I remember a few years ago when Sublime was all the rage. The people I know personally that used it have all moved on to VSCode by now. Does Sublime still have a significant following?
Sublime is unbeatable when it is used as a smart notepad - with frequent starts/closes. It loads instantly.
VSCode is more like IDE (once opened, rarely closed) and is actually moving into Visual Studio direction in respect of its weight and associated problems with that.
Exactly how I see them. One of my favorite use cases of Sublime is the 'FilterPipes' command. You can use it to transform the text in numerous ways (such as converting case). You can even write your own text transformation logic in Python. But my favorite use case is the 'Send Text to Command'. I just invoke gnu utilities, like sed or awk (my most common one is 'grep -i filtertext' to only display lines which match a certain pattern), which are accessible from Sublime because they're on my %PATH% on Windows. So I'm basically doing things in Sublime that Vim users think are only possible to vimmers in a unixy world. I'm filtering/transforming text very effectively, all without having to retain in memory some very arcane commands.
I use Sublime Text and VSCode depending on what my needs are. I'm happy with both, but both have different strengths.
Sublime Text is great for quick jobs. Looking at a large log file, pretty-printing a JSON snippet, URLdecoding a bunch of URLEncoded text, writing a one-off shell script, etc, is all quick and easy with Sublime Text. One of my favourite things is to use the multiple cursors feature to quickly construct a shell script - think of taking a list of a dozen IDs and constructing a series of 'grep' commands to look at a log file.
VSCode is great for longer-lived jobs. Currently I'm working on a bigish Python script to sync data from a handful of source systems to a cloud service. Using VSCode for this sort of development works decently for me, though I'm sure I'm not using it to its full potential at all.
I remember years ago when VS Code was all the rage. Now I have to sit through 10+ seconds of top-corner update status bar windows and x.x.2x 'Welcome' screens full of animated GIFs everytime I just want to open a file.
I'm a very, very low level user, I mostly use it as text editor with syntax highlighting, so I'm not the target audience of your question, but what I love to bits is that it starts up instantly, and keeps unsaved files open in as many editor windows as you want. I'm somewhat of a fan just because of that. If you use the exit menu option rather than closing a window, when you start ST again, all windows open again as they were, minus undo history, but hey. That's both pleasing on a slick software level, as well as super useful.
For small projects, large files, or one-off files, it's Sublime for me. For work on my existing/massive project at work, it's phpStorm. For everything else it's usually VSCode.
Speed for one, though most people seems to not care much about this, I personally can't stand the very much perceivable lag while using VS Code / Atom.
And multi-cursor editing is still the best on ST.
I personally use vim as my main editor, and the ST for the occasional batch text-editing. Though the out-of-box experience of VSCode is really good.
What does VS Code offer over Sublime besides a massive marketing budget? I absolutely love Sublime, it has never occurred to me to even try the Electron based alternatives.
Sublime is nowhere in terms of add-ons / language integration compare to VScode, without that it's pretty much useless. Sublime is just a better looking Notepad++
In my opinion, it really depends on the language. I find that VSCode is better than Sublime for web development, but I really prefer Sublime for write and compile workflows (e.g. C/C++ or Go development) which do not rely too much on extensive IDE support.
The out-of-box "IDE" features it provides (esp. for working with JS/TS projects) is amazing. I still struggle to reproduce that experience with various plugins on Sublime.
Thats pretty much it for me. Everyone keeps saying that the performance issue is a myth, but I still experience a very noticeable lag with VSCode, and that keeps me from using it as my main editor.
Sometimes, less is more. I completely agree that if you do need IDE-like features, then Sublime is most likely not for you, and any plugin trying to replicate those features falls pretty flat. But if you're doing simple file editing,
I much prefer Sublime Text as it's faster and the UI much cleaner, not bloated with hundreds of buttons and options and huge context menus for things I'll never need.
A lot of IDEs have silly limitations about creating projects or files. I like being able to open a blank scratch file on Sublime, set the syntax mode if I need to, and start editing text right away. The half a second to open is also amazing.
I've tried them, you're not missing anything unless you like typing lag, appalling scrolling performance, syntax highlighting that happens several seconds after you've opened a file etc. etc.
Editing remote files with Sublime Text and rsub[0] makes my day to day work so much easier. It seems like such a simple thing, but having a fast, intuitive, accessible, and easy to configure text editor is so underrated. I work with people that swear by vim, emacs, etc. but I never had the patience to learn how to set them up to suite my specific needs. With Sublime, I never had to. Maybe that makes me less sophisticated, but I genuinely appreciate that it's such a simple product that just works; I don't have to mess around with buffers, scrollback bindings, or memorize complicated shortcuts - I just call "subl" no matter where I am and I can manipulate the file natively on OS X.
Everyone has a different use case, but in my opinion VSCode is a full fledged IDE at this point - not a text editor (and it shows in its speed.) I use ST to poke around in config files when they need quick edits because I'm less likely to make a mistake than if I used vim. It's also significantly faster when loading up large log files than VSCode. Actual remote programming is done with PyCharm, but that's just my use case.
I’m working with big CSV files now and VSCode is horrific. It hangs for tens of seconds on files that I have no problem editing right away in vim/vi. So for non-Terminal use, I think I’m ready to switch back to Sublime.
I personally use 2 types of editors, VSCode for any project based work and NPP (Notepad++) for any light editing work, config files, or writing down some minor notes. I have encountered "huge file" scenarios and had Sublime installed as well in my previous job. Some scenarios and features worked well for me in Sublime, some in NPP (Macro).
I was a user of NPP for .. maybe 10 years. I finally gave Sublime another try just a few months ago and I'm full time convert. I'm not knocking on NPP but I think Sublime is a little bit more sleek. And it's cross-platform.
That said, the 'Text Tools' plugin in NPP is killer.
I wish they bundled in language server functionality instead of relying on 3rd party packages for it. I had to do a fresh install earlier this year, and there was a ~1 month period where you couldn't install the recommended language server plugin because the single person who had control of the repo didn't have time to update the plugin to pull dependencies from BitBucket because BitBucket changed their API. I primarily use Sublime for Rust development, and without the language server plugin you don't get much benefit besides syntax highlighting.
I just want to use this moment to thank the creators of Sublime Text. Thank you for an awesome text editor. Who knew it could make editing life so much simpler!
Though it has seemed to lose its market share over the past few years, there still isn’t a text editor to date that can efficiently handle what Sublime can. For me, it’s search, multi-cursor selection, OOTB shortcuts, and performance are unrivaled. Do I use VSCode, PyCharm, and Vim for most things? Yes. But when I need to edit text, lots of it, and fast, I always fall back to Sublime. Outside of it not having the things that would turn it into an IDE like VSCode, Sublime just feels like a more sane environment to work in for me, at least for text editing.
Examples: Needing to edit Maya ASCII files (3D DCC) that can easily range from 10,000 to several hundred thousand lines. Most apps can’t even open these files, yet ST processes them like a champ. I’ve opened 3-5GB text files in Sublime before with little fuss. Scrolling performance does get affected a bit, but at least I can do what I need it to do.
50 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadSublime is unbeatable when it is used as a smart notepad - with frequent starts/closes. It loads instantly.
VSCode is more like IDE (once opened, rarely closed) and is actually moving into Visual Studio direction in respect of its weight and associated problems with that.
Sublime Text is great for quick jobs. Looking at a large log file, pretty-printing a JSON snippet, URLdecoding a bunch of URLEncoded text, writing a one-off shell script, etc, is all quick and easy with Sublime Text. One of my favourite things is to use the multiple cursors feature to quickly construct a shell script - think of taking a list of a dozen IDs and constructing a series of 'grep' commands to look at a log file.
VSCode is great for longer-lived jobs. Currently I'm working on a bigish Python script to sync data from a handful of source systems to a cloud service. Using VSCode for this sort of development works decently for me, though I'm sure I'm not using it to its full potential at all.
Nothing wrong with that, just pointing out that anecdata from HN will be somewhat screwed.
https://sublime-text-unofficial-documentation.readthedocs.io...
Seriously, using native C++ gives it a real performance boost over the other two editors.
And multi-cursor editing is still the best on ST.
I personally use vim as my main editor, and the ST for the occasional batch text-editing. Though the out-of-box experience of VSCode is really good.
Thats pretty much it for me. Everyone keeps saying that the performance issue is a myth, but I still experience a very noticeable lag with VSCode, and that keeps me from using it as my main editor.
A lot of IDEs have silly limitations about creating projects or files. I like being able to open a blank scratch file on Sublime, set the syntax mode if I need to, and start editing text right away. The half a second to open is also amazing.
Also VS Code is the only text editor that I know of where common file encoding bugs [1] are not a priority.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?utf8=&q=is%3Aissu...
Might be a minor detail, but all text always looks great.
[1] https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
[0] https://github.com/henrikpersson/rsub
I think plugins should automatically disable themselves if the file is over x KB.
We've got some pretty exciting changes coming up quite soon, but this isn't it.
Can you elaborate? :)
Examples: Needing to edit Maya ASCII files (3D DCC) that can easily range from 10,000 to several hundred thousand lines. Most apps can’t even open these files, yet ST processes them like a champ. I’ve opened 3-5GB text files in Sublime before with little fuss. Scrolling performance does get affected a bit, but at least I can do what I need it to do.