6 ms·

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 so

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.
- Bwonsamdi 8y ago
  I am a lurker and don't have a account or comment on Hacker News. Sublime is created by a small software shop and they need money to run the shop while Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company. Microsoft can afford to give away free software for some goodwill from developers. Its kinda a unfair comparison.
  - blackfawn 8y ago
    I can appreciate their need to charge but the $80 for personal use is rather prohibitive. It is a bit odd they differentiate a personal and business license yet charge the same for both. I'd buy a copy for personal use if it was more reasonable since I do like how it works but I just stick to xed for simple editing and IDEs like vscode for more in-depth work instead.
    - Veen 8y ago
      $80 is a lot for personal use, but how many personal users actually pay it? It's not difficult to ignore the occasional nag message, so people who can't or don't want to pay aren't forced to.
      - helij 8y ago
anonymousab 8y ago
On OSX, Sublime Text 2 and 3 never felt much faster than VSCode to me. Small and medium sized files were snappy enough for me not to notice, and they both choked hard on larger (multi-GB or many millions/billions/etc. of lines) files. Could have been a plugin not scaling, but I didn't care to experiment and find out for sure. Sublime seems clearly faster on Windows 10 for me though.

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.

Bwonsamdi 8y ago
I am a lurker and don't have a account or comment on Hacker News. Sublime is created by a small software shop and they need money to run the shop while Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company. Microsoft can afford to give away free software for some goodwill from developers. Its kinda a unfair comparison.
- blackfawn 8y ago
  I can appreciate their need to charge but the $80 for personal use is rather prohibitive. It is a bit odd they differentiate a personal and business license yet charge the same for both. I'd buy a copy for personal use if it was more reasonable since I do like how it works but I just stick to xed for simple editing and IDEs like vscode for more in-depth work instead.
  - Veen 8y ago
    $80 is a lot for personal use, but how many personal users actually pay it? It's not difficult to ignore the occasional nag message, so people who can't or don't want to pay aren't forced to.
    - helij 8y ago

anonymousab 8y ago

On OSX, Sublime Text 2 and 3 never felt much faster than VSCode to me. Small and medium sized files were snappy enough for me not to notice, and they both choked hard on larger (multi-GB or many millions/billions/etc. of lines) files. Could have been a plugin not scaling, but I didn't care to experiment and find out for sure. Sublime seems clearly faster on Windows 10 for me though.