Weirdly Sublime Text is one of the few text editors that I not only dislike, but struggle to understand the appeal that others have with it (and I say weirdly, because even with the other editors that I disliked, I've at least understood the appeal of them from an academic perspective).
The last time I tried ST2, it jarred with my system themes and didn't offer any additional functionality that wasn't already present with the other editors that I used at that time. Plus the other editors were open source where as ST2 was shareware (I'm guessing that may have changed now given the number of people who currently use it?)
I'm open to having my opinion changed though - if one of the Sublime Text fans want to put their case forward :) (Or at least better relating to why it's become so popular)
Try to thinks about the whole class of editors defined by Textmate, Sublime Text and E-TextEditor. It's mainly about offering all the features of something like Notepad++ (easy to use menus and settings, arbitrary multiple cursors, support for easy to use plugins without touching config files), plus:
- offering that unnamed aesthetic quality of "UX flow" (ie. try looking form something in Notepad++'s settings panes - Eclipse will seem nice and clean in comparison!)
- being cross platform and easily runnable from a memory stick
- having what feels like "no learning curve" - you can basically move from Eclipse or VS and be productive in Sublime Text from second 0, and achieve enough productivity to actually be in "coding flow" after just 1hr spent learning the shortcuts and hunting for needed plugins
- following the "don't make me think!" philosophy: this basically restates the first and the previous points and captures in one sense the "unnamed quality" that this class of editors aspires to. I you want to understand "the zen" of this, think of the multiple cursors workflow where you'd catr+click 3 different places and start typing and the alternative would be doing a regex-based search and replace on a selection (or a bloody copy paste to the 2nd and 3rd location, I know... but pretend you didn't think of this :) ), but his would actually require you to "think" about what you are doing, therefore breaking the "don't make me think" philosophy.
...all I've said above has many holes, but I understand the appeal of Sublime Text (and I actually use it - it's my favorite tool for editing plain text files, yaml files or html/js/php soup). Though, for real work, nothing beats a decent IDE with a good Vim emulation plugin :)
> multiple cursors workflow where you'd catr+click 3 different places and start typing and the alternative would be doing a regex-based search and replace on a selection
Oh so that's what multiple cursors are for! People kept telling me that sublime supports multiple cursors and I could never understand what the hell I would do with multiple cursors.
Not that your example makes me want them any more than before, though.
The last time I tried ST2, it jarred with my system themes and didn't offer any additional functionality that wasn't already present with the other editors that I used at that time. Plus the other editors were open source where as ST2 was shareware (I'm guessing that may have changed now given the number of people who currently use it?)
I'm open to having my opinion changed though - if one of the Sublime Text fans want to put their case forward :) (Or at least better relating to why it's become so popular)