I've tried it when the first public ST2 builds were released. I kept downloading new builds from time to time out of curiosity but I ended up removing it definetely a while ago.
What I liked: well, I didn't actually like anything beside the ease of modifying/adding keybindings.
Some of what I didn't like:
* The whole UI felt wrong from alpha to omega and overly gimmicky: the whole thing relied too much on the mouse and the things that relied completely on the mouse like the options in the search panel were poorly sized/designed. The many roundrects and shades and gradients created a mess that left a very bad impression.
* The underlying engine is very poorly used by ST: just activating vintage mode is enough to tap a lot deeper than the default UI lets you. The engine is great but it only shines when you try to use it as another app. That's weird.
Using Vim is a spoiler, I guess.
I can't reasonably tell you to not make the switch. I have no idea what knowledge you have of Vim but I can say that I find Vim not only extremelly more powerful than ST but also a lot better designed on almost all fronts.
Once the beauty of subsitutions, :global, ranges, Ex commands, text-objects and motions is ingrained in your brain, using ST2 may feel like using (a pretty) TextEdit. Hell, even folding is nicer in Vim.
In the last year, I had the impression that a bunch of people blogged about their decision to switch to ST2 from Vim. Each time, I felt that the blogger didn't use much of Vim to begin with so switching may have made some kind of sense. If you are reasonnably advanced, I don't think there's any reason to switch.
The UI looks very much like a programmer wrote it. But I can ignore the gradients and the Soda UI theme makes it look more like a native app.
But the find panel is the sole reason I cannot use ST2. Every time I bring it up I can't remember what button does what. And then I get stuck in the panel and have to click to get rid of it. Or hit escape.
But if I hit escape before hitting enter it assumes I didn't want to search after all and scrolls the viewport to somewhere random. Even though the term I wanted to search for is clearly highlighted on the screen.
It's a very very frustrating experience and even my co-worker who uses ST2 every day for the past year or two still gets tripped up by the find panel.
If I had a way to import the TextMate 2 find dialog into ST2 /3 I would buy a license.
Agreed, the find and replace UI in ST2 is extremely frustrating. The essential functionality is all there, but the changing behaviour of different keys depending on context drives me crazy, particularly the way you need enter vs. escape to get back to editing, and the meanings of F3 and Shift+F3 swapping depending on whether your last search was forward or backward. Also, it's silly that you seem to need to mess around with the mouse to change basic find options like case sensitivity or using regexes, and to set the locations affected when finding/replacing across files. Tidying up the keyboard shortcuts in this area would bring a huge benefit in usability for a relatively small change in behaviour, IMHO.
What I liked: well, I didn't actually like anything beside the ease of modifying/adding keybindings.
Some of what I didn't like:
* The whole UI felt wrong from alpha to omega and overly gimmicky: the whole thing relied too much on the mouse and the things that relied completely on the mouse like the options in the search panel were poorly sized/designed. The many roundrects and shades and gradients created a mess that left a very bad impression.
* The underlying engine is very poorly used by ST: just activating vintage mode is enough to tap a lot deeper than the default UI lets you. The engine is great but it only shines when you try to use it as another app. That's weird.
Using Vim is a spoiler, I guess.
I can't reasonably tell you to not make the switch. I have no idea what knowledge you have of Vim but I can say that I find Vim not only extremelly more powerful than ST but also a lot better designed on almost all fronts.
Once the beauty of subsitutions, :global, ranges, Ex commands, text-objects and motions is ingrained in your brain, using ST2 may feel like using (a pretty) TextEdit. Hell, even folding is nicer in Vim.
In the last year, I had the impression that a bunch of people blogged about their decision to switch to ST2 from Vim. Each time, I felt that the blogger didn't use much of Vim to begin with so switching may have made some kind of sense. If you are reasonnably advanced, I don't think there's any reason to switch.