Hi, I’ve used ConTEXT as my code editor for several years now, but due to some crappy political stuff its development has all but halted and I’m getting a bit tired of its bugs. I’m trying out ST2 and so far I’ve been pretty impressed; getting things configured the way I want has been a little daunting, but there are some features that have motivated me to stick with it (like multi-selections, oh my god).
I’ve got three things that I’m rather used to from ConTEXT and I can’t seem to figure out if there are any equivalents in ST2.
First is one annoying aspect of the find behavior. I can’t stand “wraparound” find, so I turned that off, except now I have the problem that the find feature only searches from the cursor down. In ConTEXT, the default is to start searching at the top of the file (though searching from the cursor is an option as it’s occasionally useful). I can’t find any equivalent in ST2. Is it possible to get it to start searching at the top instead of at the cursor?
Second is that although ST2 provides a way of building code from within the editor, I can’t find anything that lets me run the resulting program and capture its output. Sure, I could alt-tab out to the console and run it manually, but it’s so nice to be able to do it all in the editor; it saves a lot of keystrokes. Capturing the output to a buffer can be really helpful with debugging as well. Is there a plugin to do this, maybe?
Last isn’t much of a dealbreaker and may be something that I’d work on as a personal project, but one convenient feature in ConTEXT (and I’ve seen it in other editors like Kate as well) is a built-in filesystem browser that sits in the sidebar. Unless there’s some awesome feature that obviates the need for something like this!
Thanks for any help, and sorry if it’s bad etiquette to put multiple questions in one topic like this.