Sublime Forum

Sublime Text X

#5

Very cool news Jon. Looking to check it out but the 64 bit installer link doesn’t seem to work.

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#6

n00ge: link is fixed now, sorry about that

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#7

First impressions…

I’m not sure I like the vertical tabs as opposed to the horizontal ones. I rarely ever have more than a few files open at a time so I feel like that’s a lot of wasted space. I’m trying not to jump to conclusions so I’ll feel it out for a bit. However, the UI for it feels really smooth. Maybe if it were just a small section of the side that would be better?

Where’s the MiniMap? I think that’s a pretty core feature for Sublime. I have grown to love it and wish it were in all apps. Is that on it’s way? Where exactly would it fit in with the vertical tab bar on the side?

I love the fact that it’s cross-platform. I think that will go a long way with community involvement. Should existing plugins work now, in the future, or never (haven’t tried yet)?

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#8

re: vertical tabs, there’s still more fleshing out to do on the sidebar, I think it’ll justify itself more in the future. I’m not opposed to having on option for normal tabs as well. The sidebar will eventually be resizeable, of course.

The minimap is there, it’s just sitting on the right hand side. Still more work to do on it: the view port isn’t being displayed, and it doesn’t respond to mouse input.

Plugins aren’t enabled yet, no. They will be in the future, but there may be some changes to the API.

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#9

Also, just to be clear, the UI is in a fairly fluid state at the moment, and nothing is set in stone. There’s more I’m planning to do with the side bar, but if it doesn’t work out, then it’ll go.

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#10

I was just working with some test new files so I didn’t have enough content to see the mini-map. Kind of like it better on the right. Cool.

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#11

jhawk28: The 32 bit windows version has been updated, it’s running on XP now. Direct download link is sublimetext.com/Sublime%20Te … 0Setup.exe

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#12

Eh, no opinions on the virtual window idea? Only reason I ask as it seems to be a pretty good time to bring it up with the core and UI redesigns and how X aims to impact the workflow. Is it just not technically feasible or do people just not like the idea? I’m cool with either, just interested in hearing something.

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#13

I’m planning something along these lines for the side bar, I’ll be posting some details in another blog post.

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#14

The main reason there isn’t a session management UI exposed in Sublime Text is that the semantics get a bit strange with multiple windows, and it’s hard work to build any sort of rich UI with the toolkit Sublime Text is built upon - this kind of thing will be simpler to do in Sublime Text X.

Session management is something that’s been requested fairly frequently, and it’s something I intend to address properly in Sublime Text X.

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#15

Ah sweet. That’s great to hear.

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#16

Looking at it on a Mac, I like the overall look of it.

However, things are very sluggish if have 2 or more buffers open. The problem does not show up when just 1 buffer is open though.

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#17

So far so good! I like the new interface, and it feels slicker and more modern. Particularly, I think the animations in the sidebar give a nice impression, and the rest of the UI feels more responsive. That may just be the lack of loaded plugins. It also suits Windows 7 a little better, and feels a little more like a ‘native’ Win7 app; the groups feel like they’ll match the Windows Explorer left-hand panel’s idiom of Favourites / Libraries / Homegroup / Computer.

I’m guessing that the left hand bar will be full of other buffers and suchlike? I’d quite like to see things like the console output displayed as full-size buffers, rather than small windows which don’t get treated as ‘proper’ panels. The same way emacs dumps everything into new buffers.

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#18

Performance, say, when scrolling, should be a function of the number of pixels being redrawn, and the buffer that’s being drawn. It shouldn’t be related to the number of buffers. Is the slow down you’re seeing definitely from having two buffers open, or is it perhaps just that the second one is clearly slower, even when it’s the only one open?

Yep, that’s the plan!

It’ll certainly be an option via theming, yes. Sublime Text X already has much better support for being themed than Sublime Text does - the .sublime-theme files now use an entirely different format.

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#19

I know you said it wasn’t ready for use, but I’m playing with it for simple editing and right now ctrl+backspace/ctrl+delete doesn’t delete the previous word, but adds a box character to the buffer. Similarly, ctrl+del should delete next word. If you could see your way to fixing that in the next beta, I’d be more likely to use it and provide feedback. As I say, though, I know this isn’t a beta program but more of a trailer. :wink:

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#20

I installed is on Win XP3. The first and indeed easy task was to change the background colour of the sidebar.

I cannot imagine to welcome a sidebar. I like S1 because it has no sidebar and maximum screen estate for editing!
There are applications which use sidebars that vanish if not needed. But they need at least a bar at the side. Sometimes the animations to display are slow. Bah.

I don’t know what’s wrong with the quickpanel. For me i’ts the better solution.

By the way: where is the statusbar?

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#21

tgkeul: The side bar will certainly be hideable (and will take up zero pixels when hidden), and the quick panel won’t be going anywhere.

Status bar will be coming back too.

Steve: I’ll see what I can do :slight_smile:

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#22

Yay! Good stuff!

OK, feedback:

  • The vertical buffer: not very useful to me as I don’t really switch between files that way, anyway. Overwhelmingly, I’ll open a file, make my changes, save it and then use the project pane to open another file. I rarely need to keep track of buffers in that manner in Sublime. However, I’m not suggesting you remove it. It may turn out to be incredibly useful, it’s just hard to tell right now with so many components still missing.

  • Although Sublime has an interface that’s very unique to itself, it might be good to pay attention platform HCI guidelines for things like keyboard shortcuts and the like. ⌘F usually shows a search box on editors on Mac, for example. Full screen is usually ⌥⌘F or ⇧⌘F or so on.

Again, thanks for making Sublime cross platform! It’s really great!

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#23

Henrik: Thanks for the feedback. I agree completely about fitting the HCI guidelines where possible, and it’s something I’ve already put a lot of work into for Sublime Text X (I’ll save the details for a blog post). Thanks for the heads up re: full screen, I’ll fix it for the next release. There are other omissions I’m aware of (e.g., dragging a file onto the dock won’t open it, “Hide Sublime Text X” isn’t bound to ⌘H), but I’m sure there are plenty of others I don’t know about.

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#24

jps, really great to hear that you are taking HCI guidelines into account! (But I’m an interaction designer - I may be a bit biased as to their importance ^_^)

I’m not sure whether this is the right place for a wishlist, but it’d be great to be able to match path names as well as file names in the project pane. I work a lot in Symfony (PHP framework), where a lot of files have the same name. Under every module (which is a simple directory), there is a file called action.class.php (containing all the actions that the module can perform). So I find myself in a situation where I’d like to be able to match a bit of a directory name and a bit of the file. I’d like to be able to type “google act” to filter out all paths where both “google” and “act” are not present.

However, maybe I should just look into building a Symfony aware plugin once Sublime X is released.

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