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...why not sublime? I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all. With all due respect to the people working on them (because it really isn

by s4vi0r 9y ago

...why not sublime? I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all. With all due respect to the people working on them (because it really isn't their fault for the most part), they're bloated slow pieces of shit. I don't like electron in general, but its an especially bad choice for a text editor intended for developers. If you don't like vim or emacs, sublime does what the electron editors do but better. Its probably the most performant of all the text editors I've used; vim and emacs both don't like gigantic logfiles, but sublime handles them without issue. The only bad things I can say about it are lacking vim emulation and worse dev experience than Emacs. But then again, I've never used an editor anywhere near as nice as Emacs in terms of language integration for a lot of the languages I work with.

scarlac 9y ago
As someone who uses both Sublime and VS Code, I find that Sublime is my preferred editor for anything other than working on large projects. But VSC shines when it comes to code insight or specifically: IntelliSense/Code Suggest (or whatever they call it nowadays). Getting intelligent suggestions to methods, parameter help, type hints for popular libs, etc. as well as an integrated Javascript debugger is just a huge time saver. VSC is just 'fast enough' for it to be bearable to me. It's clear that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into making it a professional IDE - it's not just a sloppy hobby project.
meric 9y ago
Sublime Text 3 is a commercial text editor. Atom is free; but I don't want to pay for Sublime Text 3, I had already paid for 2, and I don't like not using the latest...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- fletchowns 9y ago
  Two things I feel compelled to mention: You can evaluate it for free, forever, just dismiss the nag screen. The other is, it's easily worth the $80 in my opinion.
  - bazza451 9y ago
    Again baffling. yeah I bought it but I feel entitled to version 3 because I had version 2. Development costs money...why not pay for it to support people creating great tools.
fefb 9y ago
"...pieces of shit..." lol , nice argument.
zzzcpan 9y ago
> I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all. I would like to understand this better too. I'm guessing vim and emacs take too much time to learn, since they drag the whole unix ecosystem with them. Sublime might be a decent easier to learn editor, but it's a non-free product that could disappear one day, you have to go through the hassle of buying it and it's expensive one too. So sublime is not even a choice for most people. This leaves us with electron based editors as an acceptable choice. But obviously bloat, performance still matter and people will choose something better if available.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  The free trial for Sublime Text lasts as long as one wants -- you only have to put up with an occasional reminder.
- criddell 9y ago
  > it's expensive one too It's $80. If you work in text all day, then that's practically nothing. It's kind of disheartening to see how little value people place on excellent software.
  - bazza451 9y ago
    Agree. Baffling how many developers spend 1/4 of their life programming yet are too cheap to spend money on tools...
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    All the compilers I bought during the 90's, using student discounts, would allow me to buy several copies of Sublime Text in today's money. It is that mentality that killed the market of nice tools for developers. Now everyone that wants to live from software tools has to target the enterprise market, where the tool won't cost $80 but a few hundred if not thousands.
    - zzzcpan 9y ago
      That mentality is created by capitalism. Corporations need to push people into software engineering and attract software engineers, which in turn creates an incentive for free and open tooling for developers.
epynonymous 9y ago
have you tried visual code? also electron based, but works for me, i do golang development mostly.
zabil 9y ago
> I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all. IMHO it's the future of IDE's. After years of using vi and Intellij IDEA, I've switched to VS code (which is electron based) and never looked back. I find it as snappy as vi or sublime. I feel more productive because of all the plugins. For e.g. the fantastic https://github.com/eamodio/vscode-gitlens https://github.com/eamodio/vscode-gitlens Extending it is really easy using the language server protocol http://langserver.org/ http://langserver.org/ . Our team spent very little effort to build a plugin for our open source project https://github.com/getgauge/gauge-vscode https://github.com/getgauge/gauge-vscode Electron editors are successful because it's hackable and cross-platform allowing the community to extend and add an impressive list of plugins.

by s4vi0r 9y ago

scarlac 9y ago

As someone who uses both Sublime and VS Code, I find that Sublime is my preferred editor for anything other than working on large projects. But VSC shines when it comes to code insight or specifically: IntelliSense/Code Suggest (or whatever they call it nowadays). Getting intelligent suggestions to methods, parameter help, type hints for popular libs, etc. as well as an integrated Javascript debugger is just a huge time saver. VSC is just 'fast enough' for it to be bearable to me. It's clear that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into making it a professional IDE - it's not just a sloppy hobby project.

meric 9y ago

Sublime Text 3 is a commercial text editor. Atom is free; but I don't want to pay for Sublime Text 3, I had already paid for 2, and I don't like not using the latest...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fletchowns 9y ago
Two things I feel compelled to mention: You can evaluate it for free, forever, just dismiss the nag screen. The other is, it's easily worth the $80 in my opinion.
- bazza451 9y ago
  Again baffling. yeah I bought it but I feel entitled to version 3 because I had version 2. Development costs money...why not pay for it to support people creating great tools.

fefb 9y ago

"...pieces of shit..." lol , nice argument.

zzzcpan 9y ago

> I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all. I would like to understand this better too. I'm guessing vim and emacs take too much time to learn, since they drag the whole unix ecosystem with them. Sublime might be a decent easier to learn editor, but it's a non-free product that could disappear one day, you have to go through the hassle of buying it and it's expensive one too. So sublime is not even a choice for most people. This leaves us with electron based editors as an acceptable choice. But obviously bloat, performance still matter and people will choose something better if available.

dwaltrip 9y ago
The free trial for Sublime Text lasts as long as one wants -- you only have to put up with an occasional reminder.
criddell 9y ago
> it's expensive one too It's $80. If you work in text all day, then that's practically nothing. It's kind of disheartening to see how little value people place on excellent software.
- bazza451 9y ago
  Agree. Baffling how many developers spend 1/4 of their life programming yet are too cheap to spend money on tools...
- pjmlp 9y ago
  All the compilers I bought during the 90's, using student discounts, would allow me to buy several copies of Sublime Text in today's money. It is that mentality that killed the market of nice tools for developers. Now everyone that wants to live from software tools has to target the enterprise market, where the tool won't cost $80 but a few hundred if not thousands.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    That mentality is created by capitalism. Corporations need to push people into software engineering and attract software engineers, which in turn creates an incentive for free and open tooling for developers.

epynonymous 9y ago

have you tried visual code? also electron based, but works for me, i do golang development mostly.

zabil 9y ago

> I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all. IMHO it's the future of IDE's. After years of using vi and Intellij IDEA, I've switched to VS code (which is electron based) and never looked back. I find it as snappy as vi or sublime. I feel more productive because of all the plugins. For e.g. the fantastic https://github.com/eamodio/vscode-gitlens https://github.com/eamodio/vscode-gitlens Extending it is really easy using the language server protocol http://langserver.org/ http://langserver.org/ . Our team spent very little effort to build a plugin for our open source project https://github.com/getgauge/gauge-vscode https://github.com/getgauge/gauge-vscode Electron editors are successful because it's hackable and cross-platform allowing the community to extend and add an impressive list of plugins.