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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

I take heed when so many people are fans of something but after trying it out I feel like I'm missing out on what makes this editor so awesome.

Can someone explain to me why this is better than Textmate, MacVim or UltraEdit?

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It's basically the same thing as textmate, only actively updated and with some extra features.

For me, the main advantage over textmate is split-screen layout.

And runs on Linux, unlike Textmate.

and Windows, unlike Textmate

I was a long-time TextMate user. The main advantage that ST has of TM is that the Go To Anything (files, functions in a file) feature is much, much faster than TextMate's. It also shows you the contents of files as you type, so you can sneak a peek at a file, copy some text, without actually opening the file in a new tab. The full project search has a less native-looking interface than TM but it's faster, especially on huge projects.

It runs on other platforms. "e" always felt like a hack to me on windows. I use Linux and it runs PERFECTLY. I was a Textmate lover and it feels great to have an editor that can use Mate's plugins and themes AND extend the possibilities.

For one, the mini-map feature. I believe it was fairly unique a few years ago, don't know if it still is.

mini-map should be turned off by default.

What a kitschy "feature"

hmm. I use Sublime Text 2 every day and I don't think it's kitschy at all. I can't even imagine why you would put the word feature in quotes. It's one of my favorite features even after using it for months.

It's like having all of the benefits of a scrollbar with the addition of getting an overview of the file you're working on. When I need to scroll to a specific location in a file, my eyes flick over to the minimap and I know where I am in the file. It's subtle and unobtrusive when I don't need it so I barely notice it otherwise. I think it's a better feature than code folding and something I think all editors should offer.

Anyway, to each their own. You can turn it off.

At first I thought it was a bit silly eye candy but I have found that it really is useful for longer documents. In longer documents and code, the syntax highlighting along with the "shape" of the document gives a nice "gestalt" sense of things.

It's a decent and useful feature, the only real issue I have with it is the empty space underneath. When you have a short document, I find myself clicking on that empty space to get to the end of the line and then being confused as to why it's scrolling the document. Perhaps it should be a slightly different color than the main document.

As a Vimmer, I'm in the slow process of transitioning. I actually write plugins for the languages I use and the API in Sublime is actually really great. The main thing holding me up from daily use is that the bugs in Vintage make me crazy and I don't want to spend the time to fix them myself. Hopefully the transition to github for the mode will get it stabilized faster.

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