so I can't speak for it. Maybe it gives you 80% of vim's productivity for 1/4th of the effort, but make no mistake, vim is an absurdly powerful tool which I'm 99% sure beats Sublime out of the water (though, again, I never got deep into Sublime, so take this with a grain of salt). Oh and the learning curve thing is greatly exaggerated, often by vim users themselves, seeking to brag to everyone about how they mastered the "fearsome learning curve of vim".
    - shawndumas 12y ago
      Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong [1] ---- [1]: -- http://yehudakatz.com/2010/07/29/everyone-who-tried-to-convince-me-to-use-vim-was-wrong/ http://yehudakatz.com/2010/07/29/everyone-who-tried-to-convi...
    - xs 12y ago
      I used vim for 10 years; now I prefer Sublime Text. I have a need to use a text editor a lot in Windows and never liked the experience that vim for Windows gave me so I gave Sublime Text a try. I quickly fell in love with the multi-cursor editing and ability to auto-recover unsaved files when I close and reopen the program. From there I discovered new awesome features including vim mode which lets me use vim commands within ST if I so choose. I am really happy to know vim because it's installed on every linux/unix distro ever and when I'm sshing into servers that's what I use, but for the bulk of my coding, ST all the way.
RubberMullet 12y ago
The volume level in the sample video seems very low. Are all the videos like this?
alphabetam 12y ago
I'm a proficient VIM user. Can Sublime compete? Is it worth trying to learn it?
- jbrooksuk 12y ago
  Yes, Sublime has a plugin called "Vintage" which acts like Vim.
  - mklim 12y ago
    The Vintageous plugin does a better job of emulating Vim than Vintage, I recommend using that instead. Neither one is perfect, but Vintageous covers most of the commands. It's good enough that I felt comfortable dropping Vim for ST entirely (disclaimer: not an expert Vim user so my bar is probably lower than average, YMMV).
- bad_user 12y ago
  I'm an IntelliJ IDEA / Emacs user. I've been trying out Sublime for a couple of months because I wanted a light editor (i.e. not an IDE) and that isn't so difficult to configure as Emacs. Unfortunately Sublime ain't it. The problem is that my Emacs works better out of the box for everything it does that's important to me. I often find myself unproductive in Sublime, then I go searching for a plugin, then I find myself frustrated because the plugin I found doesn't work well enough for me. Then I realized the reason for why I moved away from Emacs - it's so good in the things that it does well that you find yourself wanting more, you find yourself wanting to learn ELisp and then you get disappointed by how hard that is. Personally I'm currently rooting for LightTable, hoping to be the successor of Emacs. But it's still too young to tell and maybe a little too flashy for my taste. I also work with Vim. For replacing Vim it depends on what you do with it. It's more comfortable than Vim for working on projects, but nothing else is better than Vim for quick stuff. Also - all plugins in all editors providing a "Vim mode" suck - that dual mode in Vim's personality is simply incompatible with how the other editors work. On pricing - I find Sublime to be expensive and the author is releasing paid updates that are minor in delivering new functionality, yet you feel compelled to upgrade because that's were the fixes go. Upgrading Sublime costs me about the same with IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and that's really not right, because IntelliJ IDEA is a really good IDE clearly worth every penny, plus it has an open-source edition so I'm confident that even if the company goes under, the project can still survive. Whereas Sublime competes with Vim and Emacs, both free, both awesome in what they do and both still being around in 50 years from now. There are some things that Sublime does well. Things like Textmate-like snippets (available in Emacs in an awesome plugin btw - Yasnippet), multiple cursor editing or "go to everything". Compared to TextMate, at least it works multi-platform and have been using it without problems on both Ubuntu and OS X, but that's not a problem that Vim users have :) But try it out by yourself, because this choice is personal and nobody else will be able to tell you what's the best environment for you.
stuntmachine 12y ago
CSSDEVCONF removes $15 off of the price.
nayak 12y ago
Editor is $70 if you want to buy and this book is more than $30. Combined price of both of these is more than I paid for my OS long back. Too much investment for a editor and learning it.
oron 12y ago
Looks nice and priced fairly, got my copy, Thanks.
victorhooi 12y ago
I'm pretty tempted to buy a copy. However, the thing holding me back is, I've recently switched from SublimeText to Atom. I didn't see much development on the SublimeText front, and Atom seemed to have a growing community. For anybody that's purchased it - what are your thoughts on how applicable this might be Atom? Or helpful to somebody using it? (I know that Atom is "inspired" by SublimeText)
- luketherrien 12y ago
  I have not purchased the e-book. I just wanted to note that although Atom is a derivative of Sublime Text, they may not end up having 100% feature parity. That may not be a problem due to the ease of creating an Atom package.
_raul 12y ago
Very nice. One thing I'm missing in the TOC is a chapter on creating your own packages: the official docs are (as usual) quite sparse and I'd love to have a couple chapters (tutorial + reference) instead of following the typical "take a look at a existing package and wing it from there" approach. Can someone recommend some good resources on this topic?
- zzleeper 12y ago
  Yes.. I purchased the book although I already know most of the things there; but what would be really useful is better tutorials for how to make your own packages/syntax highlighters/build systems.
  - xs 12y ago
    I've created my own syntax highlighter plugin for ST. I still don't know how to do it even after completing it. There's just so much about it that is guesswork.
inzax 12y ago
As shown on https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hacker-News/1558365107716690 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hacker-News/1558365107716690
pdknsk 12y ago
This is personal preference, but I dislike when sites force a download for files which can just as well be displayed in the browser, such as the sample PDF.
zaatar 12y ago
Thanks; I just purchased the book+video; is there a recommended way to print out a paper copy for my own use beyond just hammering my own (or work) printer?
KobaQ 12y ago
I'm just asking myself if this belongs to hacker news. When does something deserve to be posted as "Show HN"? Does the link to what someone wants to show us lead to a rich discussion about tech, start-up, programming, business and other topics of general interest here? Is it a interesting website, that we can experience and talk about? Is it code? Is it an interesting business idea? In this case, I think this "Show HN" post is advertsing only.
code_chimp 12y ago
Just skimming and the content seems really good so far, just a couple of nits to pick. The PDF appears to be missing a table of contents and the chapter links starting on page 2 are not working in Okular running on Ubuntu 14.04 - they appear as links to files on the author's local DropBox. The epub looks pretty good on the iPad.
ivanca 12y ago
Disappointing that it doesn't have a chapter for plugin development, in my opinion that's the best feature of Sublime Text: You can use all the python ecosystem plus it has a nice API. Plus you understand anyone's plugins because is all python, not some random lang they like.
Pamar 12y ago
I have a Mac for use at home, but most of my coding is done at the office on a windows machine... Can anyone suggest a similar resource for Ultraedit?
- deevus 12y ago
  Probably, but Sublime Text runs on Windows anyway.

163 points by wesbos 12y ago

jaset 12y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8424337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8424337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8418552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8418552

jackmoore 12y ago
In fairness, this time it was submitted by the author and he is responding to comments.

ghshephard 12y ago

Love the concept - but reading the sample chapter, the layout was extremely distracting. Tons of widows/orphans, and even some images that were cut across pages. When you are selling a book for $36, the bar is a little higher in terms of the quality of the presentation.

wesbos 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback - I have a newly formatted version of the book coming out later today which remedies the orphans and adds in some new bookmarking features.
- mamurphy 12y ago
  I will check back later today for the newly formatted version. In the sample, some sentences were split between pages (with the top half of the letters on the bottom of one page, and the bottom half of the letters on the top of the next page), and that low production quality really threw me off.
- DanSmooth 12y ago
  Can you also make sure to improve the keyboard shortcuts. Judging from the sample you mix upper- and lowercase. If one reads "CTRL + P" or "CTRL + R" one might be tempted to add the shift automatically to get the uppercase p, while later on you specifically write "CTRL + Shift + p". I also suggest a new version of the sample as soon as the new version of the book itself is done.

danso 12y ago

Nice...I generally skip over the endorsements section but Addy Osamni's statement of confidence caught my eye, and it reminded me why I should even be interested in such a narrowly-tailored book: optimizing workflow. I've clearly lost brain cells as I've gotten older, but I think I've been able to maintain a constant rate of learning new things by reducing the amount of slack and drag in how I work (and read)...I really like the selling point of "As a developer, I value my time at $100/hr and this book will save me 30 min/day...This means I will have an extra $12,500 per year". That's a nice way to think about it, though it probably underestimates the impact of more time in life. I like the pricing of the video (at least at the launch price)...I almost never learn via video (yes, I'm that old) but for an extra $9 (or +$5 of the regularly-priced book)...that's not at all a bad deal. And I've been trying to make screencasts on workflow and tooling and am always interested in how the pros teach with video. So, sold.

prottmann 12y ago
I don't think that it will save me 30 min/day, but when it saves me 1 min/day, it will be enough too.
- dbtc 12y ago
  To add to this, I think the hidden value of workflow optimization is avoiding interruptions. If the optimization itself is only worth a few seconds but it allows me to remain focused on whatever I'm actually working on, it becomes much more valuable.
- dbla 12y ago
  To be fair, you should also subtract the time it will take you to learn the skills that will end up saving you that time. As long as it's less than 365 minutes it should pay off for you in less than a year.
  - Raphmedia 12y ago
    Well, this is "book reading time" and it's spent reading a book. If I wasn't reading this and optimizing my workflow, I would be reading some other book anyway.

wesbos 12y ago

If anyone wants $10 off either package, use coupon code LAUNCHDAY - 100% money back guarantee

j_lev 12y ago
Does that work with the $5 off coupon code?
- wesbos 12y ago
  So you found it ;) Only one can be used, so the $10 off is better than the $5 one.
Krowbar 12y ago
I used this code for the $45 bundle. The site showed $35 before purchasing but my credit card was charged $45! Hopefully Wes will refund me that $10 Edit: And in the time it took me to complain, he already responded. Way to stay on top of things!
- wesbos 12y ago
  This goes for anyone who bought it before seeing this code - email me and I'll refund the $10 right away!
stuntmachine 12y ago
Even better, use CSSDEVCONF for $15 off. I bought it for $10 off and then found this code after, and now I'm kicking myself as much as the guy who bought it for $5 off. :)

wnm 12y ago

i love sublime, and i love to learn new things that make me more productive or efficient, so i'm your target audience. if i'd want to convince my boss to buy this (as you suggestest on your salespage :)), i'd probably need a paperprint version... but i'm actually thinking about buying this just for myself. great work on the sales page! looks very well done. one thing you can think about: why not let users give you their email address to get the free chapter?

sergiotapia 12y ago

Shame you only accept Credit Cards, I live in South America and only have access to PayPal for online payments.

wesbos 12y ago
I have a FAQ on my site that says to email if you wish to do paypal - I'll set you up for sure!
derengel 12y ago
Not sure what you mean here, what country in south america doesn't have credit cards?
- sergiotapia 12y ago
  I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but Bolivia.
  - ivanca 12y ago
    That's... strange. In Colombia we do have credit cards.
code_chimp 12y ago
I have a debit card with plenty of cash in the account backing it, but Stripe keeps rejecting it. This is probably the first time I've tried to use Stripe - not impressed. I will contact Wes for the PayPal information.

Silhouette 12y ago

Looking at the sample chapter, this book seems reasonably well written and might be a good buy for someone new to ST who wants to get up to speed quickly. I think calling it a book for power users is highly optimistic. Much of it seems to be more like the manual ST should have had but never has, describing routine tools and pointing out keyboard shortcuts that you could find for yourself just exploring the default keyboard map. That is certainly a useful gap to fill, but there seems to be little if anything in the table of contents about real power user features like defining or customising languages, templates/snippets, themes, plugins, etc. I hope the choice of title doesn't lead to disappointment from actual power users while causing those who would enjoy and benefit from the book to go elsewhere. I did notice that the sample chapter PDF has quite a few obvious layout problems, and that the expanded TOC on the web site has obvious typos, so the jury is out on editorial/production quality. As a final comment, the author seems very keen on ST3, which makes me hesitant. I gave up and installed ST3 myself a little while ago, after too many packages I relied on self-updated into just not working any more on ST2. Now instead of a productive text editor that I enjoyed and recommended a year or two ago, I have a crash-prone, bug-ridden mess, which just has different packages I used to rely on that don't work reliably instead. So I'm pretty down on the whole fragmented ST ecosystem and lack of progress/support for existing customers right now. While I assume none of this is the author's fault, perhaps the timing of this book launch is unfortunate; it might be a better buy if and when ST3 and its package ecosystem are up to production quality, updated to reflect whatever the best available supporting packages are at that time.

wldcordeiro 12y ago
I've been using ST3's dev builds with no issues whatsoever so I don't see how it's a crash-prone, bug-ridden mess. Maybe your crashes are a result of plugins you use?
- Silhouette 12y ago
  It seems to crash occasionally (or at least hangs for long enough that it might as well have) even with no plugins at all installed, with build 3065. Certain plugins, particularly more heavyweight ones like SublimeCodeIntel, crash so often for me that they are completely unusable with ST3. But the bottom line is it doesn't really matter whose fault it is. I used to have an editing suite using ST2 and powerful plugins like SublimeLinter and SublimeCodeIntel that worked very well for me. Now I don't, and no combination of ST version and available plugins for that version will get me back there short of figuring out which packages I used to have and then going back to ST2 and manually installing historical versions of each of them assuming they are still available. Since ST without those powerful plugins is a decent text editor but nowhere near adequate for professional software/web development, the currently fragmented and broken ST ecosystem is their problem one way or another even if it isn't supposed to be their fault.

DevX101 12y ago

I've been planning on registering my sublime for some time. Gonna do it now. I just did a trial of WebStorm and realized my Sublime setup is still the superior editor (with the right plugins: VIM, git, git gutter, Origami, HTMLPrettify). I've evaluated it for the past 6 months but looks like they finally convinced me to fork over the cash. If you've been evaluating for more than a few months and you're not a student, pay up!

Lambdanaut 12y ago
I know this might not be kosher, but I have to ask, why? I'm all for supporting the artist, but is that the only reason? Edit: I expected the downvote, but honestly believe that a discussion on this could be valuable. If you're going to downvote me, in return please tell me why you think this question shouldn't be asked.
- Silhouette 12y ago
  You're asking why you should pay for software that is offered for free as a trial? Because otherwise you're breaking the law, not to mention screwing whoever put in the hard work to create something you obviously find valuable.
  - Lambdanaut 12y ago
    Yes, I'm asking that. The unbelieving condescension is unnecessary. You're breaking the law? No, you're not. On the download page it explicitly says "There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation." Screwing them over? Ridiculous. They've explicitly given me permission to not pay them! I'd be doing them a favor if I paid them. I would be showing them a lot of respect. That is a good thing, but it is not inherently bad to accept their charity and use the software freely. As far as I can tell, it's a clever business strategy for disseminating free software, with the hope that people will purchase it out of respect for the art. It's a clever business move because it gets the software out there in mass so that it becomes popular. They shouldn't expect everyone to buy the software when they explicitly say they don't define a time limit in which one has to pay. I would bet that they even don't expect this.

tsax 12y ago

Bought!

tsax 12y ago
Why is this downvoted? Would the author not like to know if a commenter purchased his work?

bhaumik 12y ago

First thoughts via @tholex. http://i.imgur.com/7me4WYG.png http://i.imgur.com/7me4WYG.png

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jawns 12y ago

Let's talk about the price of the e-book, $36. For a standard nonfiction e-book, that price is fairly high, but when it comes to software/programming books, you expect it to be a bit higher than average. I took a look at some O'Reilly titles around the same price point, and specifically at books that are similar to this, where you're really learning about how to make use of a particular software program's features, rather than how to write in a particular programming language or understand a particular abstract concept or niche in software development. "Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac" is 200 pages, $30 for a print edition. "Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought" is 346 pages, $30 for a print edition. "Learning GNU Emacs: A Guide to Unix Text Processing" is 536 pages, $36 for an e-book. It seems to be generally the case, and these examples bear it out, that e-books are priced lower than physical copies, and shorter books are priced lower than longer books. I would add that niche books (where the information is hard to find elsewhere) also command a premium. Based on that, I would suggest that this Sublime Text book should probably be priced a bit lower. It's an e-book, it's only 220 pages, and though it's nice to have all of the information conveniently packaged in one place, it seems like the majority of the book talks about stuff you can easily Google about (and typically find a high-quality answer, precisely because the Sublime Text community is so large and active). Edit: I don't usually complain about downvotes, but it's pretty evident that people are downvoting this because they disagree, not because they think it doesn't add anything substantive to the discussion. I'm an author myself, so I know how much work goes into producing (and marketing) a book, and I'm totally supportive of the author trying to make the project worth his time. I'm merely pointing out that if you look at the market, its list price should probably be closer to the "with coupon" price.

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enknamel 12y ago
On the pricing, The Pragmatic Programmer is about the same price and gives you a ton of tips related to writing code and more.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

kendallpark 12y ago

I can't find a text editor superior to Sublime. Maybe one day I'll buck up and learn vim then join the superiority-complex crowd, but until then Sublime all the way. I was hoping that Atom would be better or comparable, but just doesn't feel as solid as Sublime. So laggy. Has anyone read this book? Good reviews?

shubhamjain 12y ago
> Maybe one day I'll buck up and learn vim then join the superiority-complex crowd Is that the sole reason for learning vim? I mean I am all for investing in productivity, but vim seems to be a tool for geeks to boast about and surprise a lay-person how fast they can work. Is it worth the time you invest to get used to it when you compare it to Sublime Text?
- andrepd 12y ago
  Don't listen to those people. Vim was very much worth the initial learning curve, for me at least. I never really used Sublime that much, so I can't speak for it. Maybe it gives you 80% of vim's productivity for 1/4th of the effort, but make no mistake, vim is an absurdly powerful tool which I'm 99% sure beats Sublime out of the water (though, again, I never got deep into Sublime, so take this with a grain of salt). Oh and the learning curve thing is greatly exaggerated, often by vim users themselves, seeking to brag to everyone about how they mastered the "fearsome learning curve of vim".
  - shawndumas 12y ago
    Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong [1] ---- [1]: -- http://yehudakatz.com/2010/07/29/everyone-who-tried-to-convince-me-to-use-vim-was-wrong/ http://yehudakatz.com/2010/07/29/everyone-who-tried-to-convi...
  - xs 12y ago
    I used vim for 10 years; now I prefer Sublime Text. I have a need to use a text editor a lot in Windows and never liked the experience that vim for Windows gave me so I gave Sublime Text a try. I quickly fell in love with the multi-cursor editing and ability to auto-recover unsaved files when I close and reopen the program. From there I discovered new awesome features including vim mode which lets me use vim commands within ST if I so choose. I am really happy to know vim because it's installed on every linux/unix distro ever and when I'm sshing into servers that's what I use, but for the bulk of my coding, ST all the way.

RubberMullet 12y ago

The volume level in the sample video seems very low. Are all the videos like this?

alphabetam 12y ago

I'm a proficient VIM user. Can Sublime compete? Is it worth trying to learn it?

jbrooksuk 12y ago
Yes, Sublime has a plugin called "Vintage" which acts like Vim.
- mklim 12y ago
  The Vintageous plugin does a better job of emulating Vim than Vintage, I recommend using that instead. Neither one is perfect, but Vintageous covers most of the commands. It's good enough that I felt comfortable dropping Vim for ST entirely (disclaimer: not an expert Vim user so my bar is probably lower than average, YMMV).
bad_user 12y ago
I'm an IntelliJ IDEA / Emacs user. I've been trying out Sublime for a couple of months because I wanted a light editor (i.e. not an IDE) and that isn't so difficult to configure as Emacs. Unfortunately Sublime ain't it. The problem is that my Emacs works better out of the box for everything it does that's important to me. I often find myself unproductive in Sublime, then I go searching for a plugin, then I find myself frustrated because the plugin I found doesn't work well enough for me. Then I realized the reason for why I moved away from Emacs - it's so good in the things that it does well that you find yourself wanting more, you find yourself wanting to learn ELisp and then you get disappointed by how hard that is. Personally I'm currently rooting for LightTable, hoping to be the successor of Emacs. But it's still too young to tell and maybe a little too flashy for my taste. I also work with Vim. For replacing Vim it depends on what you do with it. It's more comfortable than Vim for working on projects, but nothing else is better than Vim for quick stuff. Also - all plugins in all editors providing a "Vim mode" suck - that dual mode in Vim's personality is simply incompatible with how the other editors work. On pricing - I find Sublime to be expensive and the author is releasing paid updates that are minor in delivering new functionality, yet you feel compelled to upgrade because that's were the fixes go. Upgrading Sublime costs me about the same with IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and that's really not right, because IntelliJ IDEA is a really good IDE clearly worth every penny, plus it has an open-source edition so I'm confident that even if the company goes under, the project can still survive. Whereas Sublime competes with Vim and Emacs, both free, both awesome in what they do and both still being around in 50 years from now. There are some things that Sublime does well. Things like Textmate-like snippets (available in Emacs in an awesome plugin btw - Yasnippet), multiple cursor editing or "go to everything". Compared to TextMate, at least it works multi-platform and have been using it without problems on both Ubuntu and OS X, but that's not a problem that Vim users have :) But try it out by yourself, because this choice is personal and nobody else will be able to tell you what's the best environment for you.

stuntmachine 12y ago

CSSDEVCONF removes $15 off of the price.

nayak 12y ago

Editor is $70 if you want to buy and this book is more than $30. Combined price of both of these is more than I paid for my OS long back. Too much investment for a editor and learning it.

oron 12y ago

Looks nice and priced fairly, got my copy, Thanks.

victorhooi 12y ago

I'm pretty tempted to buy a copy. However, the thing holding me back is, I've recently switched from SublimeText to Atom. I didn't see much development on the SublimeText front, and Atom seemed to have a growing community. For anybody that's purchased it - what are your thoughts on how applicable this might be Atom? Or helpful to somebody using it? (I know that Atom is "inspired" by SublimeText)

luketherrien 12y ago
I have not purchased the e-book. I just wanted to note that although Atom is a derivative of Sublime Text, they may not end up having 100% feature parity. That may not be a problem due to the ease of creating an Atom package.

_raul 12y ago

Very nice. One thing I'm missing in the TOC is a chapter on creating your own packages: the official docs are (as usual) quite sparse and I'd love to have a couple chapters (tutorial + reference) instead of following the typical "take a look at a existing package and wing it from there" approach. Can someone recommend some good resources on this topic?

zzleeper 12y ago
Yes.. I purchased the book although I already know most of the things there; but what would be really useful is better tutorials for how to make your own packages/syntax highlighters/build systems.
- xs 12y ago
  I've created my own syntax highlighter plugin for ST. I still don't know how to do it even after completing it. There's just so much about it that is guesswork.

inzax 12y ago

As shown on https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hacker-News/1558365107716690 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hacker-News/1558365107716690

pdknsk 12y ago

This is personal preference, but I dislike when sites force a download for files which can just as well be displayed in the browser, such as the sample PDF.

zaatar 12y ago

Thanks; I just purchased the book+video; is there a recommended way to print out a paper copy for my own use beyond just hammering my own (or work) printer?

KobaQ 12y ago

I'm just asking myself if this belongs to hacker news. When does something deserve to be posted as "Show HN"? Does the link to what someone wants to show us lead to a rich discussion about tech, start-up, programming, business and other topics of general interest here? Is it a interesting website, that we can experience and talk about? Is it code? Is it an interesting business idea? In this case, I think this "Show HN" post is advertsing only.

code_chimp 12y ago

Just skimming and the content seems really good so far, just a couple of nits to pick. The PDF appears to be missing a table of contents and the chapter links starting on page 2 are not working in Okular running on Ubuntu 14.04 - they appear as links to files on the author's local DropBox. The epub looks pretty good on the iPad.

ivanca 12y ago

Disappointing that it doesn't have a chapter for plugin development, in my opinion that's the best feature of Sublime Text: You can use all the python ecosystem plus it has a nice API. Plus you understand anyone's plugins because is all python, not some random lang they like.

Pamar 12y ago

I have a Mac for use at home, but most of my coding is done at the office on a windows machine... Can anyone suggest a similar resource for Ultraedit?

deevus 12y ago
Probably, but Sublime Text runs on Windows anyway.