Sublime Forum

I Present To You: The Sublime Manifesto

#1

This is a culmination of Ideas and Feature Requests I have either had myself or come across from this forum (some of which I have mentioned in posts that have been lost or ignored). It is more or less a vision I have for seeing ST2 improve and become more [new] user-friendly. Feel free to offer feedback, add to the list, or criticize my artistic vision.

  1. Improve the sidebar:
    a.)clicking a folder should add focus to the folder AND expand/collapse it.
    b.)user should be able to select multiple items using shift + arrow keys
    c.)users should be able to designate keybindings for when the sidebar has focus (example: command+d could duplicate currently selected file)
    d.) there needs to be a visible indication for when the sidebar has focus (e.g. change color of selected folder/file)

  2. Improve Preview Feature:

  • Add visual indication of the view is showing a view or a preview. My advice would be to add an ‘x’ to the top right of the preview, which when pressed would close the preview and return the view to any overridden files. Perhaps add some extra drop shadow to add the impression that the preview is merely on top of the view and the previous file has not been lost (this can be confusing for new users).

  1. The active view should have some type of highlight/outline to distinguish it from all the other views.

  2. Better support for custom layouts. For example, some modifier keys + arrow keys could split the current view in the given direction. This makes more sense because rarely do I think, “I could really benefit from a 3 by 2 layout right about now.” Rather, I think, “I wish I could easily split the view vertically/horizontally.”

[COMPLETE] 5. Fix renaming: renaming a file in the sidebar should update the tab if the file is open. This is definitely the expected behavior and the current implementation is frustrating at best.

  1. Add support for anything wuub wants because he put a goddam terminal inside Sublime! And I want to play with it :smile:
  • This means adding Sublime.DRAW_RECTANGULAR_NO_BORDER

[COMPLETE] 7. New Icon. Now hear me out on this one. I know you might want to wait on that until a stable release of ST2 is out (as it non-beta) but there are implications. I know from experience that most Mac users are extremely conceited when it comes to icons and are willing to dismiss an app based solely on its icon. My recommendation is try a new icon and if people come to a popular consensus about another one, just switch. All this icon testing should be done on the dev channel as to not confuse users and work on rebranding your icon. cough You should definitely consider this icon by this amazing artist of whom of I have no connection to: boundincode.com/img/Portfolio/portfolio5.png cough

  1. New website. You have many talented web-designers at your disposal who are willing to help. This is another thing I’m sure you planned on doing towards the release of ST2 stable. This would make the most sense because all the Sublime Text 1 stuff needs to be removed first. You probably don’t need to have the default home screen showing Sublime Text 1 anymore.

  2. Docs :smile:
    I’d offer to help write some documentation, but I can only write sarcastically :smile:

If I missed anything major, I’ll consider adding it to the list. This list is not meant to sound negative or condescending in any way. This is just the direction I’d like to see this beautiful piece of software moving in.

P.S. Whenever I say “you,” I’m talking to Jon. That’s right, I talking to you Jon.

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Bindings Context For When Focus Is On Empty Group|Cell
Where is the tab
Request to allow disabling of "Preview Tab/View"
#2

Nice list dude.

I like pretty much of all of what you said, especially 3,4 and 6:

haha I want a repl! Don’t care one iota about 7 but I’m sure lots do.

Hopefully the sidebar will receive a loving sweep like autocompletion got recently. Would be nice to be able to get the open files that are selected in the plugins. I don’t think you can currently? You can only do it on files in the folders trees. If you click on a file that is open to target it for a command, suddenly it’s focused in the Open Files or some Group \d and you can’t do squat with it.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts on 3/4 but my stomach is grumbling.

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#3
  1. Ponies. Because everyone loves a pony. And Unicorns are a little harder to catch.
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#4

Project selector window. I want to be able to delete some old projects.

And yeah, ponies.

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#5

I’m wuub and I support this message :smiley:

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#6

haha

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#7

So where can we vote on this feature to show Jon that we want this?

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#8

I believe that Jon would have already read this topic :smile: He’s a good man like that, I’m sure he listens - but he has a big list of things to do first I believe.

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#9

my collegues have stopped to 1.4 only because in that version the minimap could be positioned to right or left…
i agree in one thing: why take out a feature from an earlier version? it’s better to let choose to the users…
Sry form my bad eng but it’s necessary

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#10

Yep. This is more or less things that were already mentioned across the forum that I believe deserve some attention. While everyone will have their hundreds of features to request, I tried to focus on bringing to light issues that hinter the average user from taking full advantage of Sublime. While not as confusing as, say, Vim, Sublime does have a learning curve. Making that first step as painless as possible is perhaps most important for Sublime to continue to expand. Additionally, the majority of feature requests presented on this forum are possible through a plugin.

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#11

I really **dislike **the sidebar behaviours, and very disturbs my mind and thinking.

I can enumerate some:

1 - It lose your selection
2 - you can’t disable the preview.
3 - the preview make you lost focus of your “current tab”
4 - very difficult to close the preview tab.
5 - clicking a png(binary) popups a new “preview tab” which whole ouput is a lot of unreadable garbage which sometimes makes sublime hangs.
6 - It makes packages such SFTP useless because you can’t “stick” your selection of files to “upload” ( imagine debugging a couple of files many times doing testing on a server with a simple -> right click -> upload )
7 - It scroll by itself
8 - You can’t select a folder. When you need to select for example two folders you need to unselect the “focused tab” (on sidebar) first.
9 - Right clicking a file opens the “preview” thing which makes my package sidebar enhancementsvery annoying because is very difficult and sometimes hangs when you need to do cut, copy and paste operations on binary files.
10 - CTRL + Right click select files and folders.
11 - You need to do TWO click to focus the sidebar. I guess this is because of the “preview tab” thing. It adds a chance to write to the focused tab.
12 - IT needs to keep overflow(scroll past end) to prevent self-scrolling of the sidebar when opening/closing a folder near bottom. Think of scrolling as something that moves unexpectedly your entire left portion of the screen.
13 - The sidebar is distracting, some people ( me ) prefer to have the sidebar on the right side. The left side(gutter) should be the end of the screen (black hole). Also if you use black background for code but light background for sidebar the contrast kill your eyes.
14 - if you really use sublime for working everyday, some of this points are disgusting, because you hit these many times in a day.

Additional to the ability to remove the preview feature you can improve it by looking at my comments here.

Talking about overall sublime, I sometimes forget this is work in progress, but however, I think most people will prefer to opt-in features instead of being pushed “by design”. The problem of “by design” is when it breaks in a hard way what you expect by degradating your experience or workflow to provide a simple “feature” that is only really useful for a very minimal userbase.

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Request to allow disabling of "Preview Tab/View"
#12

I decided to scrape together a basic concept for my proposed improvements to the “Preview.”

Here it is:

Improved Preview UI Concept.png845×748 68.7 KB

This to note:

  1. I added an ‘x’ that would potentially close the preview and return the view to the underlying file.
  2. The previewed file appears under the “Open file” list, but has a tag next to it labeled “preview” Pressing this ‘x’ would also close the preview.
  3. Some drop shadows and highlights to give the impression that the preview is merely “on top of” the other file.

So what do you think?

P.S. The image is best viewed in a new tab so you can see the whole thing at once without the scrolling :smile:

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