Hi HN - Jon Skinner here, I made Sublime Text and Sublime Merge, alongside the rest of the Sublime HQ programming team - Will, Dylan and Benjamin. Let me know if you have any questions!
Allo, looking forward to trying it. One question for you, could you compare it to other standalone git merge options? What don't the competitors do that you do?
But PS, you have a broken link on the /download page
Sublime Merge is a Git client, and I'd list the main advantages over the alternatives as performance, and UI polish in general.
For example, when you stage a file in Sublime Merge, we internally predict the resulting change to the repository, so the changes are reflected in the UI immediately, while the operation is actually happening asynchronously. In contrast, other Git clients can take seconds before being able to stage a second file.
Thanks for the kind words! There's some basic integration now, and we'll be adding more in the future.
Right now, Sublime Merge will pickup installed Sublime Text packages (e.g., for syntax highlighting), and will also find Sublime Text when you choose Open in Editor from within Merge (this can be customised to something else though, of course).
It would be cool to have some integration going the other way. In particular I would love:
1. If Sublime Text could detect when a directory is a git root directory, and present a button to "open in sublime merge" (my sublime projects often span multiple git repos, so detection on a folder by folder basis would be key). The ability to configure this to use another git client would make sense, although personally Sublime Merge looks fantastic.
2. A create commit action accessible from the Command-Shift-P dialog. I imagine Sublime Merge launches pretty quickly, so this would be pretty nice as I wouldn't have to keep it open: I could just let Sublime Text manage my "workspace". I currently commit using the terminal (+ Micro Editor), but this could be even better. Note: I notice that there is no "Stage All" button. That would be useful...
Aside: IMO managing workspaces/projects is a weakness of Sublime Text atm. I have tendency to move directories around which makes managing projects a bit awkward. I've resorted to opening sublime from the terminal with `cd /path/to/project/; subl .`. Not sure I have any specific suggestions for improvements, but that welcome screen in Sublime Merge sure looks nice...
2. Merge tool integration for file merging/diffing (e.g. if two files are selected in the sidebar, you could right-click > diff files, and perhaps an action on an open file could be "diff file with..."). There are plugins for Sublime Text that try to do this with two text panes, but they don't work especially well. IMO there aren't very many good diff tools, so a lightweight one that works cross-platform could be a good market to target.
Thank you for Sublime Text. I've used it almost every day for work for the last 5 years and it's definitely made my life much easier!
This a million time. With VSCode being more popular than sublime text now, not having first class git integration just after installing sublime text is a serious reason not to use it.
We'll 100% be adding integration in that direction too. A new build of Sublime Text shouldn't be too far off, there are some nice thing's that we've added into Sublime Merge (e.g., an update theme system), that I want to roll into Sublime Text.
With regards to Stage All, we don't have a button, but we do have a key binding: Command+Shift+A to stage all Modified files, and then press it a second time to stage all Untracked files, if desired.
Just asking software engineering perspective, would be better to have the code that integrates Sublime Text <-> Sublime Merge as plugins? As in, the same Python plugin system that ST3 offers today?
Speaking as the sublime-text-git person, something with official deeper integration would honestly be appreciated. There's a few common UI requests which something official would probably pick off as low-hanging-fruit but which are basically impossible with the current API. :D
Thanks, the fact that they can share packages (and eventually maybe themes) sounds great.
If it's possible, I'd also like some auto-sync mode (e.g. when a folder with a git repo is opened/active in sublime text, have sublime merge automatically switch to that).
Eventually, perhaps Merge can just be an extra tab (or something similar), inside ST, for people with both licenses.
Jon, it's impressive how you deliver incredibly performant cross-platform UIs. You really should consider talking about your development and custom widget toolkit.
I've never experienced a non-performant cross-platform UI.
Well, to be honest I've heard of folks complaining about Electron apps, but are easy enough to avoid. Oh yeah and Swing was a bit sluggish… in the 90s.
Allow me to somewhat quippishly rephrase your original post: "I've never heard of badly performing cross-platform apps, except for the ones written in what's currently the most popular cross-platform toolkit and the ones written in one of the most popular cross-platform toolkits a generation ago."
Hi Jon, we currently use Gitkraken, which allows us to manage submodules. I can't seem to find this functionality in sublime merge, do you know if this is something you guys have thought about and if it will be released any time soon?
+1 on this. I use Tower which has really nice submodule support.
In demoing Sublime Merge — if I move branches that use a different submodule or different submodule version, I get uncommitted changes, either a folder where the submodule was or commit change on submodule.
Pretty amazing feat to enter what looks like a saturated market with a product that has a a unique combination of features, is super performant and cross platform. Kudos.
Any plans to implement interactive rebase in some way? Right now I'm heavily dependent on GitUp, where things like swapping commits or squashing them is often a matter of a single keyboard shortcut.
We do have some basics in there right now, you can directly edit commit messages and squash commits without any fuss. Full interactive rebase support will be coming later.
Had a little play with it and it's looking really promising. I'm probably going to stick to the terminal for simpler stuff, but this tool will definitely help pry me away from Gitlab, and the merge conflict resolution feature looks so much better than my current workflow.
I have a question, or rather a request. As a long term Sublime Text user I like to hide the menu bar which you can't seem to do in Sublime Merge. Would you consider adding this in a future release?
While you are fielding little requests, I'd personally like to be able to collapse/expand the areas in the "Location Bar" pane/drawer on the left (where branches/tags/stashes are listed). For instance, I often have a lot of local branches and would like to be able to focus on them rather than the remote branches. As it stands there isn't much vertical real estate for each of the lists, and there doesn't appear to be a way to resize/collapse them. SourceTree on Mac treats these as collapsible in an accordion-like way, which I personally like, but I'm sure there would be other good approaches too.
Not a huge problem because there's the cool branch list/switcher at top center, so maybe will find myself working with the Location Bar hidden mostly.
Awesome stuff, I'm loving it! I guess it's time do finally ditch GitKraken and SourceTree (:
I have a couple questions:
- Do you have a plan to add git flow integration? And what about interactive rebases?
- Please, please, allow free users to use dark theme as well! Sublime Text license was really great, why add such a small change?
Interactive rebase is absolutely coming (you can already edit commit messages and squash commits). UI support for Git Flow is going to depend on user feedback. I expect we will eventually, but even if not, we will be adding a plugin API, and it would naturally be doable via that.
Also, if you can rename all these opaque commands to be more user friendly :) even if this means adding more commands, I think it’s worth it. “Rebase” should be the first victim
Alas, one of our key principles is to not hide or rename anything in Git, so your knowledge from using Git on the command line transfers to and from Sublime Merge.
Fair enough, maybe think of this as an optional feature for the future :) you must be really good with git but most people need to google how to do something everytime they want to do something more complicated then a merge
Personally, I believe letting every UI or toolchain compatible with git settle on their own phraseology for identical operations will lead to more issues than we currently have. Git is definitely complex, flags unclear, and commands awkward from time to time. Now, imagine trying to figure out the meaning of commands when they don't even translate equivalently across tooling? Sounds like a nightmare to me. I appreciate the effort to stay consistent with git itself.
I have to pay for a dark theme? seriously? You should sell features like in-app-purchases then. $1.99 for this, $.99 for that, etc. $80, $99.... man your software is really really good, but when there's free competitors that are on par w/yours, those prices are steep imo. I know you've heard all this before... guess the hundred dollar dark theme got me
I might be inclined to agree with you, but it seems to me it's not a $99 dark theme as much as it is an unrestricted trial version that you should buy for $99 even if you continue using it with the light theme.
I think it's actually good of the developers not to impose DRM, but it seems that confused you into thinking this is free software?
Hi! I love sublime and I'd love to use this too, but.. it crashes 100% of the time for me, whether I open an existing repo or create a new one. Is there a crash log or something I can send to you guys?
What are the chances of being able to "switch mode" from Sublime text itself? What would be killer for me is to do some work, and then jump to this view to commit / review changes / pull in other changes - I appreciate that it's a very different mode, but the integration would really help. Looks great so far!
Congratulations for launching another promising product Jon. I tried it on Linux and couldn't figure out a way to scale the interface on a higher resolution screen. Increasing the font size only scales half of the UI. Is there any hidden setting to scale or zoom in/out?
You can use the dpi_scale setting for this in Sublime Merge and Sublime Text, but you'll have to restart after changing it. You'll need to edit the JSON settings directly for this (via Preferences/Edit Settings), and then set dpi_scale to something reasonable, such as 1.25
> Wait... you use GTK on Linux? For what, exactly?
SublimeText uses "Skia Graphics Library" to draw the entire user interface.
However, you still need to write Cocoa for macOS components and GTK for Linux.
Many cross-platform programs do the same, developers use a high-level library to render the overall interface, but underneath they are still using the native graphics libraries offered by the operating system where the program is running in, in this example, macOS and Linux. You can still do a lot with Skia alone, but eventually you'll find yourself writing some platform-specific custom code.
Hi Jon, amazing work! I am happy to try this out as I'm starting to get annoyed with SourceTree, it often hangs on me.
Is there a way to delete a local tracking branch and its corresponding branch on the origin in one operation? I often use this when cleaning up old branches that have been merged into the main development lines.
You can drag the top or bottom of a diff to see more context at any time, but there's no setting to change the default number of context lines - I'll add a note for it
Nice to see you're using the same animation technique [1]. MP4 could not possibly provide this level of quality/size (~150KB per animation).
Pngcrush is rather limiting though. I could compress the PNG textures by ~8% more with optimage [2] (I'm the author).
And for newer browsers, serving the textures as brotli-compressed BMPs would actually make them >30% smaller (probably more with filtered but uncompressed PNGs).
We built the animations using a slightly enhanced version of anim_encoder, which I currently have online at https://github.com/wbond/anim_encoder. One of the changes was adding pngquant which helped compress the images a bunch beyond pngcrush.
I often commit in a detached HEAD state (primarily because we're using Gerrit, and git-review sort of encourages it). Sublime Merge won't let me commit without being on a branch. Is there any way to get around this?
Looks very nice! Two things I noticed right out on a projet:
- It doesn't seem to be picking up my global .gitignore file. I see untracked changes of something that should be ignored. It doesn't appear on any other git client nor `git status`.
The billing period isn't changed, instead a pro-rated amount is changed. For example, if you add a seat half way through the billing period, you'll be changed half the normal amount for it. Reducing seats will result in a pro-rated credit on your next billing cycle.
The search functionality looks great - I didn't even know that was an issue because I generally know how to dig through commits, but having a simple and fast UI for doing it might tip it over into the "must have" category.
EDIT - read the blog post and idly wondering if you would ever consider licensing Sublime's UI engine?
One feature that's missing from most of the git clients I use is the ability to do "branch1...branch2" diffs, ie, diff two branches from a common starting point but only show the new changes in branch2. Do you think this will be possible in Sublime Merge at some point?
If you select two commits in the commit list, it will diff between the two. Currently there isn't a super-easy way to jump to a branch while leaving the previous one selected, but we have some ideas on enhancing some of the process of jumping around the commit list.
The light theme uses the Breakers color scheme from Sublime Text 3 for the editor controls. Many of the other colors are pulled from the Default theme in Sublime Text. This includes the colors of the commit list which is based on the side bar in ST, and the command palette.
Just to be a bit annoying; I know a ton of people that download SublimeText and just ignore the little thing saying "Sublime is licensed software please pay", though I find that long term it does lead to them getting their employer to pay for it. Is SublimeMerge going to have a similar model?
Just a sidenote, good on you for keeping SublimeText fast and optimized. There are way too many systems out there that have moved to the "put every single application ever inside a self-contained chrome". I usually recommend Sublime before I recommend Atom because of this.
Where are the various options and the like documented?
I'd like to add a custom command for pulling a specified branch from a remote, and given the extensibility of Sublime Text, I think there's a way to do that, but I'm not yet sure how to find it all?
Also, count me as a vote for a high performance Sublime Terminal. I'd pay for that in a heartbeat.
I work a lot with repos with very long line lengths (regularly up to 10k characters) and have to often check and merge multiple changes per line. I really like Git clients that can do one or all of these things:
- Block a small threshold of vertical scrolling when scrolling horizontally on a trackpad to stop the current line I‘m tracking wavering up and down as I scroll.
- Highlight whether there are further changes on the same line in some way (e.g. Git Fork starts a highlight at the first change and stops it at the last).
- Allow some sort of merge comparison with word wrapping turned on (I‘m yet to find a client that does this).
If you can get the first, and one of the second or third in, then I‘ll happily pick up a Sublime Merge licence to go with my Sublime Text one. I do understand that this isn‘t a typical merge environment, but I’m editing ebooks with long paragraphs.
Sounds like it might be easier to just write a program which inserts line breaks after periods (and one to remove them), so you can edit the books in their typical format and export to "git format" to deal with versioning/branching/etc. Although it sounds like you've been doing this for a while so there's probably some reason this wouldn't work which I don't know.
I almost purchased before downloading it just because of how much I trust you and your team to make high quality software, and as a way to throw more money in your direction.
Been messing with it for a few minutes and it is awesome. Been looking for a good Sublime-like git tool for years.
Jon, if you're looking for ideas what to work on next, please consider creating an email client. With fast UI & search, tree view for emails, proper support of plain text emails etc.
This is one of those things that I didn't know I needed. An email client made for power users with the speed, simplicity and flexibility of Sublime Text (and now Merge) would be the end of all of my email woes. I would pay a lot of money for this.
Mailspring looks nice. I would like the metadata to be under my control and not synced to their servers. The fact that I need to login to their machines turns me off. I'm open to running my own instance of their server. I do not like requiring "the cloud" to use my email client.
I only recently learned about sciter, and was pretty excited to start using it on a personal project. Thanks for that!
I'm not exactly an expert on imap/pop/smtp, but I'd potentially be interested in helping depending on what your plans are for it. Honestly I'd be happy to help with any new privacy-focused e-mail client that has a convenient ui.
I'm going to assume you meant you could start in a month, rather than be completed in a month, because otherwise I'd like to save you some pain!
I wrote a mail client, two actual, focussed upon the console. (Think "scriptable mutt".) Writing a mail-client is hard. Partly due to the sheer amount of bogus mails you'll get, and partly due to people having very firm beliefs about what they want.
The user-interface is the easy part. More important is to design how you're going to work - Originally I allowed something similar to google's tagging, so you could "open a folder" which contained mail from multiple Maildir collections. It was not a success.
Using a database to store your state is a cheap alternative, but risks issues getting outdated if you ever interact with the mail outside your program. You either have to force an "indexing" step - like notmuch does - or scan the filesystem tree. Neither of those approaches are great, for obvious reasons.
(Also God help you if you want to work with remote IMAP servers. Standards? What are they!)
The one killer feature I'm hoping some GUI client implements is the ability to seamlessly search and filter branches by just typing the way most IDE's implement search for symbols or files. I work on large active projects that use git flow and inevitably there are dozens of branches. Sourcetree in particular is slow and painful in this scenario and I would love to replace it.
Sublime Merge is looking very responsive and cleanly organized. Great job!
If your dpi scale isn't being detected correctly on Linux, you can set it explicitly via the dpi_scale setting (there are instructions elsewhere in this thread)
I just opened this on my repo and there's 3 immediate things I noticed:
1. The commit message UI sprouts a subtle 72 column marker when I put text in it, which is nice. But what it's missing is the even more subtle 50 column marker that I expect for the first line. Standard git commit style says the first line should try to be shorter than 50 chars because it's frequently shown as a summary and you don't want it truncated. Other tools like GitUp and GitX handle this nicely.
2. The diff view doesn't seem to have syntax highlighting for .swift files. I see highlighting for Tcl and Obj-C so I can confirm it's highlighting in general, but nothing for Swift. This is a rather surprising omission.
3. I can't actually commit using this app at all, because it seems to think I have no configured user details. Trying to commit pops up a dialog for me to set it either globally or locally. But I do already have it configured globally. In fact, I have it configured globally twice. I have it first in ~/.git/config, and then I also have it overridden in ~/.git/config.local, and my ~/.git/config has an [include] section that specifies `path = config.local`. I'm wondering if Sublime Merge is getting confused by that include and throwing away my entire global config?
On the topic of setting the user details, that UI element stretches across the entire width of the area, right up until the "Nothing to commit" button. A few times I clicked in that "empty" space to close a dropdown menu and was wondering why the "set user details" dialog popped up.
My one question why was this made into it's own thing and not integrated into Sublime? I sort of would love to see Sublime have a bit more power, I can only assume it would start to consume too many resources? It'll be interesting to see what else you guys make. I really hope you consider making SublimeMail as others suggested.
Hi Jon, I just tried it out and I really love it. 20MB of memory, super fast, intuitive to use. Tick, tick tick.
There's just one thing I found really annoying and it's that the window doesn't remember where I snap it to (Windows). Every time I open it I have to snap it to half my display again. GitKraken (and as of a month ago, VS Code) remember where they belong.
Some feedback: I have a project containing a large (multiple MB) text file. Running Ubuntu 18.04. When there is a change to that file, Sublime Merge's UI becomes fairly unresponsive, with many actions taking multiple seconds to complete.
Hello Jon, I bought Sublime Merge a few days ago and am excited to see Dark Mode, but the key does not work. I sent in an email to support but I haven't received a reply. Sorry for nagging you, I realize you are probably all busy over there, but I'm super excited about this. Sublime Merge so far is the _perfect_ git client I have been waiting for.
I remember something about Sublime being written in Python? Also I'm more curious about the feature set. The performance argument can be made again for Sublime vs VSCode. Doesn't matter to me because I've switched from Sublime to VSCode a long time ago.
I care about features the most, not if the app will open in 0.5s or 3s
I feel similarly and use VS Code, but GitKraken takes much longer than 3s to load on my desktop and it uses up to 500MB of RAM. Since I usually have it open with VS Code that's quite a lot of heaviness open at once. Then I've got several terminals open, a local Kubernetes environment, etc. Stuff adds up.
> I remember something about Sublime being written in Python?
SublimeText is written in C++ with the "Skia Graphics Library" for the UI.
It exposes an Python API to extend the functionality via 3rd-party packages.
> I care about features the most, not if the app will open in 0.5s or 3s
Opening is not the only performance gain you will get for using a software written with native libraries.
You get faster overall operations in comparison with a program like GitKraken that needs to allocate several chunks of memory to execute simple tasks. It always baffles me when people use the startup time of a program as a mean to explain why they prefer using it over others. Electron-based applications are —overall— not performant. It's impossible to get good performance out of Electron because it sits on top of a web browser that is known to hug significant amount of memory from your entire system.
Wow, Sublime Merge is so much smoother than GitKraken, great job! I love that it takes everything we know and like about ST and applies it to Git.
It even seamlessly finds my Sublime Text packages, and uses the syntax definitions installed there for highlighting - no duplicate/double configuration required.
GitKraken is a web-based application built on Electron, which is why it is slow. Same thing with Slack. What Jon and his team do is always build native and as you are probably already well aware, Sublime Text Editor performance is consistent across all operating systems.
Custom themes are supported (although not in the evaluation version), however Sublime Text themes will need to be adapted to work in Sublime Merge: there's quite a bit more to the UI here, and the controls to target are quite different. Likewise with color schemes, as long as they define the new diff scopes, color schemes can be used, however none of the existing ones will yet. Syntax definitions, on the other hand, don't need any changes, and any you have installed for Sublime Text will be picked up automatically by Sublime Merge.
Plugin support is on the roadmap, and tabs will be added if that's what the user feedback asks for.
There's no dev channel yet, but we'll be adding one soon.
Congrats! I know what I'm doing at work tomorrow :) Does it have gitflow support built in? Also just FYI the main page shows a "download for Mac" button in iOS Safari, I almost thought it was Mac-only until I went to the Download page. Maybe the front download link should autodetect the platform but also give you the option/drop-down to select another? Or at least make it obvious that it isn't the only platform. Cheers
- I would be nice to be able to remove the name inside the commit log. It's only me on this project and literally 50% of the lines (ever other) is my name.
- I would also like to have the option to split top/bottom like sourcetree, so that I can read the full commit message easier.
- The 'end of list' looks like a loading indicator
- 'Staging lines' only appear when I select something on the line (even one characer). It would be good if clicking in a line actually selected the whole line instead of adding a (unusable?) cursor
- The logo might want to have a shadow where the light and darker color meet. Right now it is looks kinda strange. The Sublime Text logo has shadows where two edges meet. That logo does 'fold' over itself though which this one doesn't. But anyway the color difference is strange on my eyes.
I think GitKraken does the user indicator best by using gravatar icons for each commit node on the graph. Much more compact way to show who's who. Can get confusing in very active repos but it's better than too much text on the screen
No dark theme in the tryout version, that's evil. I love Sublime Text and I believe that Sublime Merge will surely do an exceptional job, but I love my eyes even more, so I'll pass this time.
The point of a tryout version is to allow you to try the software, in order to make you buy the software.
For some people (e.g. people who have delayed sleep-phase syndrome), a dark theme is essentially an accessibility requirement. They won't be able to try the software if it doesn't have it.
Imagine a piece of software where the demo version doesn't have screen-reader support. Would that make sense? How do you expect a blind person demo the software?
Well, I haven't tried the software, and won't, since I all my needs are already met and I tend to avoid proprietary software anyway.
Nevertheless, I think this is a clever strategy from Jon Skinner and his team.
It'd be nice if there was a command line option for this actually. I have my machine setup almost entirely automated, but this is one of the manual steps I have to do.
It's really nothing fancy, just based on strap[1] but then modified a bit. I keep my dotfiles in github and leverage homebrew for installing pretty much everything.
After years of clicking cancel as a student, I was more than happy to shell out the full amount for a license after my first paycheck. Don't think I would've stuck around if the free versoin was gimped in any way.
Bet there was some gnashing about how to name this. Sublime Merge makes it sound like it's in the established genre of general text diffing/merging application, rather than a git GUI.
This looks really good. I'm trying it out now, and my main immediate pain point is that there is too little visual separation between staged and unstaged files. A horizontal divider or a slight change in background color could be useful.
My first impression is extremely positive. Many actions, particularly the kinds of actions that a UI can really help with, are unnecessarily hard in other UIs I've used.
Eg most UIs have a good File History window, but often finding the appropriate file is a lot of work (and by often I mean at least SourceTree, GitKraken and GitExtensions iirc). Eg something like you need to scroll through commits until you found one that happened to have changed that file, then right-click the file, choose file history.
In Sublime, it's just Ctrl+P, fh<enter>myfilename<enter>.
I care about stuff like this (same for Blame, and Stage/Commit (which is usually done great though)) because it's the kind of thing UIs are great at. Both invoking the command and using the output is significantly easier and nicer in a UI than it is from the terminal. Eg it's way more important than an extended "Pull" dialog with all kinds of options I don't care about - I can do that just as easily from the terminal, and my editor probably has a button/keystroke for it somewhere too. So far it seems to me that the Sublime folks got their priorities right. Hats off, will probably purchase!
You can do that in GitKraken too btw, jump to file with Ctrl+P, "hist[enter]myfile[enter]". Or click on any recent commit, on the changes pane click "view all files" and you can jump to whatever file you want and see full history with right-click file history.
For my needs, GitX (rowanj fork) is still unbeat: http://rowanj.github.io/gitx/
It has the exact right amount of UI complementing the command line, and some delightful features, e.g. amending the last commit is possible via a checkbox below the commit message.
What I don't like about Sublime and now Sublime Merge, is the unusual way of setting preferences by editing files. I understand that hacking in a JSON file has benefits, but if you just want to use that tool, it's tiring having to google how to change a setting. To me, it feels a bit like losing control.
E.g. I wanted to check whether SM supports line wrapping—I'm still not sure whether it does, after browsing the available menu items a bit.
Since you are on a Mac, did you try Gitup? I am disappointed that Sublime Merge didn't take clues from Gitup's interface. I feel it's the most unobtrusive and efficient git GUI to exist.
Yeah, been there, done that. I have maintained a fork of GitX for my own usage with my own fixes but then gave up. Better clients exists. Right now I am using Git Tower and happy with it.
Git Tower is not really better for my use cases. I‘ve tried various clients, Git Tower among them. I need UI only for file comparisons and line staging, and I find GitX‘s Layout perfect.
GitX is again under active development (per another comment here).
For what it’s worth, the currently developed version of GitX (which I use daily) is at https://github.com/gitx/gitx . You’ll have to build it yourself, but it’s in a much better shape than the rowanj fork.
GitUp is cool, I particularly love the graph view. It has almost no functionality though. You can't three-way-merge and resolve conflicts in it, nor browse the file tree for any given commit, nor compare any two commits.
True, it doesn't do everything, but it really hits the sweet spot for me. I wouldn't say that it almost has no functionality. To me, it has surprisingly much. It's just that it does such a good job of keeping the interface clean, that it can appear as if it doesn't do much.
It is the only git client I know that makes polishing the commit history (i.e. moving commits around, splitting(!), rewording, editing) pleasant. If only it was available on Windows too...
Feedback: The first time I switched to the Search view, it was extremely non-intuitive how to get back to the main view. It took me a little bit to figure out that the main view is at Navigate>Go To Commit Changes. Maybe this selection could be moved below the divider so it's a little more obvious that it's related to the other options in that section? Or make the Search view an overlay kind of like Blame so there's a visual affordance suggesting what to click to back out of the view? It took me a good while to figure out that I could get from Search view back to Commit view by clicking on one of the Branches in the Location bar (and if you have that hidden then I don't think there's any GUI-click way to back out of Search view?). Hope this makes sense!
FWIW you can also press the Search icon/key binding again to get out of it, or use the Back button on the toolbar. I agree that it's not at all obvious from a visual point view - I'll see what we can do.
I think what made it a little less intuitive is that the very first time I got to Search using the menu dropdown instead of the Search Icon (at that point I hadn't even noticed that there was a search icon). If I had switch to the Search view the first time using the icon, it might have been a little more obvious to me that I could back out by clicking it again.
Looks good. I like how most buttons have text labels instead those dreadful indecipherable icons that are so popular currently. In a way it looks like a successful mix of git-gui effortlessness with no nonsense gitk. I hate all those clients that have to grind all the time through their leaky abstractions.
However I'm still waiting for a client with graphical presentation and manipulation of git's DAG. Other than that I get by with CLI, git-gui (I would only wish to be able to edit files in it sometimes) and gitk.
Looks great Jon, happy you are expanding the Sublime family.
Can I suggest Sublime Terminal as a possible addition? I'd happily pay for a decent terminal experience on Windows and with your cross platform toolkit it looks like you could deliver that. ConEmu et al just don't do it for me.
I would keep an eye out on alacritty. It's a blazingly fast gpu-accelerared terminal emulator for Unix (currently) written in rust. According to their 0.2.0 announcement post, where they added scrollback support, Windows is next on the Roadmap.
Alacritty isn't actually super fast, the author just opened three other emulators and decided to call Alacritty "the fastest terminal emulator on earth".
Kitty is much more full-featured and super fast. I've switched to it and love it to bits.
EDIT: Ah, it's not available for Windows, too bad. It's the best.
I'm not saying you have to have tabs, if you want to paint your terminal pink with yellow fonts and render it upside down then go for it, but I'd like tabs :)
If you have 2 tmux servers with different hotkeys you can totally nest them safely. I have a different hotkey prefix for my machine and then leave the default for servers. Works great!
If you’re asking seriously... tmux has a unique interface which is probably not worth learning merely for the purpose of managing multiple active sessions. You also can’t wire it to accept proper GUI commands with the mac command key. Tabs make sense.
And like all these cool new *nix terminal projects, they seem to forget that a configuration GUI is worth having. Sure, you don't need it every day, but its really darn handy when you're first setting it up. The cycle of "Look at website, edit file, restart terminal, repeat, what are my font options again?" gets old really fast.
Really, and its a terrible reason to write an entirely other app, but I just don't like the styling on the tabs :/ That tabbed Windows GUI is just so damn ugly it actually distracts me.
> I just don't like the styling on the tabs :/ That tabbed Windows GUI is just so damn ugly it actually distracts me.
They bothered me too but it's totally fixable with 1 setting.
There's an option to remove the tabs and they become merged into the titlebar (with numbers). It ends up looking like this: https://imgur.com/a/NDgCZFJ
Then you can use Win + 1 or Win + 2 (or other hotkeys) to switch between them.
Right clicking the titlebar also brings up a context menu for accessing the settings and a bunch of other things.
You can enable this style by going to general -> tab bar -> "don't show" (the radio button on the top left).
Thanks, I'll give this a try :) Currently I have Hyper looking like this: https://imgur.com/a/8pZmMqM so I have tabs that I can click between and they look nice.
"Prettyness" seems like such a trivial thing to complain about, but when I spend half my working day staring at something I'd rather it was nice to look at!
While I generally like ConEmu, I personally find the multi-line selection to be pretty poor compared to something like iTerm2. (The way the selection buffer stays at the same coordinates while the text underneath it scrolls up isn't all that awesome either.)
I'm happy to see some innovation in diff and merge tools. I have been happy to pay for Beyond Compare. The diff and especially merge is so much better than the built-in tools. I absolutely hate doing a complex merge on the command line, or trying to edit the conflict files git spits out manually.
But, Beyond Compare doesn't really integrate with git. You can set it to open for 'git difftool' and 'git mergetool' of course, but that's it. BC isn't well integrated with the Linux desktop either, not even the clipboard.
Has anyone here tried both Beyond Compare and Sublime Merge or an other new tool? What keeps me using BC, despite its flaws, is the core diff and merge algorithms. It just does a better job of showing what actually changed, and lets me manually align code when necessary. The suggested merges are very often right too.
@jskinner We need a built-in console/terminal and better Javascript intellisense for Sublime text; I hope the Sublime Merge and Sublime Text will fit together perfectly. All the best.
360 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadEdit: there's also the announcement blog post, at https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-merge
Thanks for the great work! No single text editor in my life i love as much as sublime!
But PS, you have a broken link on the /download page
Of course that leading slash will break things -- you could drop the whole `/https:` too.For example, when you stage a file in Sublime Merge, we internally predict the resulting change to the repository, so the changes are reflected in the UI immediately, while the operation is actually happening asynchronously. In contrast, other Git clients can take seconds before being able to stage a second file.
Does it offer any integration with Sublime itself (e.g. if someone has a license for both)?
Right now, Sublime Merge will pickup installed Sublime Text packages (e.g., for syntax highlighting), and will also find Sublime Text when you choose Open in Editor from within Merge (this can be customised to something else though, of course).
1. If Sublime Text could detect when a directory is a git root directory, and present a button to "open in sublime merge" (my sublime projects often span multiple git repos, so detection on a folder by folder basis would be key). The ability to configure this to use another git client would make sense, although personally Sublime Merge looks fantastic.
2. A create commit action accessible from the Command-Shift-P dialog. I imagine Sublime Merge launches pretty quickly, so this would be pretty nice as I wouldn't have to keep it open: I could just let Sublime Text manage my "workspace". I currently commit using the terminal (+ Micro Editor), but this could be even better. Note: I notice that there is no "Stage All" button. That would be useful...
Aside: IMO managing workspaces/projects is a weakness of Sublime Text atm. I have tendency to move directories around which makes managing projects a bit awkward. I've resorted to opening sublime from the terminal with `cd /path/to/project/; subl .`. Not sure I have any specific suggestions for improvements, but that welcome screen in Sublime Merge sure looks nice...
2. Merge tool integration for file merging/diffing (e.g. if two files are selected in the sidebar, you could right-click > diff files, and perhaps an action on an open file could be "diff file with..."). There are plugins for Sublime Text that try to do this with two text panes, but they don't work especially well. IMO there aren't very many good diff tools, so a lightweight one that works cross-platform could be a good market to target.
Thank you for Sublime Text. I've used it almost every day for work for the last 5 years and it's definitely made my life much easier!
With regards to Stage All, we don't have a button, but we do have a key binding: Command+Shift+A to stage all Modified files, and then press it a second time to stage all Untracked files, if desired.
If it's possible, I'd also like some auto-sync mode (e.g. when a folder with a git repo is opened/active in sublime text, have sublime merge automatically switch to that).
Eventually, perhaps Merge can just be an extra tab (or something similar), inside ST, for people with both licenses.
Trying to migrate away using spacemacs but it's not going well
Great job on Sublime Merge.
Well, to be honest I've heard of folks complaining about Electron apps, but are easy enough to avoid. Oh yeah and Swing was a bit sluggish… in the 90s.
What am I missing?
Qt, Wx, Java, and many others don't or no longer perform poorly. So why the surprise there is one more? Maybe some folks don't know they exist.
In demoing Sublime Merge — if I move branches that use a different submodule or different submodule version, I get uncommitted changes, either a folder where the submodule was or commit change on submodule.
Other than this it looks great!
We do have some basics in there right now, you can directly edit commit messages and squash commits without any fuss. Full interactive rebase support will be coming later.
I have a question, or rather a request. As a long term Sublime Text user I like to hide the menu bar which you can't seem to do in Sublime Merge. Would you consider adding this in a future release?
Not a huge problem because there's the cool branch list/switcher at top center, so maybe will find myself working with the Location Bar hidden mostly.
I have a couple questions: - Do you have a plan to add git flow integration? And what about interactive rebases? - Please, please, allow free users to use dark theme as well! Sublime Text license was really great, why add such a small change?
Bonus if the other strings contain placeholders e.g. "Interactive #{rebase|ucfirst}" to reduce the changes.
Bravo Jon, SourceTree has been sucking more and more recently, and as a Windows & Mac user I'm looking forward to trying this out.
I think it's actually good of the developers not to impose DRM, but it seems that confused you into thinking this is free software?
What does that mean? Isn't git flow just a branching model?
git flow init = git init; git branch develop; git checkout develop; ```
``` git flow feature start add login page = git branch develop feature/add-login-page; git checkout feature/add-login-page; ```
``` git flow feature finish = git checkout develop; git merge develop feature/add-login-page; git branch -d feature/add-login-page; ```
Is there any roadmap somewhere so we know what to expect in the future?
Go to Preferences > Edit Settings, then add a new setting to the dict: `"dpi_scale": 2.0` (or whatever float value works for you)
I think you need to restart Sublime Merge then.
I'd like to revisit this, as the hidpi experience really is a lot better with GTK3.
SublimeText uses "Skia Graphics Library" to draw the entire user interface.
However, you still need to write Cocoa for macOS components and GTK for Linux.
Many cross-platform programs do the same, developers use a high-level library to render the overall interface, but underneath they are still using the native graphics libraries offered by the operating system where the program is running in, in this example, macOS and Linux. You can still do a lot with Skia alone, but eventually you'll find yourself writing some platform-specific custom code.
Is there a way to delete a local tracking branch and its corresponding branch on the origin in one operation? I often use this when cleaning up old branches that have been merged into the main development lines.
Pngcrush is rather limiting though. I could compress the PNG textures by ~8% more with optimage [2] (I'm the author).
And for newer browsers, serving the textures as brotli-compressed BMPs would actually make them >30% smaller (probably more with filtered but uncompressed PNGs).
[1] http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.h...
[2] https://getoptimage.com
Also, most of those savings came from near-optimal Deflate compression.
- It doesn't seem to be picking up my global .gitignore file. I see untracked changes of something that should be ignored. It doesn't appear on any other git client nor `git status`.
- Please add regex to the search :)
EDIT - read the blog post and idly wondering if you would ever consider licensing Sublime's UI engine?
I'm hoping you could somewhat detail your custom UI toolkit used in these apps as they are consistently fast and uniform across platforms?
One feature that's missing from most of the git clients I use is the ability to do "branch1...branch2" diffs, ie, diff two branches from a common starting point but only show the new changes in branch2. Do you think this will be possible in Sublime Merge at some point?
Just a sidenote, good on you for keeping SublimeText fast and optimized. There are way too many systems out there that have moved to the "put every single application ever inside a self-contained chrome". I usually recommend Sublime before I recommend Atom because of this.
I'd like to add a custom command for pulling a specified branch from a remote, and given the extensibility of Sublime Text, I think there's a way to do that, but I'm not yet sure how to find it all?
Also, count me as a vote for a high performance Sublime Terminal. I'd pay for that in a heartbeat.
- Block a small threshold of vertical scrolling when scrolling horizontally on a trackpad to stop the current line I‘m tracking wavering up and down as I scroll.
- Highlight whether there are further changes on the same line in some way (e.g. Git Fork starts a highlight at the first change and stops it at the last).
- Allow some sort of merge comparison with word wrapping turned on (I‘m yet to find a client that does this).
If you can get the first, and one of the second or third in, then I‘ll happily pick up a Sublime Merge licence to go with my Sublime Text one. I do understand that this isn‘t a typical merge environment, but I’m editing ebooks with long paragraphs.
https://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/
You can map git difftool to it to launch it from the command line.
https://blend2d.com/
Been messing with it for a few minutes and it is awesome. Been looking for a good Sublime-like git tool for years.
It basically operates on your local Maildir which you can keep in sync with your mail server by using a tool like OfflineIMAP[1].
[0] https://notmuchmail.org/
[1] http://www.offlineimap.org/
[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html
I am considering creation of EMail client, as a next step of my https://notes.sciter.com.
The Sciter Notes resembles email client UI pretty close, so UI portion is feasible in months time frame.
At the mean time I am doing html-notepad that has also close UI: https://sciter.com/html-notepad-new-kid-in-the-block/
If someone knows IMAP/POP/SMTP stuff and want to join or invest into the project - please let me know.
I believe it is finally the time to make convenient email client.
I'm not exactly an expert on imap/pop/smtp, but I'd potentially be interested in helping depending on what your plans are for it. Honestly I'd be happy to help with any new privacy-focused e-mail client that has a convenient ui.
I'm going to assume you meant you could start in a month, rather than be completed in a month, because otherwise I'd like to save you some pain!
I wrote a mail client, two actual, focussed upon the console. (Think "scriptable mutt".) Writing a mail-client is hard. Partly due to the sheer amount of bogus mails you'll get, and partly due to people having very firm beliefs about what they want.
The user-interface is the easy part. More important is to design how you're going to work - Originally I allowed something similar to google's tagging, so you could "open a folder" which contained mail from multiple Maildir collections. It was not a success.
Using a database to store your state is a cheap alternative, but risks issues getting outdated if you ever interact with the mail outside your program. You either have to force an "indexing" step - like notmuch does - or scan the filesystem tree. Neither of those approaches are great, for obvious reasons.
(Also God help you if you want to work with remote IMAP servers. Standards? What are they!)
Question about Sublime Merge, is it possible to use smerge as a diff tool without git?
Seems like it is not possible right now. Curious, if you are planning to add this in the future.
Sublime Merge is looking very responsive and cleanly organized. Great job!
Magit does this in Emacs, especially when used with Helm.
If your dpi scale isn't being detected correctly on Linux, you can set it explicitly via the dpi_scale setting (there are instructions elsewhere in this thread)
I just opened this on my repo and there's 3 immediate things I noticed:
1. The commit message UI sprouts a subtle 72 column marker when I put text in it, which is nice. But what it's missing is the even more subtle 50 column marker that I expect for the first line. Standard git commit style says the first line should try to be shorter than 50 chars because it's frequently shown as a summary and you don't want it truncated. Other tools like GitUp and GitX handle this nicely.
2. The diff view doesn't seem to have syntax highlighting for .swift files. I see highlighting for Tcl and Obj-C so I can confirm it's highlighting in general, but nothing for Swift. This is a rather surprising omission.
3. I can't actually commit using this app at all, because it seems to think I have no configured user details. Trying to commit pops up a dialog for me to set it either globally or locally. But I do already have it configured globally. In fact, I have it configured globally twice. I have it first in ~/.git/config, and then I also have it overridden in ~/.git/config.local, and my ~/.git/config has an [include] section that specifies `path = config.local`. I'm wondering if Sublime Merge is getting confused by that include and throwing away my entire global config?
1. You can setup two rulers via adding "rulers": [50, 72] to Commit Message.sublime-settings, which is available via the Preferences menu.
2. We don't have Swift syntax highlighting out of the box, but if you have it installed for Sublime Text, we'll pick it up
3. Thanks for the report, I'll investigate
Given there's a custom Git library in use under the hood, I don't suppose there'll be Mercurial support in the future?
There's just one thing I found really annoying and it's that the window doesn't remember where I snap it to (Windows). Every time I open it I have to snap it to half my display again. GitKraken (and as of a month ago, VS Code) remember where they belong.
Will there be a home-brew cask for us on MacOS, by any chance?
I care about features the most, not if the app will open in 0.5s or 3s
SublimeText is written in C++ with the "Skia Graphics Library" for the UI.
It exposes an Python API to extend the functionality via 3rd-party packages.
> I care about features the most, not if the app will open in 0.5s or 3s
Opening is not the only performance gain you will get for using a software written with native libraries.
You get faster overall operations in comparison with a program like GitKraken that needs to allocate several chunks of memory to execute simple tasks. It always baffles me when people use the startup time of a program as a mean to explain why they prefer using it over others. Electron-based applications are —overall— not performant. It's impossible to get good performance out of Electron because it sits on top of a web browser that is known to hug significant amount of memory from your entire system.
It even seamlessly finds my Sublime Text packages, and uses the syntax definitions installed there for highlighting - no duplicate/double configuration required.
Sublime editor is incredibly fast.
A couple questions:
* Can I add custom themes from my Sublime Text installation? How about color schemes?
* Are there plans for plugin support?
* Is there a development channel?
* Have you thought about adding tabs?
* Have you considered showing previews of binary files?
Plugin support is on the roadmap, and tabs will be added if that's what the user feedback asks for.
There's no dev channel yet, but we'll be adding one soon.
Edit: Attach an image to explain why: https://twitter.com/Edditoria/status/1043481201443368960
- I would be nice to be able to remove the name inside the commit log. It's only me on this project and literally 50% of the lines (ever other) is my name.
- I would also like to have the option to split top/bottom like sourcetree, so that I can read the full commit message easier.
- The 'end of list' looks like a loading indicator
- 'Staging lines' only appear when I select something on the line (even one characer). It would be good if clicking in a line actually selected the whole line instead of adding a (unusable?) cursor
- The logo might want to have a shadow where the light and darker color meet. Right now it is looks kinda strange. The Sublime Text logo has shadows where two edges meet. That logo does 'fold' over itself though which this one doesn't. But anyway the color difference is strange on my eyes.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but if I add a new file the only options are Delete or Stage. Or maybe it isn't implemented yet.
For some people (e.g. people who have delayed sleep-phase syndrome), a dark theme is essentially an accessibility requirement. They won't be able to try the software if it doesn't have it.
Imagine a piece of software where the demo version doesn't have screen-reader support. Would that make sense? How do you expect a blind person demo the software?
They really know their target audience.
[1]: https://github.com/mikemcquaid/strap
It was an excellent motivator. :)
Regardless, personally very likely to use this!
Eg most UIs have a good File History window, but often finding the appropriate file is a lot of work (and by often I mean at least SourceTree, GitKraken and GitExtensions iirc). Eg something like you need to scroll through commits until you found one that happened to have changed that file, then right-click the file, choose file history.
In Sublime, it's just Ctrl+P, fh<enter>myfilename<enter>.
I care about stuff like this (same for Blame, and Stage/Commit (which is usually done great though)) because it's the kind of thing UIs are great at. Both invoking the command and using the output is significantly easier and nicer in a UI than it is from the terminal. Eg it's way more important than an extended "Pull" dialog with all kinds of options I don't care about - I can do that just as easily from the terminal, and my editor probably has a button/keystroke for it somewhere too. So far it seems to me that the Sublime folks got their priorities right. Hats off, will probably purchase!
Quite timely VS Code released this week: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.v...
What I don't like about Sublime and now Sublime Merge, is the unusual way of setting preferences by editing files. I understand that hacking in a JSON file has benefits, but if you just want to use that tool, it's tiring having to google how to change a setting. To me, it feels a bit like losing control. E.g. I wanted to check whether SM supports line wrapping—I'm still not sure whether it does, after browsing the available menu items a bit.
Yeah, been there, done that. I have maintained a fork of GitX for my own usage with my own fixes but then gave up. Better clients exists. Right now I am using Git Tower and happy with it.
That aside, I like this a lot, and normally I only use the git command line.
However I'm still waiting for a client with graphical presentation and manipulation of git's DAG. Other than that I get by with CLI, git-gui (I would only wish to be able to edit files in it sometimes) and gitk.
Can I suggest Sublime Terminal as a possible addition? I'd happily pay for a decent terminal experience on Windows and with your cross platform toolkit it looks like you could deliver that. ConEmu et al just don't do it for me.
Edit: Ah, also "doesn't have features such as tabs" ruled it out for me.
Kitty is much more full-featured and super fast. I've switched to it and love it to bits.
EDIT: Ah, it's not available for Windows, too bad. It's the best.
[0] https://jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/
Heard of Konsole? It doesn't need GPU to achieve the same speed.
The lack of tabs is a feature for some of us. After all, why have tabs when you can have tmux? :)
Personally I recommend Terminal.app :)
Using it at this point isn't viable however, since the Windows port uses rusttype for font rendering, and rusttype lacks support for hinting.
With the new Windows Console API we can assume, that people will start to use it.
I've been using it for many months now and it's been nothing but solid.
I spend 99% of the time using the WSL terminal, and every once in a while I run a PowerShell terminal too.
They bothered me too but it's totally fixable with 1 setting.
There's an option to remove the tabs and they become merged into the titlebar (with numbers). It ends up looking like this: https://imgur.com/a/NDgCZFJ
Then you can use Win + 1 or Win + 2 (or other hotkeys) to switch between them.
Right clicking the titlebar also brings up a context menu for accessing the settings and a bunch of other things.
You can enable this style by going to general -> tab bar -> "don't show" (the radio button on the top left).
"Prettyness" seems like such a trivial thing to complain about, but when I spend half my working day staring at something I'd rather it was nice to look at!
Not a factor if you don't use those sorts of applications, but a bit of a deal breaker if you do.
But, Beyond Compare doesn't really integrate with git. You can set it to open for 'git difftool' and 'git mergetool' of course, but that's it. BC isn't well integrated with the Linux desktop either, not even the clipboard.
Has anyone here tried both Beyond Compare and Sublime Merge or an other new tool? What keeps me using BC, despite its flaws, is the core diff and merge algorithms. It just does a better job of showing what actually changed, and lets me manually align code when necessary. The suggested merges are very often right too.
On windows it treats .gitignore patterns as case-sensitive which differs from how git itself behaves.