Sublime Forum

Whitespace display improvements, + a few other suggestions

#1

Hi all, I originally wrote directly to the Sublime team, who redirected me to this forum.
I’ve been using this tool for a few years now, on an almost daily basis, but only for personal HTML projects, and I’m not a coder by trade.

And that’s what partly brings me here, since Sublime could be one extra notch user-friendly: setting personal preferences (including themes and keyboard shortcuts) is not an easy task for the layman. So why not resort to the good old panel other programs have?

The other and major reason for this post is that I have a strong dislike for the new display of non-regular spaces (non-break and long spaces) as a string of code. I for one would very much rather have it displayed with background color (just like search text is underlined with dashes) while retaining the same monospace width (which should also apply to emojis by the way).

At last, there should be an update check opt-out because seeing the message every time you start up is a bit of a bore…

Thank you for reading those lines, looking forward to seeing your answers :slight_smile:

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#2

ST doesn’t enforce a package must provide its settings schema. It’s like 99% of them don’t. I can’t see how someone can provide UI for them.

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#3

There’s no API to provide such a classic preferences GUI.

What probably would make sense was to

  1. render merged content of all settings files of certain name from all packages on the left.
  2. provide global, OS specific and syntax-specific settings on the right via tabs.

Actually, PackageDev and LSP-json however provide already pretty good support by providing completions and popups to make settings editing easier.

This can to some degree controlled by

"draw_unicode_white_space": "none",

and maybe

"draw_unicode_bidi": false,
"control_character_style": "hex",

It may be possible to add regions for them via plugins, but I am uncertain about the outcome with regards to performance, when trying to update those after each keystroke in large documents.

Licensed users can set "update_check": false to disable automatic upgrade dialog popping up.

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