Extending Sublime Text… Now for Vim Lovers Too!

Sublime Text has continued to gain a lot of traction as a very powerful and extensible editor. Its excellent plugin API and large base of contributors has been a major factor in its success.

Though I have been, and still am, a fan of Vim, it falls short when it comes to plugins and extensibility. But when I found that Sublime Text shipped with a Vi mode, I was very curious…

Sublime Text’s Vim mode is implemented as a standard plugin, but is authored by the creator of Sublime and is distributed as part of Sublime itself. It is cleverly called Vintage Mode. It provides good coverage of the basic Vi Command Mode, but retains the full capabilities of Sublime while in Insert Mode.

Beware that Vintage Mode comes disabled by default. You have to remove Vintage from the list of ignored packages per the details in the Sublime Vintage Documentation.

Although, if you are like me, you will miss Vim Extended Mode. A simple plugin, VintageEx, does a pretty excellent job of filling that gap. Best of all, VintageEx is a very active plugin, and keeps getting better all the time.

In order to get rolling with Sublime plugins, you should definitely hook up with Will Bond’s Sublime Package Control plugin. It sources plugins from GitHub, and BitBucket as well. It allows you to browse available plugins directly form within Sublime, as well as install and update them without leaving the editor.
 

Conversation
  • Topher says:

    One of the things I love MOST about vim is that I can ssh to my development environment. Sublime would work if I did something like sshfs, but that has some harsh latency.

    Is the answer simply to always develop locally?

    • Kamal Nasser says:

      Private git repo with a sublime build system for pushing, and a hook on the remote server end for pulling after receiving a push.

  • Jamal’s solution definitely works, though Will Bond who wrote the popular Package Control plugin wrote a plugin that supports FTP, SFTP and SFTPs with support for ssh sessions as well: http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp

  • Carissa Bowen says:

    Many editors I have read and learned but I was not familiar with sublime text,I came to know from your text and that’s amazed to work on that.

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