Sublime Forum

About the update

#1

There are quite a few things I do not like about the new update of Sublime Text. The new UI looks horrible. The tabs at the top that were round are now trapezoids which do not look good at all. Then, there’s the bar at the bottom does not look good anymore. Now, I know it can be changed using themes, but it would be nice to have it look good out of the box. Also when I open the find using CTRL + F, the pop-up opens much, much bigger than it used to. I think it looked much better before. In addition, I like using the scripting language, Lua, but it’s not even there anymore. I know that people could get a linter and syntax highlighter online, but as I said above, it would be much better to have it out of the box.I also do not like the new look when suggestions for code come up. In addition, the icon is absolutely hideous. Could that be reverted or add an option like Notepad++ has and be able to switch to the old icon.

I’m not saying that the new UI should be completely scrapped, but an option should be added to change back to the old UI.

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#2

I agree the tabs look old fashioned.

The larger search with Ctrl-F is welcome to me though, and I like the status bar.

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#3

It’s not really feasible to make everybody happy out-of-the-box. That’s why Sublime is so flexible is packagecontrol is so awesome.

Everything you mentioned can be changed. You can prefer someone did it for you, but perhaps your opinion is just one of many, and perhaps you’re better off making the very minor changes you need yourself.

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#4

Well, in my opinion, the new theme looks better.

You said it yourself: you can change the theme. Why would you care about the default one if you can change it forever? You can just ignore it.

And guess what; the size of the find popup depends on the theme!

And guess what; the completion popup is depends on the theme!

I went back to a fresh state, and I still have the lua syntax highlighting…

Anyway… as @braver said, all the thing that you’re complaining about can be changed, except the icon, but what should we care about the icon of a text editor.

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#5

Perhaps it depends on which OS you’re running, but it’s totally possible to change that too.

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#6

UI style is a question of taste.

For all of those who haven’t realized yet - the trend in all major OS is to simplify and flatten the UI. The changes of the ST GUI just reflect that major trend.

As a result it adapts much better to most of the latest OS.

The time of overwhelming and bloating 3D rendered GUIs seems over.

I never liked the old default theme - that was what looked horrible and outdated to me.

So like I said, it’s just a question of taste.

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#7

There are always people who don’t like change, it’s quite predictable. Personally, I love the new design of Sublime Text and it’s the first time I’m using one of the bundled themes. You can’t make everybody happy. However, I think since it was predictable that some (actually: few) people are nagging, the developers could have included the old themes or made them available on Package Control.

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#8

For sure, but it’s always a question of resources. All the theme assets require updates to support the new High-DPI screens. On the other hand there is Retina package which already provides the legacy theme with High-DPI support.

So why copy it?

A couple of topics were opened during the last few days with complains about the new theme. If people would read they would probably have found the alternative to revert the theme already.

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#9

I often think that flat can be good or bad depending how it is done. I’ve noticed this more as flat styling has become increasingly more popular. While I think the flat style in Sublime is good, it isn’t good in all apps and websites. I find in some interfaces that things are so flat that I have to hover around just to see if stuff is clickable as it isn’t always intuitive. Style changes with the times though. Flat won’t last forever, but I like the new UI in Sublime better.

But yeah, I do wonder why the Sublime team didn’t include a “Classic” theme. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the majority of people don’t like change. I remember I wrote an app for work that had UI issues (in regards to workflow). People complained about it at first, but got used to it. A number of years later when I had the opportunity, I reworked the interface to streamline the work flow, but by that point, people were so used to the old problematic interface, their knee jerk reaction was that it was too unfamiliar. In the end it was fine, but people don’t like change.

You can’t please everyone, thank goodness for customization :slight_smile:.

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#10

You always need guys who know enough about a language to write a lexer for. Who of you knows all required details of all default languages? Not to talk about time. I wrote my own lexers for languages I need on work - it requires a lot of detailed knowledge and time to do so. Too much for the core team.

All those things are too language specific to deliver it out of the box. This is the reason why Microsoft introduced the language-server-protocol to outsource such stuff into separate programs. Have a look at KomodoEdit which outsourced all its code intelligence features into a CodeIntel library which is used by SublimeCodeIntel. Many other examples could be mentioned to proof it a bad idea.

With Microsoft’s language-server-protocol the first attempt was made to create a standard-interface for such things. As a result the one and only way to create something out of the box was to adapt to such a standard protocol and create common ways to display completions/tooltips/diagnostics/… provided by different language servers. Now one could discuss whether something like that is to be done by core or not.

You might have a look onto LSP package which tries to get the best out of language-server-protocol for Sublime Text.

But this approach is on both sides still very young and therefore maybe incomplete.

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#11

The TLDR is: time.

There were two (primary) reasons:

  1. There were no source files produced by the original designer. The @1x PNGs that were part of the theme are the only source material available. This means we would have to recreate the theme in vector to be able to provide proper high DPI support, especially moving forward.

  2. We refreshed the Default theme and added a new Adaptive theme, which take a good chunk of time “to do right”. Adding a third theme, having to be (effectively) drawn from scratch, and maintained, means even less time available for core editor features and maintenance (which is impossible for the community to help with). The community can (and has) made an approximation of the original theme (with all of the shortcomings) and made it available to install.

In some sense it would be harder to recreate the old theme and keep our current level of attention to details. The old theme had blurry icons, and different motifs to the panel buttons and other graphical elements. The color of tab highlighting was hard-coded to orange. All scroll bars were very dark, even when the sidebar the color scheme were light. There were a bunch of little things that needed to be addressed, and trying to recreate the old theme while fixing those, would largely result in the new theme. I know a handful of users lament the reduction in gradients and shadows, and some really miss the curve in the tabs, but otherwise most of the changes were cleaning up clear deficiencies.

I do believe that the new default feels very similar to the old default, just freshened up a bit, with more of a contemporary aesthetic. Accusations of it looking just like other editors, IMO, fall flat when you compare them all.

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#12

This may just be a value in your session. The find panel can be expanded and collapsed by the mouse. There is slightly more padding in the panels than there used to be, but I can’t imagine the panel is much more than 15px taller than it used to be.

We still bundle Lua in the default packages. Nothing was changed there. Perhaps ensure you don’t have some disabled packages?

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#13

I like it a lot, I just prefer thinner and less diagonal tabs, I’ve modified it a bit and for now it’s looking like this.

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