Sublime Forum

Interested in purchasing Sublime, but I have questions

#1

Hey all! A friend recommended this program to me for code editing, but I had some concerns. Right now I have DW CS3; I was planning on upgrading to ColdFusion Builder 3, but I have no idea when it’s coming out, and I noticed that CF Builder 2 was exceptionally slow and bloated. I work on a Windows 7 x64 environment, and the languages I was interested in knowing that Sublime supported were:

ColdFusion 10
HTML5
CSS3
JavaScript/jQuery
LESS/SASS
SQL

The more I thought of it, I don’t need all the extra things many IDEs do. I just need a good code editor that helps me write code quickly, to my personal tastes, and affords me the customizations I need. To that end, can someone tell me if Sublime supports:

Custom Code Coloring
Remembering Code Collapse Ranges

And the last thing I was wondering was a personal love of mine, but I haven’t seen any editor allow it. Source formatting is VERY important to me. Not only do I hope the editor has per-language source formatting, but one of the rare features I see too few editors offer is “aligned attributes”. For example, I don’t like code that looks like this:

Instead, I’d love it if the editor would allow specified tags (not all) to format as follows (I hope the forum allows this to come through properly)

In other words, the equal sign and value are visually lined up with tabs depending on the longest attribute name.

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#2

Sublime can probably do all that. I just decided not to purchase because I don’t get support answers, and there’s very very few fixes in half a year according to sublimetext.com/3dev. That’s alarming considering the number of unanswered support requests on this forum (and on mail, I hear) It’s not as robust a product as it claims to be…

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#3

Good point. That’s definitely something to be mindful of.

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#4

Yes there is syntax highlighting available. There are plugin that provide more specialized highlighting (e.g supports CSS3) if it isn’t built in. In terms of remembering folded regions, there is BufferScroll. I haven’t used it, but I know it’s one of the features of that plugin. Source formatting will likely be supported by a plugin. Though, I don’t know many plugins for that, I’m relatively certain they exist. As the plugins are written in python, you could always explore writing your own plugin or extending an existing plugin that suites your needs better (if you want to). As @Aegis wrote, the lack of updates is troubling to some. There are posts asking about for an update from jps (Jon what is the future of Sublime Text?). I can’t say how good jps is at answering support emails, but the forum is okay (in my opinion). It is community driven, so it’s not possible for us to know how to answer all of the questions.

Anyways, even with the drawbacks of a lack of updates and lack of support on some issues, ST fits my workflow. One of the upsides to ST is you can “trial” it, full featured, completely free. This allows you to use the editor, explore different plugins, and determine if it fits your workflow without spending anything. If the ST3 trial is the same as ST2, you will get an occasional pop up asking you to purchase a license, but that’s fair as it is technically a trial.

sublimetext.com/3

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#5

Just to add to skuroda’s last paragraph, on the subject of “robustness” as pointed out by Kaniken.

Sublime is not perfect, but the vast majority of issues raised in the forums fall into the category of “niggles” in my opinion. A niggle is something that can be easily avoided or worked around and doesn’t lose your work or any substantial amount of time. Sublime has a number of niggles, but I could say the same about almost any program or tool I use. I’d love to see such things addressed and a more rapid pace of development with Sublime - as would many people here I suspect - but it’s good enough for me and better than anything else for the majority of programming work I do.

From the programming perspective of “robust”, I would say that Sublime - at least v2 - certainly is. I’ve used ST3 on and off but not enough in anger to be sure. But I hear good things from colleagues: few have any complaints and many use it as a daily driver, some with big projects.

For the rest I’m with skuroda: try it for yourself for as long as you like. If it fits your workflow and saves you time and/or money, consider supporting the developer. On the whole I think that’s pretty fair, though there are some who (quite vocally) disagree.

To the OP’s other points:

  • Syntax colouring is pretty flexible in Sublime, although you’ll need to get your hands dirty with some XML if you want to roll your own or customise those provided. The system is compatible with Textmate; one XML file handles language definition and “scopes” for colouring, and another defines colours for the scopes. Plenty of people have made custom colour and language definition files and you get a decent selection thrown in. This tool is quite handy if you want to play around with colours. Sublime also has “themes” which can re-skin the rest of the interface.
  • As for alignment and formatting, there are a few plugins out there that do this, or you can write your own. Writing python extensions for Sublime is fairly easy especially if all you want is to manipulate buffer text. Some plugins like HTMLtidy use web-services to do this. This post on SO and this package might be of interest.
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