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I used Sublime for over a couple years. At the time it was the greatest editor I had ever used. But to get "basic" features (that come default with VScode) requ

I used Sublime for over a couple years. At the time it was the greatest editor I had ever used. But to get "basic" features (that come default with VScode) required plugins. And then plugins would conflict sometimes, but there were no answers online to why something wouldn't work because the problems were obscure and rare. Also, there was some simple copy/paste problems (limitations?) on Linux as well. I liked it so much that I dealt with all of these issues from nearly day one without complaint. I had tried VScode, and at the time Sublime was just faster smoother and all around more polished. But I tried VScode about a month or two ago, and it came default with features that I had to use a few plugins (with overlapping and conflicting features) with Sublime. I was actually sad to switch to VScode, simply out of principle. But VScode is built how I would expect an editor to work by default, where Sublime, as fast as it is, lost some zip after a few too many plugins, and actually has fewer features (that I really require/use frequently) than VScode does. Also, vscode greatly simplified settings, snippets and other text based settings that I think Sublime could take note of. Edit: Another note, because VScode comes default with many features, the keyboard shortcuts seem a little more consistent. I hope Sublime steps up their game, as I think VScode is standing on their shoulders, and competition is good.

jxi 8y ago
I tried to like VSCode, but I feel like if I want a powerful IDE, IntelliJ/Webstorm/PyCharm is just much more polished and requires less config (for example, run targets are kind of weird in VSCode). If I want a fast editor, then I feel like VSCode lags a bit compared to SublimeText (due to Electron?). I might be too sensitive to latency, but this is one reason I still prefer Sublime for things like Markdown editing.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Philipp__ 8y ago
Now try and open up Sublime after some time spent in VSCode. You will see what I am talking about, yeah go and try scroll that Side bar, scroll editor, enter some text fast, scroll fast the minimap. Everything is very smooth! I mean I get it, if you want rich plugins and all that fancy stuff go down the Atom/VSCode way. Even though I was using Emacs and Vim for the biggest part of my development time, I always had Sublime somewhere in there, I use editor just as an editor. Some nice light git integration, fast file searching and fast and correct code navigation is all I need that goes out of the $EDITOR scope. I have all of that with Sublime and it works reliably and flawlessly.
- Vanderson 8y ago
  I agree, for a basic editor Sublime is faster, generally speaking. (ie, open, navigate, search, etc...) But while actually coding, I can't tell a difference, and in some cases VScode is faster than Sublime. (in my experience) But faster doesn't help me when code complete doesn't work correctly on one file for no explainable reason. (and the myriad of other "small" bugs that wore on me...)
  - Wohlf 8y ago
    For me personally, VSCode doesn't compete with Sublime. Sublime is my primary text editor with some advanced features for convenience. VSCode is a replacement for all of the IDEs I don't want to install or launch right now.
    - Vanderson 8y ago
      If all I needed was a great text editor, I would use Sublime. It's everything I want in an editor. But, for web development, I feel like a second or third class citizen using Sublime. Maybe that is the separating line between these two apps?
  - bishala 8y ago
    Agree with you. VSCode used to be somewhat slower about a year back but not anymore. Yes it uses more RAM than Sublime but for anyone with a decent computer, that is not a concern. The productivity boost with VSCode is much better than with Sublime. Especially for Javascript, there is not even a contest.
- glenneroo 8y ago
  Also maybe worth mentioning that Sublime costs $80 as opposed to VSCode, Emacs and Vim being free... of course any working developer/shop should be able to afford that if the editor experience truly is (forgive the pun) sublime. I tried Sublime Text a couple years ago.. and gave up with trying to get all the plugins I needed up and running, on the other hand, I really hate using Visual Studio or VSCode, I constantly run into annoying bugs, crashes, and incompatibility issues with plugins. I have to restart Visual Studio 2017 at least thrice daily to get around minor things like "build project" no longer running fully. Perhaps its just Nostalgia speaking, but I almost miss the days of Visual C++ 6 (using Visual Assist)... it may have lacked features, but at least it never crashed.
weew1211 8y ago
I originally used subl, then switched for vscode for 3 years or so, and have now switched back to subl. I switched back to subl mainly because I downgraded my system from 16GB RAM to 8GB (switched from 2017 mbp to a 2015 carbon X1) and vscode had too large a memory footprint to use. subl is notably faster, its also a very well rounded editor with a tiny memory footprint... But I also have the issue that the plugin support is abysmal, that sane defaults are non-existent and it takes a long time to get things to work well with a very popular web techstack like React, Styled Components, eslint. Even now there are times when the syntax highlighting is wrong. It would do subl a great service if they improved the package management and created a number of officially supported packages for popular techstacks that allow people to simply (ideally) 1 click configure the editor. I shouldn't have to read a 15 minute Medium tutorial on how to configure eslint, IMO that is ridiculous.
- Vanderson 8y ago
  I really like your idea about officially supported packages, but also to group them together for popular techstacks. This was exactly the same problem I had. There were so many options that just didn't work well that I wasted tons of time trying out every plugin I could find to solve my problems. And I still didn't fully solve it, I just gave up and lived with annoyances. Edit: I perceive VScode partially solved this problem with the download count/voting on extensions.
- pwenzel 8y ago
  I use Sublime Text for Vue.js projects because ESLint support was so smooth! (just installed SublimeLinter-eslint) Sorry to hear you had trouble with it.
tomaspollak 8y ago
If I may ask, what specific VSCode features are you referring to? I'm eager to know because I'm working on an editor for Chrome OS (based on the Monaco editor from VSCode) and would love to know whether they are part of Monaco or extras that only ship with VSCode. If anyone's interested, here's the (very recent) announcement post: https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/ax8pi3/archetype_a_new_code_editor_for_chrome_os/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/ax8pi3/archetype_...
- Vanderson 8y ago
  Here's a few things: (without effort put into this...) 1. Package management / Extensions. Vscode comes with this right away, Sublime you have to install a package manager to manage packages...-sigh- 2. File icons. (this may seem dumb, but man it should be a simple thing to have defaults for...) 3. Git integration (though seems they may have caught up on this?) These are just off the top of my head... Edit: spelling
  - tomaspollak 8y ago
    Got it! Thanks.
    - Vanderson 8y ago
      Some other ones are code completion, indentation stuff, etc...
  - guessmyname 8y ago
    > Package management / Extensions https://packagecontrol.io/ https://packagecontrol.io/ > File icons https://packagecontrol.io/packages/FileIcons https://packagecontrol.io/packages/FileIcons > Git integration https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/git_integration.html https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/git_integration.html
    - Vanderson 8y ago
      Yep, I found every plugin I ever needed for Sublime. But then the minor conflicts between the plugins start happening. Of which the only support answers online are "uninstall plugin/test". So I had to choose which plugins to keep for certain features/functions. It was too messy. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was the base features of Sublime that were conflicting with a plugin, or two plugins conflicting... The seemingly unfixable bugs from plugins are what pushed me towards VScode. Where even if there are plugins/extensions, I need fewer of them, so less likely to have conflicts.
jgalt212 8y ago
Interesting, as I was thinking about going back to Sublime after being frustrated by the Python Language Server eating RAM like a Gremlin after midnight. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2594 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2594 https://github.com/Microsoft/python-language-server/issues/450 https://github.com/Microsoft/python-language-server/issues/4... https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/65639 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/65639 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2553 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2553
_bxg1 8y ago
I had the same experience, but from Atom to VSCode. There was an even more direct "standing on shoulders" effect there. I didn't want to switch to the huge corporation that just copied the project with the actual original idea. But VSCode is just so... designed. Everything just works, and brilliantly. I don't understand how they got an Electron app to be so fast. Say what you will about Microsoft, they sure know how to make IDEs.
- _coveredInBees 8y ago
  I used Atom for a while, and I recall regular instances of the entire IDE freezing for 10+ seconds for no good reason when I had a few files open. At the time (and to some extend even today), everyone just chalked this up to "Electron is terrible". But MS came along with VSCode to show how a lot of the "issues" with Electron were actually just issues surrounding bad code / software design that were bogging down apps. Like you, I felt a bit sad to switch from Atom, but the difference in quality was massive. I guess that's the difference between having a bunch of smart people who have developed enterprise software for a while working on an Electron App, vs. younger, equally smart folks working on an app without that wealth of experience to draw on for developing a complex application.
drinchev 8y ago
I use webstorm and yeah this doesn’t contradict with having sublime text installed. When I want to read a large file sublime rocks, but for actual meta developing you need to spend time configuring it. Gladly it’s not like you can’t have them both so there’s not an actual choice problem here. Just use whatever you want for the right job.
geraltofrivia 8y ago
Similar story here. Used to write my python codes in subl till I finally jumped ship to PyCharm. But I didn't stop using Sublime. I set a keyboard shortcut to launch it, and thankfully it doesn't open multiple instances if already running but pops up on foreground. And now it's my scratchpad, a temporary clipboard, a distraction free zippy screen where I compose my messages before mailing them. And its probably my most used application, lately.
mstade 8y ago
I really don't understand what all these fancy features are that are so necessary. I use a stock sublime install, with a couple of syntax plugins and the material theme because I think it looks pleasing. That's it. It's super snappy, and whenever I need to jot something down I just type `subl` in a terminal and hey presto, there's a window. I have notes that I've never saved to a file, but that have been open in a sublime buffer for probably well over a year now. Sublime has crashed. My computer has crashed. I've rebooted the thing multiple times. No matter what, these buffers stick around, and it's a complete life saver. It's so good, that I just know if I've opened up a sublime window and typed something in a buffer, it's probably gonna survive longer than I will. That's worth the price of admission alone. Several times over. I've never been this pleased with an editor, ever. I don't need fancy refactoring tools. Find across files has done wonders for me, and when I need to get real fancy I break out the regex. Ctrl+d to duplicate my selection; multiple cursors; these two alone cover probably a good 99% of my refactoring needs. I used to like having an IDE where I could click an icon and it would build things for me, now I can't stand one. I just set up a file watcher in a terminal in the background and it rebuilds whenever some stuff changes. I use Makefiles or redo or even just a simple shell script whenever I need something fancy with dependency management. I've not missed fancy build integration since forever. Whenever I need to debug something, gdb or in-browser dev tools or whatever is suitable for the context I'm in will do more than fine, I don't need an integrated window in my editor. I appreciate that sublime is just a bunch of tabs of text buffers, a simple file browser, can handle ridiculously large files with ease, doesn't consume much resources, and is stable as a rock. I've found I don't need anything else. It's like what I imagine my cool friends who use vim think of their editors, only I'm too stupid to really "get" them. It's ok. Sublime is my Fisher Price version of vim I guess, but I love it to bits. It's paid for itself many, many times over at this point.
- mstade 8y ago
  Some other things I do with sublime that might be quirky: - My font size is 22 or 24 points. Not because I'm blind, but because it forces me to not type lines too long, or files too big. It keeps my code concise and to the point. Also the font I use (Menlo) is lovely and I just like looking at it sometimes. - My lines wrap at 76 characters. Basta. - I'll have multiple windows of sublime open for weeks, months sometimes. Half the time I don't even know what windows or buffers I have open. I just did a "clean up" and closed about 10 of them. It was like a trip down memory lane of the last year. Most of these windows had buffers I had never saved – not even once. - Aside from a bats syntax plugin, and the material theme, I have no plugins. Unless you count the package installer I guess. - Sublime is my editor for git commit messages. I love it. - Most of the time when I need to write something long form, a long email, an article, anything really, I'll do it in sublime first and then copy into a word processor for layout and other things. If I need to update things, the sublime version is the source of truth, and I'll just copy/paste into Pages or whatever I'm using at the time for layout/design. - Not gonna lie, sometimes I think about writing a plugin for sublime to use it as my email client. I think it'd be wonderful. - Sometimes I just open up a new sublime window and start typing random stuff; a short story, some thoughts, or just random words. It's like therapy in a way. I never save these buffers, or at least very rarely. Sublime is the single most valuable piece of software I own, and I'm very glad to have paid the price of admission.

jxi 8y ago

I tried to like VSCode, but I feel like if I want a powerful IDE, IntelliJ/Webstorm/PyCharm is just much more polished and requires less config (for example, run targets are kind of weird in VSCode). If I want a fast editor, then I feel like VSCode lags a bit compared to SublimeText (due to Electron?). I might be too sensitive to latency, but this is one reason I still prefer Sublime for things like Markdown editing.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Philipp__ 8y ago

Now try and open up Sublime after some time spent in VSCode. You will see what I am talking about, yeah go and try scroll that Side bar, scroll editor, enter some text fast, scroll fast the minimap. Everything is very smooth! I mean I get it, if you want rich plugins and all that fancy stuff go down the Atom/VSCode way. Even though I was using Emacs and Vim for the biggest part of my development time, I always had Sublime somewhere in there, I use editor just as an editor. Some nice light git integration, fast file searching and fast and correct code navigation is all I need that goes out of the $EDITOR scope. I have all of that with Sublime and it works reliably and flawlessly.

Vanderson 8y ago
I agree, for a basic editor Sublime is faster, generally speaking. (ie, open, navigate, search, etc...) But while actually coding, I can't tell a difference, and in some cases VScode is faster than Sublime. (in my experience) But faster doesn't help me when code complete doesn't work correctly on one file for no explainable reason. (and the myriad of other "small" bugs that wore on me...)
- Wohlf 8y ago
  For me personally, VSCode doesn't compete with Sublime. Sublime is my primary text editor with some advanced features for convenience. VSCode is a replacement for all of the IDEs I don't want to install or launch right now.
  - Vanderson 8y ago
    If all I needed was a great text editor, I would use Sublime. It's everything I want in an editor. But, for web development, I feel like a second or third class citizen using Sublime. Maybe that is the separating line between these two apps?
- bishala 8y ago
  Agree with you. VSCode used to be somewhat slower about a year back but not anymore. Yes it uses more RAM than Sublime but for anyone with a decent computer, that is not a concern. The productivity boost with VSCode is much better than with Sublime. Especially for Javascript, there is not even a contest.
glenneroo 8y ago
Also maybe worth mentioning that Sublime costs $80 as opposed to VSCode, Emacs and Vim being free... of course any working developer/shop should be able to afford that if the editor experience truly is (forgive the pun) sublime. I tried Sublime Text a couple years ago.. and gave up with trying to get all the plugins I needed up and running, on the other hand, I really hate using Visual Studio or VSCode, I constantly run into annoying bugs, crashes, and incompatibility issues with plugins. I have to restart Visual Studio 2017 at least thrice daily to get around minor things like "build project" no longer running fully. Perhaps its just Nostalgia speaking, but I almost miss the days of Visual C++ 6 (using Visual Assist)... it may have lacked features, but at least it never crashed.

weew1211 8y ago

I originally used subl, then switched for vscode for 3 years or so, and have now switched back to subl. I switched back to subl mainly because I downgraded my system from 16GB RAM to 8GB (switched from 2017 mbp to a 2015 carbon X1) and vscode had too large a memory footprint to use. subl is notably faster, its also a very well rounded editor with a tiny memory footprint... But I also have the issue that the plugin support is abysmal, that sane defaults are non-existent and it takes a long time to get things to work well with a very popular web techstack like React, Styled Components, eslint. Even now there are times when the syntax highlighting is wrong. It would do subl a great service if they improved the package management and created a number of officially supported packages for popular techstacks that allow people to simply (ideally) 1 click configure the editor. I shouldn't have to read a 15 minute Medium tutorial on how to configure eslint, IMO that is ridiculous.

Vanderson 8y ago
I really like your idea about officially supported packages, but also to group them together for popular techstacks. This was exactly the same problem I had. There were so many options that just didn't work well that I wasted tons of time trying out every plugin I could find to solve my problems. And I still didn't fully solve it, I just gave up and lived with annoyances. Edit: I perceive VScode partially solved this problem with the download count/voting on extensions.
pwenzel 8y ago
I use Sublime Text for Vue.js projects because ESLint support was so smooth! (just installed SublimeLinter-eslint) Sorry to hear you had trouble with it.

tomaspollak 8y ago

If I may ask, what specific VSCode features are you referring to? I'm eager to know because I'm working on an editor for Chrome OS (based on the Monaco editor from VSCode) and would love to know whether they are part of Monaco or extras that only ship with VSCode. If anyone's interested, here's the (very recent) announcement post: https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/ax8pi3/archetype_a_new_code_editor_for_chrome_os/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/ax8pi3/archetype_...

Vanderson 8y ago
Here's a few things: (without effort put into this...) 1. Package management / Extensions. Vscode comes with this right away, Sublime you have to install a package manager to manage packages...-sigh- 2. File icons. (this may seem dumb, but man it should be a simple thing to have defaults for...) 3. Git integration (though seems they may have caught up on this?) These are just off the top of my head... Edit: spelling
- tomaspollak 8y ago
  Got it! Thanks.
  - Vanderson 8y ago
    Some other ones are code completion, indentation stuff, etc...
- guessmyname 8y ago
  > Package management / Extensions https://packagecontrol.io/ https://packagecontrol.io/ > File icons https://packagecontrol.io/packages/FileIcons https://packagecontrol.io/packages/FileIcons > Git integration https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/git_integration.html https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/git_integration.html
  - Vanderson 8y ago
    Yep, I found every plugin I ever needed for Sublime. But then the minor conflicts between the plugins start happening. Of which the only support answers online are "uninstall plugin/test". So I had to choose which plugins to keep for certain features/functions. It was too messy. Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was the base features of Sublime that were conflicting with a plugin, or two plugins conflicting... The seemingly unfixable bugs from plugins are what pushed me towards VScode. Where even if there are plugins/extensions, I need fewer of them, so less likely to have conflicts.

jgalt212 8y ago

Interesting, as I was thinking about going back to Sublime after being frustrated by the Python Language Server eating RAM like a Gremlin after midnight. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2594 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2594 https://github.com/Microsoft/python-language-server/issues/450 https://github.com/Microsoft/python-language-server/issues/4... https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/65639 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/65639 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2553 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2553

_bxg1 8y ago

I had the same experience, but from Atom to VSCode. There was an even more direct "standing on shoulders" effect there. I didn't want to switch to the huge corporation that just copied the project with the actual original idea. But VSCode is just so... designed. Everything just works, and brilliantly. I don't understand how they got an Electron app to be so fast. Say what you will about Microsoft, they sure know how to make IDEs.

_coveredInBees 8y ago
I used Atom for a while, and I recall regular instances of the entire IDE freezing for 10+ seconds for no good reason when I had a few files open. At the time (and to some extend even today), everyone just chalked this up to "Electron is terrible". But MS came along with VSCode to show how a lot of the "issues" with Electron were actually just issues surrounding bad code / software design that were bogging down apps. Like you, I felt a bit sad to switch from Atom, but the difference in quality was massive. I guess that's the difference between having a bunch of smart people who have developed enterprise software for a while working on an Electron App, vs. younger, equally smart folks working on an app without that wealth of experience to draw on for developing a complex application.

drinchev 8y ago

I use webstorm and yeah this doesn’t contradict with having sublime text installed. When I want to read a large file sublime rocks, but for actual meta developing you need to spend time configuring it. Gladly it’s not like you can’t have them both so there’s not an actual choice problem here. Just use whatever you want for the right job.

geraltofrivia 8y ago

Similar story here. Used to write my python codes in subl till I finally jumped ship to PyCharm. But I didn't stop using Sublime. I set a keyboard shortcut to launch it, and thankfully it doesn't open multiple instances if already running but pops up on foreground. And now it's my scratchpad, a temporary clipboard, a distraction free zippy screen where I compose my messages before mailing them. And its probably my most used application, lately.

mstade 8y ago

I really don't understand what all these fancy features are that are so necessary. I use a stock sublime install, with a couple of syntax plugins and the material theme because I think it looks pleasing. That's it. It's super snappy, and whenever I need to jot something down I just type `subl` in a terminal and hey presto, there's a window. I have notes that I've never saved to a file, but that have been open in a sublime buffer for probably well over a year now. Sublime has crashed. My computer has crashed. I've rebooted the thing multiple times. No matter what, these buffers stick around, and it's a complete life saver. It's so good, that I just know if I've opened up a sublime window and typed something in a buffer, it's probably gonna survive longer than I will. That's worth the price of admission alone. Several times over. I've never been this pleased with an editor, ever. I don't need fancy refactoring tools. Find across files has done wonders for me, and when I need to get real fancy I break out the regex. Ctrl+d to duplicate my selection; multiple cursors; these two alone cover probably a good 99% of my refactoring needs. I used to like having an IDE where I could click an icon and it would build things for me, now I can't stand one. I just set up a file watcher in a terminal in the background and it rebuilds whenever some stuff changes. I use Makefiles or redo or even just a simple shell script whenever I need something fancy with dependency management. I've not missed fancy build integration since forever. Whenever I need to debug something, gdb or in-browser dev tools or whatever is suitable for the context I'm in will do more than fine, I don't need an integrated window in my editor. I appreciate that sublime is just a bunch of tabs of text buffers, a simple file browser, can handle ridiculously large files with ease, doesn't consume much resources, and is stable as a rock. I've found I don't need anything else. It's like what I imagine my cool friends who use vim think of their editors, only I'm too stupid to really "get" them. It's ok. Sublime is my Fisher Price version of vim I guess, but I love it to bits. It's paid for itself many, many times over at this point.

mstade 8y ago
Some other things I do with sublime that might be quirky: - My font size is 22 or 24 points. Not because I'm blind, but because it forces me to not type lines too long, or files too big. It keeps my code concise and to the point. Also the font I use (Menlo) is lovely and I just like looking at it sometimes. - My lines wrap at 76 characters. Basta. - I'll have multiple windows of sublime open for weeks, months sometimes. Half the time I don't even know what windows or buffers I have open. I just did a "clean up" and closed about 10 of them. It was like a trip down memory lane of the last year. Most of these windows had buffers I had never saved – not even once. - Aside from a bats syntax plugin, and the material theme, I have no plugins. Unless you count the package installer I guess. - Sublime is my editor for git commit messages. I love it. - Most of the time when I need to write something long form, a long email, an article, anything really, I'll do it in sublime first and then copy into a word processor for layout and other things. If I need to update things, the sublime version is the source of truth, and I'll just copy/paste into Pages or whatever I'm using at the time for layout/design. - Not gonna lie, sometimes I think about writing a plugin for sublime to use it as my email client. I think it'd be wonderful. - Sometimes I just open up a new sublime window and start typing random stuff; a short story, some thoughts, or just random words. It's like therapy in a way. I never save these buffers, or at least very rarely. Sublime is the single most valuable piece of software I own, and I'm very glad to have paid the price of admission.