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Like for many Sublime used to be the go-to editor for a slick editing experience. Easiness for people who didn't want Vim but found JetBrains too heavy. But tod

Like for many Sublime used to be the go-to editor for a slick editing experience. Easiness for people who didn't want Vim but found JetBrains too heavy. But today I'm afraid Sublime is far behind VSC as a tool to empower developer productivity, and it reminds me of Nova at this point (too late). Also no mention of the feature that changed the face of the ecosystem — Intellisense or the language server protocol.

warmwaffles 6y ago
I still use sublime text everyday. By far the boot speed, zero lag between file changes and other slight annoyances are not there. Plus the integration of Sublime Merge has been fantastic.
- laddershoe 6y ago
  Me too -- I live in Sublime Text most days. Hard to argue that VSCode wins on dev features, and most of my fellow developers use it for that reason. But I can't get past the speed; Sublime Text does everything instantly, while in VS Code, everything is just slightly laggy. To each their own, I guess, but given how much of my day editing text, it's hard to want to use a text editor that has noticeable lag. (Cue the usual rants about latency in 2021 on multi-GHz machines)
  - warmwaffles 6y ago
    I've also got most of the shortcuts committed to muscle memory and configured just the way I like it. Sunken cost fallacy is where I am headed. But I've always loved this editor and will continue to support it as long as they continue to support it.
- kamranjon 6y ago
  I also love sublime merge, any time im screensharing with someone pairing on some code and we finish up i pop it open straight from sublime to review our changes and they always want to know what tool it is. They just produce really great software.
ericcholis 6y ago
I basically use Sublime in place of notepad on Windows at this point. If I need anything beyond advanced text editing; I'm using an IDE.
- tored 6y ago
  I use Sublime Text as excellent grep/search tool. Superfast, easy to write filters for include or exclude, can quickly open the matching file and you can see it with proper syntax highlighting.
- systems 6y ago
  then why not use notepad++ its free and open source, unlike sublime text
patjenk 6y ago
I use sublime.txt everyday. The main purpose is reading, editing, searching a “scratch.txt” file I have been prepending to for the last 11 years. Sublime loads, saves, and searches it better than any other text editor. I have found it’s a helpful way to save random lists, notes, links, and common chunks of code. It’s also my go to for wrangling weird txt.
- thefz 6y ago
  I have a similar use case, although I am not a power user. I use it to open often giant .csv and .txt very very fast. I use it to quickly edit SQL because the select-lines command (ctrl+alt+up/down) makes batch edits of indented code a breeze. I use it to sometimes format and arrange weirdly formatted C#. I use it often for its lightning fast search and replace function. It has grown on me over NP++ which is still a very very nice text editor.
tored 6y ago
Wasn't one problem that Sublime Text's plugin API was somewhat lacking, you couldn't do any advanced GUI in it?
- bogwog 6y ago
  This is a big one. Being able to create a tab/window to view custom data would be awesome, like a live HTML preview, OpenGL surface, graph rendered from an open data file, custom image format, etc. I wouldn't mind the core ST app being so bare bones if the plugin API was more powerful, but unfortunately it is pretty limited in what you can do.
  - wbond 6y ago
    We've got quite a number of API enhancements in the next version, including HTML sheets for non-text content. That said, we are definitely focused on being first and foremost a really fast text editor that makes it easy to read, navigate and write code. Trying to implement a browser or be an IDE are outside of our area of focus.
klibertp 6y ago
> Intellisense Could we please call it "autocompletion" instead? The feature did not originate from Microsoft IDEs, and while they are free to call it whatever when talking about their editors, the rest of the world (well, that 2m^2 part centered on me, at least) would appreciate if we used more general terminology.
- tehbeard 6y ago
  I think at this point it's safe to assume Intellisense is fairly genericized and refers more to an "autocompletion" that takes additional information/context into account than a specific $company's implementation.
- dgellow 6y ago
  I always understood "intellisense" as a way to say "contextual autocompletion based on structured information". So it is a form of autocompletion, but one that adapts gracefully to the context (like an IDE autocompletion experience). Autocompletion could just mean that you have some string matching (more like basic shell completion). It's good to have a way to specify when you're talking about the former meaning and I do not know another term for this than "intellisense".
  - bogwog 6y ago
    In my experience, "Intellisense" is shorthand for "broken autocompletion" I don't use Microsoft IDEs often, but have had experience with them many times over the past 15 years. And every single time, intellisense would freeze, get confused, or just stop working completely. Not once in 15 years have I had a passable experience with it, so nowadays when I'm in Microsoft land I always immediately disable intellisense before I start working.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dgellow 6y ago
      I completely understand your feelings. I also always faced quite a lot of issues with Visual Studio (not vscode) autocompletion when trying to write C++. But when it decides to work the experience is great. Visual Studio Code on the other hand is just fantastic. I was a hardcore emacs user until I switched to VSCode as my main editor a few years ago due to the crazy good auto-completion experience.
tehbeard 6y ago
Sublime still holds king for ad-hoc grepping around large files. For dev work though, my daily driver is VSC at this point. I still use Sublime for notes as well, but that's more so I don't have to think about how closing/opening half a dozen workspaces in VSC affects which notes are open.
wbond 6y ago
This is a little teaser of some of the more easily demonstrated visual changes in ST4, but we've got a huge collection of new features, tweaks and bug fixes coming. The community is actively maintaining an LSP package, and we've added a number of features in ST4 that the protocol requires, such as UTF-16 diffs.
- kamranjon 6y ago
  I'm really excited about the new release, thanks for building one of the fastest text editors in the game. I use it every day and couldn't develop without it.
- hn8788 6y ago
  I love sublime text, but I really wish you'd reconsider relying on a community LSP package. There was an issue a year or two ago where the LSP package couldn't be installed due to a dependency issue in the package, and since it's a community package, they could only fix it when they had enough spare time. I think it was a 1-2 month timeframe where there was no way for new installs to have LSP functionality since it required a third-party plugin.
  - wbond 6y ago
    We looked into the protocol, but unfortunately it made a number of poor architectural choices that leads to many language servers not implementing the protocol properly. This effectively requires custom integrations for most language servers. That wouldn't make sense to do in the core of the editor, since we'll never be primary users on the vast majority of servers. The open source model makes sense since it will need to have tweaks and fixes to support various language servers. That combined with a very small development team (six engineers across our two products), would probably lead to slower development, and it would be tied to the release cadence of the main product.
    - hn8788 6y ago
      That makes sense, I didn't know how small the team was. Thanks for the response, looking forward to ST4.
psychometry 6y ago
Jetbrains is extremely fast for me these days because the indexing is good. The fact that the IDE and Java are using 1-2 GBs RAM isn't really a problem when any dev machine is going to have at least 8 GBs.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  That's surprising. I used IntelliJ today after a pause and found it unbearably slow. For instance, scrolling a ~6 page source file lags so much it's extremely irritating. It's also fantastically bloated. There's so much stuff I have to disable to make it barely usable. And most of the supposedly helpful lightbulbs suggest changes that make absolutely no sense. I can absolutely believe that IntelliJ has its fans because it has a ton of features, but for me it's just unusable.
- benbristow 6y ago
  8GB is low for a dev machine nowadays. Your browser uses 1/2GB, IDE using 1/2GB+ (JetBrains Rider often uses like 4GB for me), then the OS itself, database servers, virtualization overhead (e.g. Docker) and other tools. Easily used up. 16GB is the bare minimum for a dev machine in 2021 IMO. Anything higher than that is 'nice to have' unless you're doing heavy stuff like data analysis, machine learning/AI, games development etc.

warmwaffles 6y ago

I still use sublime text everyday. By far the boot speed, zero lag between file changes and other slight annoyances are not there. Plus the integration of Sublime Merge has been fantastic.

laddershoe 6y ago
Me too -- I live in Sublime Text most days. Hard to argue that VSCode wins on dev features, and most of my fellow developers use it for that reason. But I can't get past the speed; Sublime Text does everything instantly, while in VS Code, everything is just slightly laggy. To each their own, I guess, but given how much of my day editing text, it's hard to want to use a text editor that has noticeable lag. (Cue the usual rants about latency in 2021 on multi-GHz machines)
- warmwaffles 6y ago
  I've also got most of the shortcuts committed to muscle memory and configured just the way I like it. Sunken cost fallacy is where I am headed. But I've always loved this editor and will continue to support it as long as they continue to support it.
kamranjon 6y ago
I also love sublime merge, any time im screensharing with someone pairing on some code and we finish up i pop it open straight from sublime to review our changes and they always want to know what tool it is. They just produce really great software.

ericcholis 6y ago

I basically use Sublime in place of notepad on Windows at this point. If I need anything beyond advanced text editing; I'm using an IDE.

tored 6y ago
I use Sublime Text as excellent grep/search tool. Superfast, easy to write filters for include or exclude, can quickly open the matching file and you can see it with proper syntax highlighting.
systems 6y ago
then why not use notepad++ its free and open source, unlike sublime text

patjenk 6y ago

I use sublime.txt everyday. The main purpose is reading, editing, searching a “scratch.txt” file I have been prepending to for the last 11 years. Sublime loads, saves, and searches it better than any other text editor. I have found it’s a helpful way to save random lists, notes, links, and common chunks of code. It’s also my go to for wrangling weird txt.

thefz 6y ago
I have a similar use case, although I am not a power user. I use it to open often giant .csv and .txt very very fast. I use it to quickly edit SQL because the select-lines command (ctrl+alt+up/down) makes batch edits of indented code a breeze. I use it to sometimes format and arrange weirdly formatted C#. I use it often for its lightning fast search and replace function. It has grown on me over NP++ which is still a very very nice text editor.

tored 6y ago

Wasn't one problem that Sublime Text's plugin API was somewhat lacking, you couldn't do any advanced GUI in it?

bogwog 6y ago
This is a big one. Being able to create a tab/window to view custom data would be awesome, like a live HTML preview, OpenGL surface, graph rendered from an open data file, custom image format, etc. I wouldn't mind the core ST app being so bare bones if the plugin API was more powerful, but unfortunately it is pretty limited in what you can do.
- wbond 6y ago
  We've got quite a number of API enhancements in the next version, including HTML sheets for non-text content. That said, we are definitely focused on being first and foremost a really fast text editor that makes it easy to read, navigate and write code. Trying to implement a browser or be an IDE are outside of our area of focus.

klibertp 6y ago

> Intellisense Could we please call it "autocompletion" instead? The feature did not originate from Microsoft IDEs, and while they are free to call it whatever when talking about their editors, the rest of the world (well, that 2m^2 part centered on me, at least) would appreciate if we used more general terminology.

tehbeard 6y ago
I think at this point it's safe to assume Intellisense is fairly genericized and refers more to an "autocompletion" that takes additional information/context into account than a specific $company's implementation.
dgellow 6y ago
I always understood "intellisense" as a way to say "contextual autocompletion based on structured information". So it is a form of autocompletion, but one that adapts gracefully to the context (like an IDE autocompletion experience). Autocompletion could just mean that you have some string matching (more like basic shell completion). It's good to have a way to specify when you're talking about the former meaning and I do not know another term for this than "intellisense".
- bogwog 6y ago
  In my experience, "Intellisense" is shorthand for "broken autocompletion" I don't use Microsoft IDEs often, but have had experience with them many times over the past 15 years. And every single time, intellisense would freeze, get confused, or just stop working completely. Not once in 15 years have I had a passable experience with it, so nowadays when I'm in Microsoft land I always immediately disable intellisense before I start working.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dgellow 6y ago
    I completely understand your feelings. I also always faced quite a lot of issues with Visual Studio (not vscode) autocompletion when trying to write C++. But when it decides to work the experience is great. Visual Studio Code on the other hand is just fantastic. I was a hardcore emacs user until I switched to VSCode as my main editor a few years ago due to the crazy good auto-completion experience.

tehbeard 6y ago

Sublime still holds king for ad-hoc grepping around large files. For dev work though, my daily driver is VSC at this point. I still use Sublime for notes as well, but that's more so I don't have to think about how closing/opening half a dozen workspaces in VSC affects which notes are open.

wbond 6y ago

This is a little teaser of some of the more easily demonstrated visual changes in ST4, but we've got a huge collection of new features, tweaks and bug fixes coming. The community is actively maintaining an LSP package, and we've added a number of features in ST4 that the protocol requires, such as UTF-16 diffs.

kamranjon 6y ago
I'm really excited about the new release, thanks for building one of the fastest text editors in the game. I use it every day and couldn't develop without it.
hn8788 6y ago
I love sublime text, but I really wish you'd reconsider relying on a community LSP package. There was an issue a year or two ago where the LSP package couldn't be installed due to a dependency issue in the package, and since it's a community package, they could only fix it when they had enough spare time. I think it was a 1-2 month timeframe where there was no way for new installs to have LSP functionality since it required a third-party plugin.
- wbond 6y ago
  We looked into the protocol, but unfortunately it made a number of poor architectural choices that leads to many language servers not implementing the protocol properly. This effectively requires custom integrations for most language servers. That wouldn't make sense to do in the core of the editor, since we'll never be primary users on the vast majority of servers. The open source model makes sense since it will need to have tweaks and fixes to support various language servers. That combined with a very small development team (six engineers across our two products), would probably lead to slower development, and it would be tied to the release cadence of the main product.
  - hn8788 6y ago
    That makes sense, I didn't know how small the team was. Thanks for the response, looking forward to ST4.

psychometry 6y ago

Jetbrains is extremely fast for me these days because the indexing is good. The fact that the IDE and Java are using 1-2 GBs RAM isn't really a problem when any dev machine is going to have at least 8 GBs.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago
That's surprising. I used IntelliJ today after a pause and found it unbearably slow. For instance, scrolling a ~6 page source file lags so much it's extremely irritating. It's also fantastically bloated. There's so much stuff I have to disable to make it barely usable. And most of the supposedly helpful lightbulbs suggest changes that make absolutely no sense. I can absolutely believe that IntelliJ has its fans because it has a ton of features, but for me it's just unusable.
benbristow 6y ago
8GB is low for a dev machine nowadays. Your browser uses 1/2GB, IDE using 1/2GB+ (JetBrains Rider often uses like 4GB for me), then the OS itself, database servers, virtualization overhead (e.g. Docker) and other tools. Easily used up. 16GB is the bare minimum for a dev machine in 2021 IMO. Anything higher than that is 'nice to have' unless you're doing heavy stuff like data analysis, machine learning/AI, games development etc.