What gui library is used by sublime text editor?

python user-interface sublimetext
Freewind picture Freewind · Aug 18, 2011 · Viewed 40k times · Source

I've downloaded an editor of sublimetext and I want to know what GUI library is used in there.

The filenames of files that are in the editor executables directory are:

bz2.pyd
Microsoft.VC90.CRT.manifest   
msvcp90.dll
msvcr90.dll                   
PackageSetup.py
PackageSetup.pyc              
pyexpat.pyd                   
python26.dll
python26.zip                  
select.pyd
sublimeplugin.py              
sublimeplugin.pyc
sublimetext.exe               
unicodedata.pyd
unins000.dat                  
unins000.exe
_ctypes.pyd                   
_elementtree.pyd
_hashlib.pyd                  
_socket.pyd
_ssl.pyd

Can I find the information from the file names?

Answer

Hugo picture Hugo · Feb 8, 2012

Sublime Text 2 is mostly coded in C++ and uses a custom UI toolkit. Here is the author, Jon Skinner, explaining it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822114.

I keep meaning to write a blog post with some details on this, but as with many things, I usually end up coding instead. Sublime Text 2 is almost entirely C++ (with a smattering of Objective C for Cocoa and Python for plugins). Coding is generally fairly straight forward: code on one platform (mostly Linux at the moment, but I switch around frequently), and then make sure it still compiles elsewhere. Sublime Text 2 itself uses a custom UI toolkit. There are a lot of apps where this may not make sense, but it's not such an unreasonable choice for Sublime Text, where I always knew that a lot of the UI controls were going to have to be custom no matter the toolkit (e.g., the text control and tab controls). The UI toolkit sits on top of a cross platform abstraction layer, which is more a union of platform functionality rather than lowest common denominator.

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