The story of TextMate, VIM and SublimeText

http://progfu.com/post/16407410728/the-story-of-textmate-vim-and-sublimetext

by darthdeus • 14 years ago

118 76 14 years ago

tylerlh• 14 years ago

I can't recommend Sublime Text 2 enough to do it justice. Such a fantastic editor.

chj2• 14 years ago

I would like to try any of these if I am not so addicted to org-mode. I can't live without emacs despite that I hate its slowness very much.

darthdeus4• 14 years ago

I used to be really addicted to hardcore code completition and refactorings for Java in IntelliJ, it just felt like there is no other way. I had the same feeling when I was considering Sublime while using VIM, I thought there's no other way to edit text than the way VIM does it. And both time it paid off that I gave another editor a try :)

Derbasti9• 14 years ago

Learning a new tool is learning a new way to think. It always pays off.

rmccue• 14 years ago

I can't vouch for it, but Sublime does have a port of org-mode: https://bitbucket.org/rchl/sublime_orgmode/overview

Might be worth a try.

Derbasti9• 14 years ago

I tried it. It is good. It supports lists, with checkboxes, and completion ([1/3]). It supports some links.

It does not support tables. You can not reorder entries. It does not support code blocks. You can fold, but you can not narrow (i.e. all headlines stay there, but content is folded away). Your favorite keyboard shortcuts are not there (though you can change that easily).

As much as I like Sublime Text, I am more productive in Emacs.

nyellin7• 14 years ago

Try Emacs with evil mode for Vim emulation. It doesn't get better than this. It is almost like having a lisp-based Vim.

beggi2• 14 years ago

I am a former user of both TextMate and Sublime Text.

The TextMate story everybody knows, it was good at first but got stale with no updates. I feel Sublime Text is fantastic, but after reading some article on Janus (https://github.com/carlhuda/janus) I switched over to MacVim.

After fiddling around with Vim for a while I can honestly say I'll need some serious convincing to switch to another editor. I've always stayed away from Vim except through occasional need for text editing through SSH or something, because out of the box it doesn't feel quite right. But after Janus sets up some sane defaults it feels great, and after putting a few hours in to learn all the shortcuts and study plugins I have never felt as productive.

I feel like Janus is sort of training wheels though cause it has a lot of plugins I don't use etc, but it's great to start and as I use Vim more I reckon I will start to manage my own .vimrc.

P.S., bcvi is so awesome.

darthdeus4• 14 years ago

The good thing about janus is that it also provides a simple framework for customizing your plugins, even if you change all of the original settings.

I've made my own fork (https://github.com/darthdeus/janus) and basically removed 90% of the default plugins and settings and repalced them with my own, but I still use it for the Rake task and nice directory structure.

maidenvoyag3• 14 years ago

This is actually my first post ever on HN. It is in fact not very often that I post anywhere on the interwebs. But I have to speak up.

Can. We. Stop. Posting. About. Fng. Text. Editors.

Please.

Imagine a room where you teleport in computer greats (in no order of importance, and I am probably forgetting tons of worthy people in my pang of internet angst) such as Gates, Torvalds, Ritchie, Thompson, von Neumann, Knuth, Turing, Carmack, ..., Joy, Berners-Lee, Babbage, Stroustrup, Dijkstra, Norvig, Moore, Noyce. I don't think these guys would start talking about text editing, so why should we?

darthdeus4• 14 years ago

People talk about what's important to them. For some it might be proving that SVN is stupid (Torvalds?) and for others it might be proving that one editor is superior to others (SublimeText 2 obviously </sarcasm>).

beggi2• 14 years ago

Oh yes, I can't imagine a room full of professionals talking about the tools they use to get their job done.

hwiechers• 14 years ago

"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." - Pablo Picasso

Jimmie• 14 years ago

"I don't trust un-cited quotes on the internet anymore" - Gandhi

burgerbrain• 14 years ago

"why should we?"

Because we want to, that's why.

If you don't want to, feel free to ignore it.

Derbasti9• 14 years ago

This could be my story, even though in the end (after Textmate, then Vim), Emacs tempted me more than Sublime Text and I eventually switched back to it from Sublime Text 2.

There is too much accredited awesomeness in Emacs (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Vim), to be overthrown by a newcomer. That said, Sublime Text is very worthy competition and given a few years, it might actually live up to those two dinosaurs.

Derbasti9• 14 years ago

He talks about the Destroy All Software Screencasts. Are they worth it?

darthdeus4• 14 years ago

If you're into TDD and Ruby, then they're probably the best ones you can find. But if you don't like testing, then I would suggest saying away :) There's a free one that you can check out here https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts on the bottom of the page ... and see if you like it.

nyellin7• 14 years ago

If the author could switch that easily to SublimeText, he wasn't properly using Vim.

Chirono• 14 years ago

Care to elaborate on that? I'm fairly entry-level when it comes to vim and I'd be interested to hear some good examples of what it can do over something like sublime.

alinajaf2• 14 years ago

The level of comfort using vim for a proficient user is very very high, so much so that it becomes difficult to switch out to other editors. I'm quite sure that textmate, sublime and emacs are perfectly good editors, but there's no way I could ever switch full time.

If you're a touch-typist and you become proficient in vim, the friction between thinking about an edit and it materializing on the screen in front of you is reduced. I think 'whoops, need a comma there', my hands move around a little without thinking and the edits done. Contrast this with move hand to mouse, click where you want to edit, hit backspace, type in new character.

IME this is not necessarily faster, just a lot more comfortable once you get used to it.

A lot of comments will say 'you can have vi-mode in <other editor>' but I've yet to see an implementation that covers the entirety of normal mode _and_ supports custom remaps, and even then the mappings would need an interface to its plugins before it approaches a vim-like environment.

nyellin7• 14 years ago

I'm fairly proficient with both Vim and Emacs and I can feel it when I'm not using either editor. For example, I'm using a browser on Windows and I want to jump to a line's end. In Emacs (or on OS X which uses Emacs shortcuts), that's Ctrl-E and in Vim that's $. On Windows, I fumble with the arrow keys or start reaching for the mouse.

When you really know a fundamental text editor, that sensation of helplessness gets worse and worse when you can't use the shortcuts that are burned into your fingers.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, I suggest reading the StackOverflow answer "Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi."

http://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118

IgorPartola• 14 years ago

Fast fuzzy search across your entire project is called grep. Why do we keep rediscovering tools that have existed for such a long time?

Edit: I suppose people keep rediscovering these tools because even if they use vim, they often times insist on running it as a stand-alone GUI application, rather than in a terminal emulatir where the built-in task switching/multitasking makes it very easy to run complex shell commands, move files around, use your VCS and switch back to your editor. Another benefit is that now you can have the exact same work environment over ssh as locally.

microtonal• 14 years ago

First, grep requires specify intermediate characters. For instance, to match SublimeText, you need the regular expression 'S.*B', while in Sublime you could just type 'SB'. (Neither is better, they just serve different purposes.)

Second, grep is not comparable, it's a different tool. For instance, if you would want to open the openCorpus function in the file MainWindow.cpp, in Sublime you'd just type "MWcp@opC", and you are there. While typing the pane and window dynamically update, allowing you to narrow down the 'search space' quickly.

Grep is for searching for text strings in files in the shell or shell scripts. Sublime's Goto Anything is for searching files and symbols in a text editor.

Edit: I like and use both vim and ST2, but neither grep, ctags, nor Peepopen provide the smooth experience of 'Goto Anything'. Of course, conversely vim also has many things to like over ST2 (such as modeful editing that is definitely better than ST2's Vintage).

gabyar• 14 years ago

Nope, fast fuzzy search is closer to find than grep since it looks for files. But it requires less keystrokes and precision, allow you to be lazier. It's a much more fluid experience.

I still use grep a lot while using ST2, but I use it for other purposes.

cmurphycode• 14 years ago

I think one huge benefit is the "instant"-esque nature of a find as you type fuzzy search in a GUI.

In Bash, you can do incremental (find as you type) history search with Ctrl+R. Something analogous for grep would be fantastic. Displaying more than one result at a time would also be great.

Another thing that grep/find lacks is a index that could make large fuzzy searches faster, but clearly that can be added too.

losvedir• 14 years ago

Three key differences: 1) The search occurs as you type, so you don't need to specify more of a query than you need to. 2) ST2 searches delineate between searching file names and searching file contents, (with, e.g. "#") and you can combine both in a single query, if you want, to go to a particular location in a particular file. 3) At the end of the search you can hit "Enter" to go to the found file and edit it, or "Esc" to return to where you were before the search (which is great for just poking into another file to check something).

In fact, thinking about it now, they're quite different. The thing that grep excels at can't even be done easily (that I know of) in ST2: "I'm looking for this function called xyz, but I don't remember which file in this directory it's in."

batista2• 14 years ago

Fast fuzzy search across your entire project is called grep. Why do we keep rediscovering tools that have existed for such a long time?

Yeah. And a car is called a horse carriage. Why do we keep rediscovering tools that have existed for such a long time? (facepalm)

Grep does not:

1) know about the scope of the project, i.e what files to search, without instructed so specifically.

2) have knowledge of code structure (methods, classes, etc). So "fuzzy" here means just using regex.

3) does not know how to present you with the results in a way that you can open quickly in tabs, etc.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

Also worth noting that ST2 has a vim emulation mode, called "vintage" mode. IIRC it's just a native ST2 plugin in python.

llimllib2• 14 years ago

As a long-time vim user, I found it to be obviously incompatible within moments.

nuclear_eclipse• 14 years ago

As another long-time vim user, it's more of a vi-compatible mode, and isn't anywhere near perfect, but it's good enough that I get modal editing with the majority of movements and commands that I use in day-to-day editing. Most of the "missing" vi/vim features just don't have appropriate command-mode bindings, so it's simply a matter of getting used to the default ST2 bindings for those, or doing some leg work to make those vintage bindings that you really care about.

I've only been using ST2 for a few weeks on a Python project, but I feel that the end result is better for me than trying to patch together a chain of vim plugins. I gladly give up a few of the more esoteric vim features for the integrated project editing features of ST2.

dgalling• 14 years ago

Has anyone else experienced the slowness the author described with Vim? I think it's possible he may be experiencing slow terminal update time (the OS X terminal is really slow in the scenario he described) instead of Vim being the culprit. MacVim, for example, doesn't have this problem, in my experience.

eridius3• 14 years ago

Did he edit the article? I don't see anything about vim being slow.

hackada• 14 years ago

All this is fine, but I definitely need a debugger with a gui

g3orge• 14 years ago

PeepOpen supports Vim as well.

gexla• 14 years ago

Vim has the keyboard entry conquered. Emacs may come close enough, but if we are talking photo finishes to races, then I think Vim always edges out emacs by a hair or more (but still misses a lot which Emacs provides.) We will have to get a totally different interface for entering text before Vim is knocked off its perch.

Emacs has a much better Vim mode for me than SublimeText 2, but neither can really give you Vim. The deeper you are in the Vim rabbit hole, the less likely you will be to return to try anything else.

Emacs wins out against everyone for scripting.

There is one other reason that I knew would always keep me in the Vim and Emacs world. At first I couldn't figure out what it was that bothered me about SublimeText 2. Vim and Emacs is open source! I don't see this point mentioned in arguments for or against but this is important to me.

Derbasti9• 14 years ago

The thing about Emacs is really its extensibility. There is simply no other text editor out there that can open a single C/C++ source file and automatically infer all tags (even of included headers) without any kind of project set up. That is simply awesome and to my knowledge only available with semantic-mode in Emacs.

Vim can use ctags or cscope or clang, but that is not the same thing. These are great tools, but they need to be set up with the correct include paths and they need to be run regularly to be useful.

To my mind, that is what makes Emacs so unique and powerful and that is something that really, no other program can hope to accomplish in a short time frame (sorry, Sublime Text).

That said, Vim hands down beats Emacs when it comes to pure text editing speed. It's keybindings are just a lot more powerful and flexible than Emacs's. And of course, that is what evil-mode is for. It emulates a subset of Vim in Emacs. It is by far the best simulation of Vim I have ever seen (judging from ViEmu, Viper, Vintage, Vico and Vimpulse), but it is not the real thing. Plus, there are lots of great Vim plugins that do not work in evil-mode.

I, for one, use Emacs and Evil and I am happy with it.

And I hope that Sublime Text will provide a potent entry-level drug for the next generation. But really, without open sourcing it at some point, I can't see it catching up to The Big Two.

lobster_johnson4• 14 years ago

> There is simply no other text editor out there that can open a single C/C++ source file and automatically infer all tags (even of included headers) without any kind of project set up.

The SublimeClang plugin for Sublime will do this, pretty much. You may have to add a few paths to its global or per-project config file, but that's pretty obvious considering that it needs them to parse referenced files. It works extremely well, giving you autocompletion of any C/C++ symbol as well as automatic compilation error indicators.

rdouble• 14 years ago

I recently switched from Emacs to Vim, because Emacs is pretty much unusable on an iPhone or iPad. Vim seems pretty good on a touchscreen. There are things I miss but as a former Emacs snob I'm pleasantly surprised at how powerful and extensible Vim is.

eridius3• 14 years ago

I switched from emacs to vim because I was tired of typing `git commit` and waiting 3-5 seconds for emacs to finish launching and setting up. Since switching to vim I've installed more vim plugins than I ever had in emacs, and yet I can still launch gvim (not just vim, but the GUI version!) in a fraction of a second.

naner• 14 years ago

I agree, especially after witnessing TextMate go stale and TextMate2 start to follow the Duke Nukem Forever release schedule. When I see a project like IntelliJ, I'm confident they will be around awhile. Looking at TextMate and SublimeText... I'm a little hesitant. The development muscle doesn't appear very robust. If a lead developer (or the only developer) gets hit by a bus is the project going to disappear?

batista2• 14 years ago

Being open source doesn't change that. Lots of open source project have gone stale or abandoned after one or more key developers lost interest.

Unless people are going to step up and take the lead, being open source means nothing. If you want some assurance in this area it should be:

1) project is open source AND 2) project has a HUGE community AND 3) there are > 2-3 key developers

(I added (2) because even hugely successful open source projects where abandoned and left in the cold when most members of the core team decided to try something different. Like, how, D (the language) was abandoned for D2 (the second, different implementation).

allertonm• 14 years ago

Title is incorrect, should be: "A story about me".

This seems kind of grouchy I know, but I am getting a bit tired of these wildly overblown titles attached to very thin blog posts. I knew what I'd see when I clicked the link and was just as disappointed as I'd expected to be. I guess I have a masochistic streak.

The actual stories of those three editors, their authors and how those stories intertwine would probably be pretty interesting. I guess I'll have to wait for This American Life to tackle it.

there• 14 years ago

maybe http://thisdeveloperslife.com/ can do a show about it.

acabal• 14 years ago

SublimeText is great, but after using it for a few weeks I went back to Komodo Edit. The reason is because I do a lot of PHP work, and Komodo Edit by far has the best PHP autocomplete I've found.

There's a plugin for SublimeText that supposedly imports the same autocomplete engine that Komodo uses. In my experience, however, it was slow, rarely worked right, and was actively broken for CSS autocompletes (which I also need frequently).

So it's back to Komodo Edit for me, at least until SublimeText gets its autocomplete act together. Which is a shame because I really liked ST as an editor.

raingrove• 14 years ago

I must say I am really impressed by the speed and performance of SublimeText 2. If they can get the vintage mode (vim mode) right, I might really consider switching. At the moment it's nowhere near perfect.

The story of TextMate, VIM and SublimeText

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