I've been trying out Sublime for the past few days. Long-time TextMate user.
The one thing I struggle with most is finding stuff in a document. I can use CMD+r to find a selector, but what if I'm looking for something else, a comment maybe, or something else?
If I use CMD+f, Sublime will put a box around all of the instances of my search term, which isn't what I want either. Worst, it keeps a box around all of the instances:
http://cl.ly/1T3x0i2L0j2u1a0E0M12.jpg
I need to "disengage" the find before I can move on.
Is there a TextMate "QuickFind" (Ctrl+s) equivalent in Sublime Text?
I find searching/navigating through a document in Sublime to be really, really frustrating.
After looking for a very long time, I've found it. The Sublime equivalent to Textmate's quick search/find is Find > Incremental Find, or cmd+i.
Now, I'm officially a Sublime convert.
Worst, it keeps a box around all of the instances (see screenshot: http://cl.ly/1T3x0i2L0j2u1a0E0M12). I need to "disengage" the find before I can move on.
To disengage find in sublime text 2 just press Esc key.
On top of using Find as per usual, if a find is for a small amount of characters that would appear 50 times on a page, use the EasyMotion plugin which does that old Vim deal:
You hit the EasyMotion key, hit the character you want to match, then Sublime replaces all visible instances of that character with a letter, number, etc - you then hit that replacement character on your keyboard and the cursor moves to that particular instance of the character you wanted. It's a bit confusing to explain but basically, it lets you teleport to absolutely arbitrary points on any page in 3 key presses.
Related
In VS2013, I find it irritating that it jumps wildly through the current source file to places matching my incomplete entry, while I am typing - I would prefer if it did nothing at all until I completed my entry and hit Enter (and if it finds nothing, the scroll position in the file will not be changed).
I couldn't find an option under "Tools/Options..." that looks like it helps there.
Is it possible to do this?
No, there is no user setting for that, sadly.
Instead, however, consider using SHIFT CTRL+F (find in files). Not the obvious choice, but I've started to prefer it as it gets rid of the leaping about and it can anyway be useful to see the list of occurrences before losing scroll position (whether or not it finds anything).
In most OS X apps, even the Terminal which otherwise seems to lack features, cmd+ctrl+space brings up a character menu, where you can type in the name and look for special characters (e.g. greek alphabet). In Sublime Text 2 this does not come up; I just get the bell sound. I tried the trick described Unmap ctrl+space in Sublime Text 3 of mapping the key to the empty command, but that did nothing. Anyone have an idea of how to enable the menu?
The default shortcut for this in ST2, of course, is alt+super+t, but I assume you are wanting to remap this, right?
If so, I looked pretty hard on this one, unfortunately, I couldn't find much to help. It is not a default command, and even if you look inside Packages/Default/Main.sublime-menu, right where the "Special Characters..." line should appear, it is conspicuously absent. Logging all commands in the console using sublime.log_commands(True) shows nothing when I open the special characters window this way.
Hitting cmd+f to find text in SublimeText, I frequently see something like:
Clearly 'someText' exists on the page. Why can't Sublime find it?
Note this sometimes seems to work, and sometimes fails. I can't work out the difference though.
How can I reliably find text with Sublime Text?
I've tried to reproduce this problem with Sublime Text 2 and this is what I found:
If you place caret before the text and the hit find, the text will be found
If you place the caret after the text and then hit find, the text will not be found
It seems that Sublime Text doesn't wrap search by default. You can enable it by toggling the button with the arrow icon (second one from the left of Find what, its tooltip should say Wrap). Then the search works regardless of the caret position.
Look at the buttons right before search box. Sometimes they are just get disabled accidentally, mis-click, or the short-cut get trigged, then the search doesn't behave as expected.
From left to right, RegExp, case sensitive, whole word, wrap(search whole doc, not just below current line), you can see them with mouse pointer hover.
I strongly suggest you to disable those shortcuts to prevent unexpected toggle of these :)
Also, turning off the regex may help you in searching for symbols which have special meaning in regex. For instance, someText(foo) will not be searchable in regex mode without escaping the brackets or putting the search string in quotes.
Good day,
is there a way to automatically edit the found words using ctrl + f in sublime, without clicking the found word.
its just extra effort if you'll click the word again even though its already high lighted, using a keyboard key would be much easier specially if your always using the search function.
thank you for the tips.
I don't know if this makes things easier for you, but you can simply press Esc when the word is selected, which will bring the focus back to the editor and you can edit the word, and cycle through the next selections using F3 or bring up the find box using Ctrl+F
I've been using BBEdit for years, but I've just started using TextMate because I find it has better support for Ruby on Rails than BBEdit (please don't start a flame-war over this!).
One thing I really miss is that BBEdit can add 1/2 or 1/1 page of empty space below the document (without adding lines to the actual document). This means that I will never have to write code at the very bottom of the window/screen, but I can always scroll the page to get the current line at a comfortable hight on the screen, even if it is the last line in the document.
Now, this might seem minor, but after using TextMate for a few days, missing this feature is really starting to bug me.
On the off chance that there is a setting I missed, or that there is a plugin or something out there, I thought I'd throw the question out here. If you know of any way to replicate this behaviour in TextMate, please share!
There is now an option in TextMate 2 to scroll past the end of the document.
This might be rather a late answer but i am posting b/c this question is high in google. Looking for the same issue i found:
PageFeed
PageFeed is a TextMate plugin that allows one to scroll past the last line of a document.
Its not perfect but for most cases its all you need: https://github.com/ampt/PageFeed
I don't think I've ever witnessed a flame war involving BBEdit.
No, TextMate doesn't allow that.
You could create a macro/snippet to add a bunch of \n at the bottom of the file.
Vim, Emacs and Sublime Text all allow this and have better RoR support than BBEdit.
Lacking a scrolling margin, especially at the bottom, when searching in text, is the most frustraing thing in Notepad, Word, Excel, etc. and is enough by itself to make me hate the products on almost a daily basis. EDT, TPU, etc, were great text editors which had this feature (maybe they introduced it) and, now that I've found Emacs emulates them, I use it all the time, and text editing life is good again. I can't understand how most of the world accepts the crazy situation of using a text editor that is worse than those in vogue 20 years ago.
For those who aren't clear about the concept or benefits of a scrolling bottom margin, it is not just about adding empty space below the document, but it also lets you see the context of text found in a search. Without a scrolling margin, the cursor is almost invariably positioned at the bottom line of the screen on the item found, and then to see what comes next you have to manually scroll further down. With a scrolling margin, the cursor and found text are repositioned above the bottom of the screen by the margin amount, letting you see the found text and all the text surrounding it. With repeated searches of the same text, this is a huge timesaver.