I purchased a license lask week and i am disappointed so much by this ‘feature’. I agree that macros should be able to record everything. Many editors or IDE can do this. I hope it will be implemented soon…

Macros are very helpful when you have to run a large formulae on a daily basis. I used to work with a technical support team where we had to depend excel. To pull out the records, we always depend on Macros, even though it has some limits.

I agree, extremely disappointing. This is the only editor I’ve seen that has macros where macros don’t record searches.

Just take the simple and common task of deleting everything in a line past the first comma. Easy in any other editor… Impossible in sublime.

I’m upset that I bought a licence.

I’d just like to add my voice here.

I like everything else about ST, the look, the feel, the use of jsonish config and python everywhere, however I noticed this not after a year, but after an hour or two.

I keep it installed because I want to like it and use this marvellous editor, but so far every Sublime Text switch in the last few years I guess? has been ended by having to switch to something else for heavy lifting. I want to invest time and money into using it and recommend it, indeed if this were a less obstructive niggle I would get work done in it anyway and possibly fix it myself in my spare time, but if I have to have emacs or textmate on hand to get work done, it’s not a software I can properly switch to.

Anyway, I guess other people’s mileage may vary and I’m only one person, but this issue is a big deal to me.

found this while trying to work around lack of automatic regex escape in find; nothing more disappointing than disappointment during attempted workaround

Gentle bump. Like so many I’d dearly love to see Macros get some love by recording everything, notably find & replace.

Pretty pls!

Bump! Even Notepad ++ has regex macro support.

As of June 12, 2016, Sublime Text macros still can’t handle find/replace? Is anyone home?

This is also still high on my list of requests for Sublime. Classic editors like VIM, Brief/Crisp and Emacs all support this, allowing for powerful compound workflows to be recorded/built in macros involving find & replace, cursor moves and edits, which can then be repeated within and across files. This, together with large file / long line handling, are the only reasons I still find myself routinely firing up another editor.

Vote this up by liking the OP at the top!

It’s 8:51AM now and still! Gasp!

… but honestly, I think the “shock” of the lack of this feature quickly diminished and caused me to just not use macros. They were more useful in Textmate 1 when we didn’t have multiple cursors and Emmet.

I also took the lack of the feature as an opportunity to hone my regex skills.

I’ve been using ST for years and never had cause to use a macro…

Agreed. I used to use them all the time in TM1, but don’t even think about them in ST3.

They are handy for quickly cleaning up pasted in code or markup that require a lot of manual cursor movement, but this is something I do very infrequently, and multiple cursors + regex find/replace have been a more-than-suitable replacement.

Who currently is in charge of Sublime Text development? Is there a single person?

How do feature requests get prioritized?

The author and owner of Sublime Text is @jps (Jon Skinner). @wbond (Will Bond), long-time Sublime community member, plugin developer and author of Package Control, is now working with Jon and is officially on-board at Sublime HQ. Major development priorities are, so far as I am aware, set by Jon although Will seems to be actively involved in Sublime’s development as well.

Traditionally Jon has been tight-lipped about Sublime’s roadmap and development has happened in fits and starts. With Will coming on-board, it seems that development efforts are ramping up again and I get the sense that this (new) forum will play a reasonably major part in defining priorities for Will and Jon.

nb. The above are opinions only. I don’t work for Sublime but have been an active part of the community since ST2, and an interested onlooker from some time before that

Back on-topic I think @natebeaty sums it up nicely, but for power users some editing tasks require the flexibility to define a regex search as part of a compound, possibly repetitive, operation across a large file. I could give examples, but those who’ve requested this and chimed in on this subject know where I’m coming from. Most of them I would assume - and myself included - come from traditional power-user text editors like Emacs and VI. I myself came originally from Brief, via Crisp, Vim and Emacs.

Macros that can record and script anything the editor can do are crucial and having a macro system that can script many things (ie. TextCommands) but not all editor operations which can affect the buffer or view is both confusing and frustrating. As a result, like @natebeaty I just avoid using macros for anything but the most trivial caret and text manipulation convenience functions.

In Crisp, I would routinely record a macro that would find a regex, then move the cursor from the found string, do some edits, go down and to the beginning of the next line. I’d then hit F8 (playback macro) multiple times to perform the same operation on repeat across the file. Or I could hit Ctrl+Y (repeat), then type 20 and hit F8, which would repeat the macro playback 20 times. Or I could hit Ctrl+Y+0 (repeat to EOF) and hit F8, which would repeat the macro playback until the Find operation would cause a wrap. You get the idea.

In truth, I would use Replace rarely in this context, but Find often. For the above workflow, Sublime misses the ability to record & script Find/Replace, but also a ‘repeat’ function. For simpler operations, I’ve found ways of getting to the same place with multi-cursors, but it’s slow, more restrictive and inappropriate with particularly large files. You want see whats being changed linearly and in a stepwise fashion. You want to ‘pause and resume’ as you go, making other edits in-between. I don’t argue this as an alternative to multi-cursors, which are awesome, but they’re not suitable in every situation.

One improvement that could help a lot is the ability to define a regex match parameter for Ctrl+D style matching. Find & Replace allows find next and highlight all, but not selective highlighting. It still means we’re in multi-cursor land (with the same disadvantages outlined above) but it would get me closer to solving many of the situations where I’d be having to fire up another editor.

It’s probably fair to say that I would use this sort of thing rarely when purely coding, but often when doing transformations of large text files laid out in a particular way, like SQL dumps, tabulated text and CSV files. The ability to compound editing procedures into macros and play them back or repeat them is still essential for at least a part of my text-editing life I’m afraid, and feels like a real weakness of Sublime.

Thanks for the informative response.

Sublime Text is already a superb product – with great potential for further development and innovation. It would be nice to see it quickly evolve into the overall best text editor on the planet, incorporating all the best features of its competitors. (Some people may argue that it is already the best overall text editor out there.)

Agree completely on this. I will continue to use Notepad++ and Textpad in tandem with Sublime Text because they provide robust macro recording features which I use on a regular basis. It would be nice to have a single text editor that does it all.

Borrowing from @JeffWay who (iirc) likened Sublime to a sports car. It’s lean, slick, light and fast, and a very ‘nice place to be’, but there are a growing list of things which people expect from a modern editor which blur the lines between traditional text editing and IDE, which are either missing from Sublime or difficult to implement due to restrictions in Sublimes API, Core, or UI manipulation via API. A good example being PHPstorm, and some newcomers like Atom and Brackets.

Sublime is indeed one of those pieces of software which you can ‘fall in love with’ and as a result it’s easy to get hung up on perfection. But let’s not forget, Sublime is slick, stable and dependable professional tool now, despite its beta status. The frustrating thing for many is the slow pace of development especially in modern times. I too would like to see that quicken along with generally better responsiveness especially with niggly, easy to reproduce and fix bugs - and there are quite a few.

The ‘best’ is always a subjective call. For me what’s important is does it facilitate what I do or get in the way? Jeff loves PHPstorm, but I found it got in the way too much of the time for me, because I have to wear a lot of different programming hats beyond webdev. That doesn’t make Sublime better, it’s just a better fit for my needs. Others will have different and equally valid opinions; no doubt a seasoned webdev familiar with PHPstorm will get more done in less time than I but may find the tool gets in the way when working in C, C++, ASM, Python and Java (and more). I need one editor across Linux, Mac and Win, that disappears no matter what I’m doing, remains a nice place to be for the journey and doesn’t let me down. Despite some limitations, Sublime still meets that requirement easily, four years in

This is a critical issue, hope we will have this feature shortly.

Just bought a license after a long evaluation time and immediately stumbled upon this issue
Really, if we could use find and replace in macros there would be no need for some of the plugins and it would greatly improve the workflow.