Sublime Forum

Writing plain text & prose - wrapping & other issues

#1

Sublime could be a lovely tool for writing “prose” ie. blocks of language text, before migrating into a word-processor for formatting. The problem is that Sublime handles punctuation-type symbols inconsistently at line ends. Remember the old “hanging full stop” problem in ST2? That’s been fixed in ST3, but there are other related niggles. Examples:

  1. In hyphenated words (containing a dash -), the dash can lead on a wrapped line where the entire word should wrap, or the dash should trail the word on the preceding line where enough room exists. In some cases we see the same behaviour with double-dashed-words as well.
  2. Opening brackets can hang at the end of the line, where they should wrap with the following word. I see similar behaviour with ( but strangely not with {

I’d love to use Sublime for writing documentation and prose but these annoyances really get in the way when you’re reading back your text. I also have some issues when selecting with the mouse:

  1. Triple-clicking on a line puts sublime into “proper” line selection mode which, when writing prose, is great for selecting paragraphs. Dragging works correctly in this mode to select multiple paras. Trouble is, triple-clicking is a pain. We should have different selection granularity when clicking in the gutter/margin. In normal view (with line numbers), clicking in the gutter will select the whole line (paragraph) too, but drag-selecting won’t; it falls back to selecting faux/visible instead of “proper” lines. Can’t we have a more consistent behaviour here, eg. for the gutter:
  • single-click-drag selects visible/faux lines
  • double-click-drag selects “proper” lines/paragraphs, and
  • triple-click in the gutter selects everything?
  • In distraction free we’d want similar behaviour when clicking in the left margin.

My final niggle is with the spellchecker. You can’t add words to the dictionary. You can ignore words, but it doesn’t stick between Sublime or document loads.

Has anyone else found annoyances for writing prose and language text with Sublime?

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#2

Don’t know anything about the first 3 points, but can’t you add an “ignored_words” key to your Preferences.sublime-settings to have a list of ignored words that persists? It takes a list of strings as the value.

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#3

I write a lot of prose in Sublime. Probably more so than anything else. Having grit my teeth and endured through the “hanging full stop” era, I’m unfazed by such “little” issues. I just don’t notice anymore. But this is not a healthy attitude.

I think what you’re suggesting, to document issues that afflict prose writers, is a good idea.

Have you added these to the bugtracker? github.com/SublimeText/Issues/

As a feature request, I think (3) is ineligible.

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