26 ms·
Curious, why Sublime Text in this day and age of VS Code dominance? Sublime text was my first "in the middle" text editor, more featured than vim/emacs, but li
by matthewtse 3y ago
Curious, why Sublime Text in this day and age of VS Code dominance?
Sublime text was my first "in the middle" text editor, more featured than vim/emacs, but lighter weight than IntelliJ. I somehow got my internship company
to buy me a license, which I ended up using for several years after leaving.
But then VS Code came along. I was a skeptic for years, as it was based on Atom/Electron, which I found really sluggish, and it was Microsoft.
The thing that converted me was the "it just works" extensions system. Most coding languages have syntax highlighting and intelligent code navigation out of the box, and if not, it's a few clicks away to install very well written extensions. Comparatively, it was a nightmare installing Sublime Text extensions.
And over the years, Microsoft has poured immense amounts of money into developing features for VS Code.
- muzani 3y agoNote taking. Quick edits. Plugins are easy. Just copy in a bunch of JSON > CMD+SHIFT+P > "pretty"
- S201 3y ago> I was a skeptic for years, as it was based on Atom/Electron, which I found really sluggish, and it was Microsoft. This pretty much still sums it up for me.
- matthewtse 3y agoAfter the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub (including Atom/Electron), they really made immense efforts to speed it up! It's been years since I've used Sublime Text, but I imagine VS Code is as fast if not faster at this point. As for "Microsoft". It's funny, I use to be a Windows/Microsoft fan in the 90s/2000s because that was the only way I was going to play computer games. Then they lost my trust during the Ballmer era, at the same time I started programming and appreciated linux/apple more. But VS Code has singlehandedly reignited my love of Microsoft. Despite the name "Visual Studio Code", it does not at all try to shove Microsoft languages like Visual Basic or C# down your throat. Support for common open source languages like python and javascript are amazing. It's as surprising to me as it is to you that I'm defending Microsoft in an online thread right now.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I use to be a Windows/Microsoft fan [...] Then they lost my trust during the Ballmer era [...] But VS Code has singlehandedly reignited my love of Microsoft Maybe we could find products useful or not without a seesaw parasocial relationship with the vendor?
- cmcaleer 3y agoIf Facebook released one that was VSCode but not electron tomorrow, I'd use that if major concerns didn't exist. I just want the best tool for the job. Sometimes the best tools come from the worst companies, as I'm reminded of every month when Adobe take money from me.
- ivanmontillam 3y ago> It's been years since I've used Sublime Text, but I imagine VS Code is as fast if not faster at this point. That is fundamentally impossible, as Sublime Text is cross platform C++ and VS Code is web based. The mere presence of a web layer makes it magnitudes slower, even if it's imperceptibly fast enough for you.
- artyom 3y agoVSCode was very fast in the beginning, indeed. Now with all the feature creep being added constantly, reminds me of Visual Studio.NET 1.0 Sublime Text is as snappy as ever. I paid for it, too.
- firecall 3y agoVSCode has noticeable UI lag as compared to SublimeText. I really don’t understand the love for VSC. I give it a good go from time to time, because I figure I must be missing something. But I end up back with ST.
- kapitanluffy 3y agoThis. I have a love and hate relationship with VSC. I try to migrate but always end up using Sublime again.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoI personally use VS Code 98% of the time or something but I want companies like Sublime to continue competing and making better stuff. I also paid for Nova from Panic. I really, really want all of these guys to succeed and keep trying to innovate. I also want options that aren’t tied to Microsoft.
- s17n 3y ago"More featured than emacs"?
- nvy 3y agoThe emacs out-of-box experience is notoriously poor, as evidenced by the rise and popularity of emacs starter packs, some of which have been on the hn front page of late. I've been using emacs since 2002 or so and until very recently it needed a ton of third party config to approximate the ux and utility of what was available in other tools built in.
- juxtapose 3y agoAFAIU this is a discoverability problem, not that emacs isn't featureful ootb. Some of emacs's built-in features (e.g. undo in region) are even not supported at all by other editors.
- globular-toast 3y agoSo just use a starter kit. Why do people put so much importance on "out of the box experience"? Who actually cares? Out of the box only matters if you can't change what you get from the box. But you can. That's the entire point of emacs. Emacs is the way it is because it's almost 40 year old software that still tries not to break users' configs. Do VS Code users even have configs? Most of them seem to just lap up whatever is dished out to them.
- nvy 3y agoBecause the "out of box experience" turns lots of users away, including future potential contributors. Emacs could be so much better if it had a larger pool of users from which to draw developers. Read the mailing lists- it's plain to see that Eli and a few others are seriously burnt out. The project is not healthy, despite outward appearances. There's a sizeable group of emacs users who are "it works for me" grognards and for whom any change to make emacs better constitutes an assault on them as a person. If that's you, just down vote and move on and continue enjoying living in your ensconced world of mediocre software. I don't have energy to have this argument yet again.
- dralley 3y agoI still like Sublime Text better for most day-to-day text editing. It's snappier, something about the text rendering just looks better to me, and it has more features w/r/t text manipulation, or at least I haven't been able to find equivalents for certain things in VSCode when I've tried to look in the past. I like the Python support that Anaconda provides in Sublime better than the VSCode alternative I've tried. I still use VSCode for Rust dev though, and merge conflict resolution, and certain kinds of debugging.
- ben-schaaf 3y ago> something about the text rendering just looks better to me I speculate that this is due to Sublime Text using the native font rendering APIs of your platform, as opposed to chrome's font rendering.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- unethical_ban 3y agoI guess I haven't explored it well enough, but I have not learned how to get VSCode to operate properly with virtual environments with python. Am I not supposed to create/manage venvs myself, and point VSCode to the path?
- dragonwriter 3y agoIf you follow the convention of dedicated in-tree venvs in ./venv or ./.venv, VSCode discovers them fine. If you do something else (like some workflows, including Poetry’s default, prefer) then its more work.
- jwells89 3y agoThe "it just works" factor for extensions varies a lot depending on the language/ecosystem in question. For some things the store is littered with old broken extensions and figuring out which ones are "right" (if any are) can be a task. I also think it tries to do a little too much and has too much in the way of modern UI-isms going on. Sublime Text is basically cross-platform TextMate, and I found TextMate more or less perfect in those regards.
- seabrookmx 3y agoThe Remote extensions in particular have changed how I do development. I use VSCode for coding in all languages now and have micro set to $EDITOR for quick stuff in the terminal. It's the comfiest setup I've had in my career.
- simianpirate 3y agoI feel Nova is SO close to being exactly what I want and need on the Mac.
- JohnBooty 3y agoI switched from Sublime to VS Code, but man, I find VS Code pretty ugly. It's not the colors, because obviously there are a near infinite number of themes. It's just a mishmash of text of varying style, size, and spacing and it realllllly all runs together visually for me. I know some of it is tweakable but a lot isn't and I'm not sure it can be fixed...
- mardifoufs 3y agoFor me it's the opposite. I literally can't use another editor for any extended period of time since I started using Shade Of Purple in vscode. I usually hate flashy stuff but man, pycharm is weirdly hard to use without it It's such a stupid detail and ideally irrelevant to actual development too, but my brain just likes it too much.
- spiralx 3y agoJust tried Shade Of Purple and while it looks nice for TS code when I switch to HTML the fact that attribute names are italicised and a bright orangey-yellow while tag names, attribute values and text content all have neutral or darker colours to me makes it look like a case of not being able to see the forest for all the trees - the least interesting part of the document grabs my attention and makes the whole thing harder to visually parse. And it's even worse when attribute values contain expressions because some parts (property and function names) get the same bright orangey-yellow colour as the attribute name.
- mardifoufs 3y agoI think you can tweak it. I'm not sure since I use it mainly for python and C++ but when I used it for html (very very rarely) I didn't notice it. I'll check again, maybe it's not optimized for web! I wonder if it's something that I changed, since with settings sync it's hard to know what's the "default" in any extension even after reinstalling :')
- kapitanluffy 3y agoTried it and it's awesome! Cool that I saw someone on the issues tab port it to ST4 too. btw, have you tried gruvbox?
- hakunin 3y agoCopying my comment from another article: This time I used VSCode for nearly 2 months. Thought it's the end of an era, I'm not coming back to Sublime Text. I decided to push through and customize the configs just right for me, it was really becoming comfortable. Main reason why I wanted to switch is more active dev, more active extension community, and well integrated modern (some ML-backed) code writing and navigation tools. I was wrong. After all the painstaking customization to bring it close to my ideal experience, while also getting used to things I didn't want to fight, I still had a bad time. For one, the tab/cursor focus keeps going into weird places. I press a button, like ESC to switch to normal vim mode, and instead it does nothing, or something different, because turns out I'm not in the editor anymore. Keeps happening, maybe my own fault. The nifty AI tools integration is more of a nuisance — they jump in at bad times (with a delay), and their tab/enter functionality is weird, can never get it right. Most of my autocompletes have been unintentional. Maybe my own fault again, but felt super awkward. There is still no good vertical align plugin, despite such an active community (Sublime doesn't have one either, although they have one that gets me a bit closer). The language server stuff that worked badly in Sublime for my language also works badly in VSCode. The extensions, while numerous, are of questionable quality. I tried to stick to just a few well known ones. After all the effort, I slowly came to realization that I'm back to not really using anything unique to VSCode, sacrificing more than I gained, being surrounded by lots of small moving details everywhere in the UI that make my experience more awkward than helpful, and occasionally getting my cursor stuck in weird parts of UI. I went back to Sublime.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y agoYeah, I almost switched from emacs to VSCode and then discovered that lsp-mode basically meant that there was no advantage to VSCode
- dumpsterdiver 3y agoI find Sublime useful because it doesn't try to be as "helpful" as some other text editors. It also makes problems stemming from non-printing character apparent. It works well for those one-off times when you need to view or edit some text outside of your normal IDE.
- kstrauser 3y agoNot Sublime Text, but I prefer BBEdit these days. It's way more responsive that VSCode, trivially easily to extend with shell scripts, Python, or whatever other language you want to write, and has fine LSP support so it can do most of the magic stuff that VSCode can. I used VSCode for quite a while. I like it. I just strongly prefer truly native apps with native user interfaces. Not having to build a JavaScript package to add any little bit of extra functionality is also pretty sweet.
- 101011 3y agoAs a paid license Sublime user, years back, my biggest annoyance with VSCode was that regex pattern matching hit a limit to the matches it could find. At the time I believe it was around 1k, from some quick Google searching it looks like they may have increased the limit to 10k, which would have been right on the cusp of my use case at the time. I could see giving VSCode another go in the future, but it's the 'if it aint broke' adage at this point.
- buzer 3y ago> Curious, why Sublime Text in this day and age of VS Code dominance? I don't know if it's still the case as I generally don't need to do it anymore but VS Code (and other Electron-based editors) used to struggle with large files. I know it's not very common use case but I did need to open large log files (from 100MB to even gigabytes range) and such in the past and that's where ST really shined.
- tw04 3y agoSame on both fronts. Not sure if VS Code has improved but it was basically unusable for large log files that Sublime basically opened instantly. Have not had a reason to do that in several years so I'm not sure if it's still the case or not.
- soraminazuki 3y ago> more featured than vim/emacs That's ... a bold claim.
- thefz 3y ago> Curious, why Sublime Text in this day and age of VS Code dominance? In one word, comfortable multi-row and column editing. Can't go back to manually indent SQL.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoYou mean like "indent selected lines with tab key"?
- tincholio 3y ago> Sublime text was my first "in the middle" text editor, more featured than vim/emacs, I've never used sublime, how is it "more featured" than either Vim, or (especially) Emacs?
- globular-toast 3y agoWhy would "VS Code dominance" have any bearing on one's own choice of text editor?
- efxhoy 3y agoIve stuck with sublime text because it feels good when I use it, everything is fast and there is no clutter. For lack of a better comparison it feels like when you had just reinstalled windows XP back in the day. Fresh and snappy and clean. I’ve tried vscode but it felt like Windows Vista, a bit slower, a bit more bloaty, a bit less familiar. The downside is I struggle with plugins.
- gentleman11 3y agoWay better on battery life, last I tested. Better ux. Not as worried about it spying
- rubslopes 3y agoFor me, the main one is multiple windows.
- kapitanluffy 3y agomultiple windows?
- rubslopes 3y agoAs far as I know, Vscode doesn't allow multiple windows. You can open several tabs, but all in the same window.
- kapitanluffy 3y agoWhy though? Anyway, I guess there's a reason for that lol
- rubslopes 3y agoI like opening different files on different monitors for different tasks. Sometimes one window will have code while the other is markdown for taking notes.