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Comment by twerquie | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I like most about Sublime is that it just works right out of the box. Sure almost everyone uses a plugin or two, but to me it's the editor that doesn't need blog posts about how to configure it, it doesn't require you to keep a git repository of your thousand-line configuration, it doesn't require an understanding of esoteric key commands to get started.

To me, Sublime is an editor for people who don't want to spend man-weeks fucking with their editor and just want to get to work.

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I agree. I also love the way it stores settings as an explicit list of changes from defaults (rather than a list of all settings and their values, default and otherwise), so you always know what's up.

My settings file only has a light theme and trim_trailing_spaces_on_save, and I'm very content with that.

This isn't to dismiss its flexible and configurable nature, which is awesome. I just don't need to do more for now.

It's half-way there. It could go a lot further. I'm really surprised there isn't a single (featureful) editor that follows the OSX/GNOME aesthetic of "convention over configuration; no preferences/options/modes if possible". Key-bindings are the same everywhere you go. Every command is available on every instance of the editor on everyone's machine, everywhere in the world. You never have to re-learn anything; you can just sit down and use all the features.

I would personally imagine something a bit like Sublime, but where all the "plugins" were actually just code contributed to the central codebase, and delivered by updates. (Specifically, I'm imagining it would work like Cloudflare's https://github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs for plugins.)

Given that the editor would then have "everything" in-the-box, it'd then probably have to have emacs-like modes, as well, to allow all the plugins' various key-bindings to live together.

I'd suggest you should download every plugin for ST and see how bloated it becomes, you'd end up with something as slow and ungainly as Eclipse.

To me, one of the largest benefits of ST is having a very powerful editor which is fast, simple, and very usable, and wouldn't want to see the core become much heavier than it already is (although I'm loving the code navigation functionality coming in ST3).

Oh, I'm certain that having all the plugins running code in the background at once would be a horrible experience (in much the same way that "installing every browser extension" would be a horrible experience.) I'm thinking mostly of plugins (packages, really) that just add code you can call through the command system--they don't do anything or consume any resources unless you prompt them to, so why shouldn't they be shipped with the runtime?

But on the other case--what sort of Sublime plugins do you use that constantly run in the background doing something? I don't use any myself that do anything like that; what are some good examples?

I have loaded a TON of plugins at one point. It was nowhere near Eclipse's "oh, you wanted to keep typing? No, sorry I'm going to block while the JVM does a GC sweep, and I try and figure out what auto-completion to show you".

With everything I had loaded in Sublime, it just took a couple of seconds longer to start up. Which plugins were you loading specifically?

> No, sorry I'm going to block while the JVM does a GC sweep, and I try and figure out what auto-completion to show you".

I've experienced this quite often, mainly on large code bases.

This is pretty much Textmate to a T. Uses OS X conventions, heavily configured for doing real work out of the box instead of installing 10 packages, has a built-in system for language definitions and plugins. Auto-updates which will include language and theme updates as well.

"Every command is available on every instance of the editor on everyone's machine, everywhere in the world."

OS X is neither on everyone's machine nor everywhere in the world. By a large stretch!

To me, after learning a couple shortcuts, it's already there. Not a big deal to learn.

In fact I have set up my Opera browser to use ctrl-pageup and ctrl-pagedown to change between tabs.

It is that ingrained.

If you mean to replace package control, no, please no. I care only about a very specific subset of packages and I don't want the rest.

So does Windows Notepad

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