What Follows Maybe/Is Probably A Load Of Old Waffle:
"I’m gonna leap to the defense of the team" (If I could put that remark in a few more quotation marks I would). The reason I say this:
Is if only I had known what I was about to tell you 2 yrs ago it’d have changed my perceptions of ST a bit and maybe eased some of my exasperation at/of/due to Sublime…
In short it was written by 3 people, which if know any thing about code you’ll realise it’s a amazing acheivement.
All that functionality has to be got into the minimum amount of time it takes to write all that code, thus (and this is a guess) they spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to get a bare bones framework to be as customisable as possible, to operate out of the box, on three different systems, which at the same time lots of other folks can add the functionality they need, all for the minimum amount of code written/time.
Because the dev team hasn’t the time to write that functionality themselves. Coz there’s only 3 of them. A bit circular I know and not incredibly clear either…
Most software’s written by 10s of people at least (games there’s 1000s, Star Citizen probably 100,000s, maybe)
The down shot of that is sometimes there are what appear to be some weird decisions: There’s no dedicated customer service (mind you there doesn’t seem to be for VSCode either) you’ve got to install package control and (package dev) before you can install anything else (certainly in ST3) and as you say there’s some side bar improvements to be made amongst many other things. Eg: Find and Replace doesn’t work with macros, but that’s because you can do a huge amount with regex (you’ve got to learn regex of course). (I’d learn python too btw)
But all these ‘holes’ in the interface are the result of the small team and the philosophy of customisation. It’s a result (weirdly) of the team being small and clever. Get everyone else to bolt the rest of it together. Either someone has already written a plugin or you’ve got to write one yourself…
…which can seem like a bit of a blow if you’ve paid for a license of course.
( I think if the folks at ST HQ were maybe a bit more upfront about what actually ST is they’d have a little bit more sympathy from paying clients who say “WTF there isn’t XYZ ?!”, professionalism doesn’t preclude honesty). I guess ST(4) has moved on quite a bit…
ST is a bit like flat pack furniture, you pay for it, you’ve got to do a bit (sometimes a lot) of work yourself.
A totally ridiculous reply to your observation I concede. My guess (if incorrect hopefully someone will put me straight) is that there isn’t a ‘move files about’ out of the box, coz the dev team didn’t have time to write one!
I did say it was a load of waffle… Rave on.