HN Explorer

Sublime Text build 3133 now available (sublimetext.com)

72 points by johnhattan ↗ HN
https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev

Build 3133

Release Date: 2 June 2017

Fixed a visible whitespace regression in 3132

Fixed a multiple selection paste regression in 3132

Mac: Handle layout changes due to macOS Sierra tabs

Mac: Improved default web browser detection

Find in Files panel now responds to find_all and replace_all commands

Improved rendering performance with a large number of gutter icons

Tweaked auto complete colors

Fixed fold markers not properly respecting line padding

Files can now be renamed when only the case has changed

Legacy color schemes are back, but hidden

minihtml: Fixed layout of html popups on Windows and Linux under HiDPI

minihtml: Fixed crash when doctype is present

API: Fixed input panel not running on_cancel when re-showing the input panel

API: Fixed crash in window.set_view_index()

69 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread
stratigos
I used Sublime (2, 3) for perhaps 5 years or more. I have a paid key. I switched to Atom about 6 months ago cuz diversity. Now I am hooked on my of Atom's side features, but the main show is not nearly as good as Sublime. Unfortunately I cant pry myself free from the social, package management, and theming tools from Atom, but still get a bit frustrated each day because Atom is not Sublime.

I just want to say, I miss you, Sublime. Can you just pls get all of the community oriented niceness that Atom has, so I can stop using Atom and come back to your elegance, pls?

PopsiclePete
Same thing here, except I did Sublime -> Atom -> VSCode.

Atom/VSCode are open-source and not written in C++, so they can evolve a lot quicker, with many more contributors than Sublime's one-man-army.

pinum
But instead they're written in Node with HTML and CSS as a UI. And honestly, for a text editor, that's a bit perverse. I want my editors fast and lightweight.
geoelectric
It's a spectrum for me. I use Vim for most light things, and a Jetbrains IDE for most very heavy things. Right in the middle is something like Atom or VS Code. The load times and overall weight of an Electron app aren't bad in that context.
konart
>many more contributors

Which is not always results in something good tbh.

hoorayimhelping
Believe the main fellow behind Sublime hired the main fellow behind Package Control, which is the reason for the steady updates over the past year or so.
sotojuan
Considering Sublime's speed, I trust the one man show more than random contributors.
petre
VS Code doesn't even remember window size. I used Sublime for 4 years and I'm trying Atom now. It works fine and has nice features but it's sluggish.
tsukaisute
I wanted to use Atom for the reasons you stated, and gave it a decent chance for a few months. Cool product as far as features and community. However, went back to Sublime due to Atom's heavy CPU/battery usage and freezing while I'm typing (without plugins too).
konart
>package management

Sublime has greate package management, don't see a problem here. Package Manage is now part of the app, works great too.

Same for theming tools (Unless we are talking about something different than being able to theme the app\syntax and work with your list of themes.)

Not sure what "social" is though. Sublime has forum and packagecontrol.io \ github repos what else do you need?

starsinspace
As a Sublime user - what exactly is it that Atom has which Sublime doesn't? The Sublime add-on package community is quite active and there are many high-quality packages after all.
ben336
Atom's 3rd party linter package is nicer than SublimeLinter (allows auto fixing, persistently showing errors throughout file, a few other niceties). Atom exposes nicer UIs for configuring things. There's more quality depth to Atom's 3rd party libs in my experience. I wrote this a while ago, it gives some idea what is possible with Atom: https://benmccormick.org/2016/01/11/the-most-interesting-ato...
firloop
>Files can now be renamed when only the case has changed

Finally, yes. This has been an issue in sublime as long as I can remember and has confused me more than once.

laurentdc
Do the latest builds support fonts with ligatures? [1]

One of the reasons I switched from Sublime to Atom was exactly that, but I'm willing to switch back since I've yet to find an editor as fast and lightweight as Sublime.

[1] https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

satysin
Sadly no and from what I remember the dev said that due to how Sublime does text rendering it isn't easy to implement so won't happen anytime soon. A real shame as like you I love Fira Code. Works in Visual Studio, Qt Creator and IntelliJ IDEA perfectly.
czechdeveloper
I learned something today. I was not even aware of ligatures.
zepolen
How do ligatures work with characters per line indication, would 81 character line with a ligature make it 80 characters visibly?
laurentdc
It doesn't alter the characters per line indication, so it doesn't mess with debug or syntax error messages if that's what you mean. The difference is only in the presentation, but "under the hood" it's still two characters. In Atom, with Fira:

* typing => turns into the ⇒ glyph automatically

* it still counts as two: a new document with only ⇒ in it and your cursor at the end reads properly as "Line 1, Column 3"

* visibly, if you're using a monospaced version of the font, it looks like a single character. otherwise, the "optical" width is completely arbitrary just like a regular font

zepolen
That would make keeping your code max 80 characters long more difficult since with ligatures it might look less - and text editor rules can't help.
baldfat
I started using Atom and switched to VS Code and there was a very noticeable difference between the two. I just fired up Atom again and it still lags behind VS Code.
[dead] 043094u039u
Well I just fired up VS Code and it lags behind Vim.

But seriously, what's the point of your comment except to further circlejerk around VSCode? We get it, Microsoft employees post here. Now stop shoving VSCode down my throat in every editor thread.

thevtm
Thats C++ vs JS.
heartbreak
VS Code is using Electron just like Atom.
baldfat
Seriously people wouldn't even know it unless they told people. I hate when the community black lists a technology. I remember when Mono was the M$ Trojan Horse that would destroy the Open Source / Free Software movement.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
jarjoura
A fun thought, Apple could acquire Sublime to compete with Visual Studio Code. It's native the way Apple loves native. It's already the favorite tool of developers all over the world.
dawnerd
That'd just suck for everyone that uses it on windows / linux.
derefr
Why?

• Apple has cross-platform apps, e.g. iTunes. Yes, iTunes on Windows is horrible—but only because it is effectively a userland driver stack for old iPods and such, and this prevents them from rewriting it to follow modern architecture. A plain old "app" wouldn't suffer from this problem.

• It's clear from what's been happening to Visual Studio that all IDEs are increasingly expected to be cross-platform. XCode probably would be by now if it wasn't so bound to building Cocoa apps. Handing Apple an editor that's already cross-platform, I don't think they'd drop the capability.

vkou
My problems with iTunes have less to do with how the backend is implemented, and more with how asinine its interface is, and its incredibly uninformative, and at times, destructive abstractions. It sucked when the iPod was new and hot, it sucks now, and, unless they take use experience seriously, it will always suck.
jamespo
What else do they have other than itunes (which only exists to sell iphones, ipads etc)?
derefr
Not sure about programs; they do maintain the "Boot Camp" set of Windows drivers for their hardware, which seem pretty stable.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
pvg
It's native the way Apple loves native.

I don't think it is. It's a very un-OS-X app with its own completely alien-looking and ugly UI (and rendering and god knows what else). It's also not much of an IDE (unlike VS Code which has IDE goals and ambitions).

It's a decent, snappy, Python-extensible cross-platform editor. It's native mostly just in the 'runs native code' sense and likely of no interest to Apple at all.

erichdongubler
I agree that the default look for Sublime isn't impressive, but it's really easy to make it look awesome with a single plugin like this: http://equinsuocha.io/material-theme/#/default

To your point about being "not much of an IDE": Sublime doesn't try to be an IDE. It's a text editor, which approaches a fundamentally different facet of writing code. Plugins with Package Control also make it easy to get more IDE-like features -- do you think that they're not discoverable enough, maybe? How could it be improved?

pvg
I use Sublime, own a Sublime license, etc.

I'm not talking about the colours and icons - just that it doesn't use native UI and what UI elements are implemented are quite clunky. It's very much not 'native the way Apple likes native'. It doesn't try to be an IDE so there wouldn't be much point in Apple buying it to 'compete with VS Code'.

do you think that they're not discoverable enough, maybe? How could it be improved?

Mostly, I think the Sublime developers don't consider this much of a priority and are ok with it being a clunkfest. Given that it's a small team making a living selling a niche cross-platform tool at a mere $70 a license, this is hardly unreasonable. But pretty or intuitive it ain't.

Compare this to the extension/theme management or preferences UI in VS Code. It's also very much 'non-native' but usability is clearly something the developers are concerned about.

filmgirlcw
It's a fun thought, except it's not even "native" on Mac (it's C++ with some macOS/Cocoa bindings). I could never see Apple buying an app that wasn't built fully-native on their own platform, let alone a text editor.

If Apple cared about a text editor, it would have bought TextMate years ago before that community migrated to Sublime (and some members of then migrated to Atom).

52-6F-62
Is there any one editor that exists in prominence like this outside of fully-fledged IDE's and underdeveloped attempts? I haven't seen anything yet...
giobox
Although they have the obvious Electron based complaints, increasingly Atom and VS Code are getting more and more popular. In my workplace these have now largely replaced what was once pretty much a Sublime only shop. For my needs, Atom's third party package community has evolved at a pace far beyond what I experienced with Sublime. I of course still miss Sublime's superb speed, and ability to handle extremely large files without barfing.

Mac users have also been big on using BBEdit for a long, long time.

52-6F-62
Ah, I've tried all of them but because of this thread I'm trying VSCode again. It feels a little more robust, if a little more rigid than Atom. It's not a bad thing.

I do like Atom, but experience the same complaints everybody else does there. Still a great project.

Just was curious if there was some hidden gem not yet seen.

I wonder if that would be a worthwhile undertaking -- a new native (even if its mac-only) robust editor...

pvg
TextMate is still around and at this point works more or less like OG TextMate did back in the day.

It does one thing that most other OS X editors don't: it displays TextMate themes in the colour space they were originally designed in.

52-6F-62
Wow yeah another one that seems to have rooted itself... There's Coda as well which I forgot about.

It seems that there's the 3 big native editors, sublime the "native" editor, then the electron apps.

I'm visualizing a niche: something with all of the benefits of the electron gang, sublime, and the native performance and stability. I'm sure it's a bit of a project.

[dead] emanuelsaringan
Then, for the sake of the tradition of naming things badly, they should name it XCode Code.
mmjaa
Interesting exercise, look for 'regression' on this page:

https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev

.. indicator that indeed, editors are hard apps to develop, imho, (perhaps coz:automated testing?) ..

Jare
Interactive apps in general are not friendly to automated testing. Games and their elusive "feel" are the worst. :)
ryanar
This is why there is so much time between official releases. This is like scrutinizing the chromium nightly build log for regressions. Sublime works hard to ensure their official releases dont have regressions
mattdawson
I'll consider myself lucky if I get to work on a project that only creates 49 regressions in 4+ years (which appears to be how far this changelog currently goes back).
swah
Not even something as basic as auto-complete from all buffers... soon we will all have moved to VSCode or Jetbrains IDEs.
oatmealsnap
Explain?
swah
Sublime updates have been mostly bugfixes for the last few years - and they still have a solid userbase that loves the speed. I just yearn for the first years when you'd get actual features.
bdcravens
I've moved to VS Code, but still keep Sublime on my machine (been licensed for a long time) to handle massive files (like CSVs that are several hundred MBs large - VS Code refuses to open, Sublime opens them in seconds)
heartbreak
If you need that feature, you can get it from this plugin: https://github.com/alienhard/SublimeAllAutocomplete

There are probably others, but that's the one I use.

swah
Thanks - exactly, but the idea was that something like that would get (re)implemented in C++ since "Sublime is fast and never makes me wait".
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
api
I've recently started using Sublime again. There's a package called EasyClangComplete that does a surprisingly good job of auto-completing C/C++ code (yes it works!) and I like that Sublime uses less than 256mb of RAM most of the time.

Also unlike VSCode it doesn't phone home every 60 seconds. I stopped using VSCode when I noticed the ridiculous amount of telemetry.

blipmusic
Even with telemetry turned off?

    "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false
soinus
Hey, thanks for the kind words about EasyClangComplete! I am glad it works for you! Feel free to open issues if something behaves less than ideal for you :)
throwaway-1209
Can it print yet? I was surprised to discover there was no built in way to print out the text I was editing (on Linux). I do sometimes print out especially gnarly code to think about it on paper.
TheAceOfHearts
Personally, I'm happy to see the author focusing on core features. There's already plenty of amazing tools which allow you to print.

Since you're just dealing with text files, the easiest solutions would probably be to open the text file on a modern web browser. All modern browsers support printing as far as I'm aware.

If you want syntax highlighting, you can use a tool like highlight [0] or source-highlight [1] to generate an HTML page, which you then open and print with your browser.

[0] http://www.andre-simon.de/doku/highlight/en/highlight.php

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite/

dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14423813
Imagenuity
This isn't a dupe. The previous release was 3132, this is 3133. It fixes regressions and adds new features.
dang
From an HN point of view it's a dupe. When threads like this are posted, people don't discuss the differences between 3132 and 3133, they discuss the product in general and their associations with it. We don't need to do that every week—once a year is about right: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.