Sublime Text 2/3 for Django developer

Many developers know about this battle between emacs and vim. Well, not exactly between editors themselves, but rather between their fanboys. As for me, I started with gedit, default Gnome, therefore Ubuntu, text editor. After adding a couple of plugins, most importantly, dummy code completion it worked well for couple of months.

A bit later I decided gedit isn't cool enough :-) And made a switch to vim. Can't say this was love from first sight, but as longer I used it, more I liked it. I ended up being completely overtaken by command mode. I don't care if I need to type one more key to yield into system clipboard, I don't need it too often. But copying to internal registers, having them as many as I want, searching right under your pinky is awesome. I started using searching dozens of time more often, then I did in other editors and IDEs. Combining this with remembering of your positions (so you can jump to your previous cursor positions), changes, and thousands of other different things. You know, look at any vim cheat sheet, and you'll be scared and maybe interested :-)

Yes, I know, it takes time to learn it, even more time to get used to it, but when it is in your muscle memory it is extremely comfortable. But I still have different issues with it. I almost can't use Rope, code completion is almost as dumb as gedit's, and configuring it is cargo-cult for me :).

I tried emacs, but it uses many many more times control and alt keys. I don't really like this. Now let's move to the subject :-)

Text editor Sublime Text 2 is starting to gain more and more attention. It is multiplatform, quick, nicelooking editor with a couple of very interesting features.

One of the mostly used ST2 features is it's function for opening files from project. You can press Ctrl+P and start typing filepath and it will give a list of matching files. You have to create project first, to use this function. It works great and became very handy way to move between files. Other options is Ctrl+Shift+P - same kind of text input opens and you can start typing a command and it will filter it for you. For example you can type Rope and it will show you all the commands of rope on first place, and then other commands that have letters r,o,p,e in it. It is hard to explain, you should try it for yourself and you'll understand it quickly.

Opening file from project

Moving between methods is not harder - Ctrl+R and you see a list of methods in current file, can filter and quickly jump to their declaration.

Most surprising feature for me is vintage mode. It is a simulation of VIM's most commonly used commands, such as ghjk-navigation, commands for copying, deleting, pasting, inserting etc. But miracle didn't happen, it is quite restricted. Using motion commands isn't as consistent as in vim. ESC doesn't clears command, so if you typed d, you will delete something, no matter how many times you push ESC button. Vintage mode is made completely on keybindings, so maybe it is possible to fix some things, but I think emulate whole vim's behavior would be overkill.

Other great advantage of ST2 is it's configuration file. You can build your own from scratch, referring to default one, which is pretty well documented. Configuration file is json, so you don't have to learn another configuration language. My (tiny) configuration file is on github. 

I have installed couple of plugins for django development:

• Djaneiro is nice set of autocompletions, colorscheme for django. I printed their README to see all list of available substitutions, e.g. var becomes {{ }} in template, block becomes {% block %} {% endblock %}
• SublimeRope is an attempt to bring powerful library Rope into Sublime Text 2. Rope can do a lot of IDEish things with python code like extracting methods, searching for docstrings, going to definitions, renaming etc. At the moment it can do only renaming and moving to definitions but github repo is being updated time to time, so I hope we will see more features in future.
• SublimeLint  became a big discovery. I knew lint existed, but never actually used it. It can show you different warnings and errors like those big compilers have: variable declared but never used, unused imports, syntax errors and PEP8. This is not the best explanation what Lint is though :) It can make editor a bit slower, but you can turn off background linting and turn on when you need it again.

SublimeLint shows PEP8 warning

Autocompletions in ST2 is what I still don't understand. Quite often I can't predict what suggestions will it give, especially what it will autocomplete with Tab key.

Everybody is talking about minimap. I can't say anything about it. It is interesting way to find your place in file, no more, no less.

As a summary I think sublime can become my default editor. I use it for a week already, and though I miss some vim specific features, I like it very and very much. I think I'll try to do a reversed path. I want to try recreate all things i liked so much from ST2 in vim. Depending on results I'll choose one of them to use day-to-day.

Even if i will switch back to vim, Sublime Text 2 showed me some things in editor, that I liked and that can make my life easier and nicer. Users really don't know what they want, until they get it :)