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...)
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?
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.
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.
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.
PS - I understand what you're saying, but I thought it was funny you claimed you don't have an account on a website that requires registration for commenting. Welcome to HN!
For me personally, that price is nothing. I would pay twice as much and each employer had to buy it if they wanted me happy in text editor regard.
It's roughly one week of food where I live; so not free, but something I would afford if it brought a net improvement to my work.
On a separate note, a friend described their backwards approach of validating licenses on every launch of their app, which creates a de facto 'telemetry' system since license hash is submitted to their servers and they obviously have access to other info such as IP.
So even though I quite like the software, I've discontinued use due to the high cost and also due to the inability to opt out of external communications that'd allow them to keep tabs on you and your usage. To be fair, I was not keen on Microsoft's telemetry in vscode but that can be disabled and even better, vscodium removes it completely.
I’ve given away 30+ SublimeText licenses in the last 5 years, mostly to students.
If you cannot afford paying $80 for a license, ping me via email and I’ll buy one for you.
My email is 0x636978746f7264732f61742f676d61696c I’m looking forward to talk with you.
If I buy a license, does that cover potentially upgrading to the next major version? If not, is there a roadmap for version 3?
Expensive is very much subjective
Granted, if I knew how to as productive as I am with Sublime Text with Vim or Emacs, I would switch over in a heart beat.
I tried working with Vim exclusively when I started my job ~2 years ago, and my terminal would hang quite often that I had to abandon it (I use ConEmu which is free, but hangs quite often).
I also work on a Windows machine and do not want to use the windows command line, I prefer git-bash/mingw32.
Things are really fast and stable. I often have 10 Vim instances open across half a dozen tmux sessions. Each one takes up about 8mb of RAM with ~40 plugins doing everything I could ever ask for in a code editor. The only time they get closed is when Windows decides to reboot but then I can automatically restore the tmux sessions with 1 hot key.
I switched to Vim last month after I found VSCode to be unusable for editing a 1mb a markdown file (it used over 50% of my i5 3.2ghz quadcore just idling with the file open). I wrote about the experience at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/vim-is-saving-me-hours-of-wor....
Haven't looked back since.
I'm looking to change jobs, so hopefully when I end up somewhere new, I can get a new laptop and try to start with vim. After reading @frosted-flakes comment, I was messing around a bit with vim yesterday, but went back to Sublime because of familiarity with commands for navigating through files.
I'll get to vim one day, just happy with where I am at now.
Was reading through your article and noticed your comment about managing windows in Windows. Did you try using the windows key + left (or any of the other directions)?
Here's a video of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxerpQ8WK8Y
Yeah I use the window key + arrow key shortcuts a lot but it's not the same as a dedicated window manager. Thanks though.
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.
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.
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2594
https://github.com/Microsoft/python-language-server/issues/4...
Say what you will about Microsoft, they sure know how to make IDEs.
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.
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_...
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
> File icons
https://packagecontrol.io/packages/FileIcons
> Git integration
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.
I've been playing with Archetype recently in conjunction with VS Code and I have to say, you've been doing a great job!
Keep it up my dude!
https://www.archetypewebsites.com/
Shouldn't cause any issues, just thought you'd want to know. Cheers!
I currently use Codemirror [0] as the online editor, but when editing online, I do miss a lot of the tools available in VScode.
Do you have an opinion of Monaco vs Codemirror? (I think codemirror is used internally for some Firefox dev tools...)
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.