hmm. I use Sublime Text 2 every day and I don't think it's kitschy at all. I can't even imagine why you would put the word feature in quotes. It's one of my favorite features even after using it for months.

It's like having all of the benefits of a scrollbar with the addition of getting an overview of the file you're working on. When I need to scroll to a specific location in a file, my eyes flick over to the minimap and I know where I am in the file. It's subtle and unobtrusive when I don't need it so I barely notice it otherwise. I think it's a better feature than code folding and something I think all editors should offer.

Anyway, to each their own. You can turn it off.

At first I thought it was a bit silly eye candy but I have found that it really is useful for longer documents. In longer documents and code, the syntax highlighting along with the "shape" of the document gives a nice "gestalt" sense of things.

It's a decent and useful feature, the only real issue I have with it is the empty space underneath. When you have a short document, I find myself clicking on that empty space to get to the end of the line and then being confused as to why it's scrolling the document. Perhaps it should be a slightly different color than the main document.