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.
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.