For developers hacking on Sublime itself, having 2 sticky topics would be immensely helpful.
The “docs” on both of these are almost entirely reliant on Stack Overflow or Textmate’s docs.
@Admins, what do you say?
A similiar suggestion was made here but unfortunately got no response, despite the admins being pinged.
I agree that documentation in certain areas is lacking - it seems to be expected that we would somehow magically know that many aspects are borrowed from ofher editors and which those are
Agreed.
I made a related post a while back & never received a response from any of the admins.
I have been developing my very first UI theme and color scheme, and have been documenting the problems here temporarily: https://github.com/kevinSuttle/Architect-Theme/issues
I’ll happily close them and move them here if there is a sticky post or separate forum for it.
I’ve been working on the default syntaxes a lot over the past few months. Part of this work is improving the correctness, but also making the scopes more consistent. My plan after doing a pass through the syntaxes is to write some official Sublime Text docs about what scopes should be used in syntaxes, plus a document describing what a reasonably-complete color scheme should handle.
Right now this information is in flux, and I don’t yet have a complete picture of all the commonly-used scopes, so I couldn’t really write useful docs. Similarly, making a topic feel official-ish by sticky-ing it would just be giving creedence to info that will be inaccurate in a couple of days.
In terms of theme development, I haven’t done that before, so I wouldn’t be able to judge if documentation is correct or even useful. Hopefully this will change at some point in the future.
So, that is why I haven’t made any sticky topics.
I answered an SO question about a particular color scheme setting (shadow) today, in case that will be useful
Documentation should not be “pinned” on some forum. It should be available at its own dedicated place, such as the official or the unofficial documentation pages.
I’m not talking about docs. I’m talking about a centralized place for developers to share knowledge and ask questions. The resulting information and best practices would then be fed into official docs.
Maybe there could be categories for theme & color development? I think they’re different enough from plugins.
If you’re arguing about that, we’d need a category for syntaxes, snippets and completions as well.
Instead, I would say that “plugin development” should instead be renamed to “package development” and everything created there. That’s how the category has always been used in the past anyway.
Or, if you prefer, additionally create a sub-category for “plugins” under “package development”.
I propose making a pinned thread that address frequently asked questions along with relevant links to external documentation and/or threads with solutions.
For example, AutoHotkey and XYplorer both have pinned sections which are very concise & address most of the FAQs that new users will have.
Some common topics that could be mentioned:
I think a useful improvement would be to create a #resources Category, so that #plugin-development can be used more for Q&A ( as it mostly is now ) and the #resources category could be used for proven solutions that don’t necessarily meet the criteria of official documentation.
#resources is also pretty general, so we wouldn’t need micro-categories as mentioned in your quoted concern.
As it stands now, there are a ton of duplicate questions ( which continue to be asked ) on the forum and there aren’t any mechanisms in place to minimize them.
I think both of the proposed solutions in this post are at least a good start to doing so.
I believe it would be a good idea to have “temporarily” pinned threads, that relate to known bugs that are being worked on. Some people don’t search the forum before posting bugs, and sometimes the report (and any response) may be a fairly hidden post in one of the “new build available” topics and not clear even if you do find it.
For example, we recently got lots of duplicates about the HTML indentation not working and the JavaScript syntax highlighting for $ etc., and I think having a quick and clear way to see current known “bugs” that are being fixed would be really helpful. Once the problem is solved, there is no need to keep the thread sticky.
I can also see the use for a sticky topic that will mention what procedure to follow if a bug is found with syntax highlighting in one of the default packages.
That way, people will know (how) to try the latest version of the syntax definition, and that, if they still encounter problems, they should report it directly to the issues list for the default packages repo on GitHub. This should make things a lot more manageable 
The idea being that the average user probably doesn’t know about the GitHub repo 
great minds think alike