Coming from someone who has never used or tried Sublime Text, how does this compare to Vim in general? It's taken quite a while to grow familiar with Vim, is it worth the learning curve to ditch it now and try Sublime? Are the two really that different? A lot of what I'm seeing looks like things that can be done in Vim, but I might be missing something.
I've tried it when the first public ST2 builds were released. I kept downloading new builds from time to time out of curiosity but I ended up removing it definetely a while ago.
What I liked: well, I didn't actually like anything beside the ease of modifying/adding keybindings.
Some of what I didn't like:
* The whole UI felt wrong from alpha to omega and overly gimmicky: the whole thing relied too much on the mouse and the things that relied completely on the mouse like the options in the search panel were poorly sized/designed. The many roundrects and shades and gradients created a mess that left a very bad impression.
* The underlying engine is very poorly used by ST: just activating vintage mode is enough to tap a lot deeper than the default UI lets you. The engine is great but it only shines when you try to use it as another app. That's weird.
Using Vim is a spoiler, I guess.
I can't reasonably tell you to not make the switch. I have no idea what knowledge you have of Vim but I can say that I find Vim not only extremelly more powerful than ST but also a lot better designed on almost all fronts.
Once the beauty of subsitutions, :global, ranges, Ex commands, text-objects and motions is ingrained in your brain, using ST2 may feel like using (a pretty) TextEdit. Hell, even folding is nicer in Vim.
In the last year, I had the impression that a bunch of people blogged about their decision to switch to ST2 from Vim. Each time, I felt that the blogger didn't use much of Vim to begin with so switching may have made some kind of sense. If you are reasonnably advanced, I don't think there's any reason to switch.
The UI looks very much like a programmer wrote it. But I can ignore the gradients and the Soda UI theme makes it look more like a native app.
But the find panel is the sole reason I cannot use ST2. Every time I bring it up I can't remember what button does what. And then I get stuck in the panel and have to click to get rid of it. Or hit escape.
But if I hit escape before hitting enter it assumes I didn't want to search after all and scrolls the viewport to somewhere random. Even though the term I wanted to search for is clearly highlighted on the screen.
It's a very very frustrating experience and even my co-worker who uses ST2 every day for the past year or two still gets tripped up by the find panel.
If I had a way to import the TextMate 2 find dialog into ST2 /3 I would buy a license.
Agreed, the find and replace UI in ST2 is extremely frustrating. The essential functionality is all there, but the changing behaviour of different keys depending on context drives me crazy, particularly the way you need enter vs. escape to get back to editing, and the meanings of F3 and Shift+F3 swapping depending on whether your last search was forward or backward. Also, it's silly that you seem to need to mess around with the mouse to change basic find options like case sensitivity or using regexes, and to set the locations affected when finding/replacing across files. Tidying up the keyboard shortcuts in this area would bring a huge benefit in usability for a relatively small change in behaviour, IMHO.
Sublime works better out of the box and is arguably prettier. But if you like modal editing then Sublime may not be for you.
There is Vintage mode, but IMO it doesn't work very well. The differences are small but numerous, and it's very annoying when the behaviour doesn't match Vim's. Others have rightly pointed out that many advanced features are missing, but I'm not talking about those - I'm talking about your bread and butter navigation/editing commands.
To make matters worse, while there is the occasional pull request, official development of Vintage mode seems to be at a complete halt.
I purchased Sublime and really, really tried switching to it (I think I gave it about six months), but I had to switch back.
I'm in the same boat. I still think NERDTree, NERDCommenter, surround plugin, modelines and ability to use the same editor AND plugins in an SSH console is unbeatable combination. I can edit from my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard on my Linode VPS.
I really liked Sublime but VIM like a good pair of Levis' 501 never goes out of style.
I'm a vim/textmate user and I found sublimes UX to be lacking polish and the UI overall needed work.
I like textmates uniform OSX style and VIMs uniform terminal style, using the "Tomorrow" theme on both [1].
Although I'm also a part designer so the aesthetics matter to me as much as functionality. If you're measuring functionality I can't imagine sublimes better than VIM.
With a few basic JSON edits I was able to make Sublime look pretty sexy. Its spartan appearance matches it's utilitarian nature. I find it very comfortable and trusty. I agree that TextMate has the OS X polish that I too prefer but it's development has stagnated a bit in comparison. There is definitely a place for ST right in the middle of Vim and TextMate. Heck, if the Sublime guys could whip up a better Dock icon that'd go a long way.
You can use a vim emulation mode in sublime so all your hard work wasn't for nothing but I believe some of the more advanced vim features don't work in sublime.
The advantage of sublime is that it works well out of the box and with package control it is very easy to install any package you may need.
If you decide to give it a try, try sublime 2 with package control (I believe the trial is still free for sublime 2).
It's not just the advanced features. Even basic features are completely broken. Pressing undo several times can occasionally break out of undoing and start editing your document on your behalf - spewing a slew of "uuuuuu" into your document, which - guess what - ruins any hope you have of reverting back to the original document state.
Gvim always used to work fine for me when I was developing a C# system, the awkward thing was the naming conventions being broken for everything so I had to go on a renaming binge.
The vintage mode is excellent. It's the best emulation of vim that I've used.
Sadly I can't run ST2 on our work machines as the RHEL version we use has a libc (glibc?) that is too old. I'm unable to host my own libc due to a binary format change that is incompatible with the system dynamic loader.
Which ones have you tried? Vintage mode is most impressive considering it's so small (code-wise), but I don't find it particularly good at even the basics (a lot of commands have subtle behavioural differences).
It's better than IDEAVim, but certainly ViEmu and jVi are better. Maybe even Vrapper and XVim beat it too.
