In the mean time Sublime Text 2 has all of the Alpha features as well as cross platform support and support for TextMate bundles. You should really give it a shot if you haven't.
There is one feature in TextMate that's not in Sublime which I really love to the point, where it's an absolute requirement for me: when I edit a file in TextMate and my account lacks permission for saving the file, TM would allow me to sudo right from the GUI in order to still save.
This is much better than seeing that I can't save, copy the whole file to the clipboard, reopen it with 'sudo vim' and then pasting it (no. Not even 'sudo subl' works)
One of the main reasons I use an editor like TM or S2 for is system administration which often requires root. For development I'm usually using the JetBrains IDE with the respective plugins.
I really didn't want to seem bitchy about the issue. In fact, aside of voting for it on their userecho feature request page and writing that comment, I haven't done anything else - surely no trolling.
If my post came over as bitchy, I apologize. I really just wanted to tell the world that there's one missing feature preventing me from using Sublime more - also in the hope of maybe getting a good hint on how to solve it.
Sorry, I meant "bitch" simply in the generic sense of "to complain about x", not that your comment came across as bitchy.
I'm glad you did bring it up in public, and glad the issue was fixed, since I use ST a lot but this was a rather glaring omission for a Mac text editor.
If I was willing to use vim (or emacs, nyellin) for my daily editing needs I wouldn't be comparing TextMate to Sublime and listing missing features in the latter :-)
Besides, I knew about the vi trick you referenced, but it often screws up something with the terminal, causing all sorts of issues. Admittedly I didn't try it again since moving to iTerm (I'm suspecting a terminal.app issue), mainly because I have a working solution (TextMate).
It's just that weren't it not for this sudo-feature, I would really prefer sublime (I bought both, by the way, in order to support their respective authors)
(I jest. Vim is an awesome editor and I recommend it to all my friends using Eclipse, Visual Studio, and XCode. But true enlightenment lies in Emacs, where vim is only another mode called evil: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil)
I would have to agree. I tried Sublime Text for two weeks, but I continued to dislike it. It's not a bad editor or anything, it's just not for me.
Personally I'm getting a bit tired of reading about how people think that TextMate is done and how we should move on. TextMate 1.5 is still my text editor of choice, it simply fit how I work. Honestly I would be happy if TextMate 1.5 is just maintained as is.
There's a lot of complaining about TextMate which I simply don't understand. Split screen editing, really, you care about that? I just open two windows. More frequent update? Why? Do you really need a new feature in your text editor every week? "The new icon is ugly"... No, it's cute, but also not important.
The main thing that Allan did wrong was starting to talk about TextMate 2 to early. It would have been much better to have said nothing and just release an alpha or beta when he was ready. People a fascinated by new versions for some reason, they apparently want version two, just because two is higher than one. Perhaps if Allan hadn't said anything people wouldn't feel to entitled to a new version (wrongly entitled in my opinion).
Also, let's try to remember that it is actually a pretty complex piece of software that a lot of us will be getting for free.
As for Sublime Text, as a replacement for TextMate, yeah, I pick Vim a head of Sublime any day. Then again I would pick Idle a head of Sublime Text.
Nah, Textmate 1.5 as it is is perfectly fine. I mean, who really needs chunked undo anyway? And opening files larger than a few hundred k? Really, just split them. They"re a bad idea anyways. Or something like incremental regex search. Real men can read the code faster than any search indexer, so who needs that? </sarcasm>
Seriously though, I agree that some incremental fixes to Textmate 1.5 might have been a saner option than a full rewrite. I for one did not wait and moved on in the meantime.
Being a user of TextMate 1.5, I don't know what issues you're referring to with "files larger than a few hundred k?" I've opened multi-megabyte XML files and dealt with them just fine. I've done regex search and replace commands, fairly complex ones, on SQL backups that are multi-megabyte without issue.
I repeat, what's the complaint?
TextMate2 is a bit rough, yes, but I don't expect better from a prerelease. As it is, it's more than enough to offer me hope that it'll be finished and that it'll be a good product.
Regex search always uses a separate Window. Call me nitpicky, but I want to see my search results highlighted while I'm typing them. Especially when it is a regex search.
Also, my Textmate regularly crashed whenever I tried to open something larger than a meg or two.
I agree for the most part, but that sentiment depends on individual usage patterns.
For example opening multiple windows works alright until I want to Find in Project at which point I have to switch to the project window. A minor annoyance but day in day out that gets old fast.
"""There's a lot of complaining about TextMate which I simply don't understand. Split screen editing, really, you care about that?"""
Hell yes I care.
"""More frequent update? Why? Do you really need a new feature in your text editor every week?"""
No, I just need tons of features 1.5.x lacks. I could care less if they are delivered all in one release of a couple of them in frequent updates, but as we've seen "infrequent releases" doesn't work for Alan.
You have to admit though that Sublime Text 2 is pretty ugly by default. Both theme and initial impression. I really enjoy using it now, but that's after four tries or so after I heard about it few months ago on HN.
Initial impression with ST2 is like playing jigsaw puzzles, it's a mix of mouse clicks and some weird text editing until you're comfortable with Cmd+Shift+P. I remembered my experience trying to adjust font size went on like this: Open preferences, hey wait what is default global settings? user file settings? Hm, let's try this one... wait I have to edit settings file? I better use Emacs then! Where I can find all available configuration options? Google search? Oops, that's for Sublime Text 1. ARGH!
Even though I do enjoy using it now, it still feel like playing jigsaw puzzles but with majority of pieces in its place. (Like recently: wait, ST2 can do split screens? Hmm, Cmd+Shift+P split... nothing? Let's try Google... none tell me how to enable it. 20 minutes later Ah, it's in the View/Layout!) I can see the whole picture now, just missing a little bits here and there.
I think the settings thing is sort of intentional. The assumption is that most users of ST2 like json, and the default file settings are well-commented in the JSON files. Also, it's weird that you thought you had to use Emacs, since clicking the menu option for a preference file opens that file in ST2. That being said, the whole global default/user default/file default system is pretty confusing to me. I think I get it, but I still put settings in the wrong files, which then don't work, and so on.
Another issue with ST2 is that, like you mentioned, for whatever reason, it's very hard to find answers to your questions via Google. You always either end up at some release notes that tell you the feature you want exists, but not how to use it, or at some forum posting from 200 years ago that's wildly out of date, and full of the usual wildly-stupid comments one finds in most internet forums. There are number of features that I now use daily that I only found out about through word-of-mouth. (To be fair, this last part is probably true for many people with many editors: "Oh, you can do $x in $EDITOR? Show me how.")
I completely agree, the menus and the options are pretty close to archaic. The developer has a bunch of work to do there. Once I got it down to an environment I liked I never had to touch it again, and with the nice package manager I never had to worry about new touching the package system again as well.
The vintage (vim-like) mode is what pulled me into sublime text as my go-to editor. It's just so much faster. I opened the textmate alpha and immediately had a bunch of j characters appear before I realized i don't think I can go back. It's either ST or vim for now…
I did (but admittedly not for long). It didn't have the same level of polish. Has this changed? I can already use TM bundles on Sublime Text, but it just felt more feature complete.
It's more polished now than it was. It's still in its nascent stages, but it's improving on a roughly monthly basis, in a definite excellent direction. The vi approach seems to be at its core, which is notable as new features are being implemented. And it's scriptable in Nu, which is pretty sweet and gives you access to all of Cocoa.
Thanks for the response. Will definitely have a second look, now that I have an idea of what to expect. Competition is definitely good in this space… especially now that the trend includes TextMate bundles & themes so it's not too hard to maintain a similar environment.
One of the huge reasons I switched to Sublime Text 2 in the first place. I like vim but I hate having to manage all of these plugins and configurations just to get things like folder views.
That said its not perfect and I do miss the old vim from time to time.
I wrote this for TextMate. Not nearly as good as built-in support, but I program 10 hours a day with it and it's saved me millions of keystrokes. https://github.com/philc/textmatevim
Sublime text is very clunky and has that very weird "UI app written in a scripting language feel" to it. I know that's not a value which is easy to quantify, but I think it's down to a slightly weird architecture and latency because of its heavy dependency on python.
The dependence on Python for configuration is for me a decisive objection. My copy of Textmate has little scripts buried all over it in several languages but with Sublime Text I am completely frozen out, or so it seems.
Actually, Python isn't used for configuration at all, just for writing plugins. JSON is the configuration language. You can even change the menus in the app by editing the Main.sublime-menu.
The reason Python is used for the API is because the editor is cross-platform, and Python is the best choice for such a situation. If you want to run other scripts or programs, you can use the python subprocess module.
Yes, exactly, what are called plugins in Sublime Text jargon can only be written in Python. Thus for example, the illustrations of things you can do with the exciting plugin facility -- duplicating the selected text, or encoding the selected text with rot13 -- involve composing things in Python, of all things, else you are completely disabled.
Actually when I first tried TextMate, in the low 1.x versions, it felt like watching the grass grow between each character press and the glyph appearing on screen.
Probably a multi-ms delay due to regexes for syntax highlighting.
And TextMate is not designed like a standard OS X app, either.
I really hate ST2's handling of project-wide file system controls on the left. Renaming a file keeps the old buffer open and I've been caught a few times re-saving under the old name. I've yet to figure out how to open a project directory from the GUI, too.
I always liked the file browser column in TM better.
Sublime Text 2 is like Java AWT - awful. Cross platform means mediocre. Literarily, because one will have to choose a common denominator. I have tried ST2 several times on OSX and never liked it. Even if TM2 is only an alpha release it feels much better than ST2. I've been using TM2 all day and I really like it. The new stuff comes to light when you start working with the text. Auto-complete, indentation, parsing, highlighting and find/replace are so much better and there are also lots of small nuggets such as multi-selection. It is apparent that the editor/engine part is much improved, more solid and snappy. I think TM2 will be great once it is released.
I also tried it some months ago and didn't like it. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but it somehow felt awkward to me. I just downloaded it again though - going to give it another try before I make my final decision.
