I felt bad for Sublime. It would be hard for Sublime to compete with MS's free IDE. MS finally decides to take over the open source code editor market. VSC also borrowed many features from Sublime such as its famous integrated package manager and keyboard based shortcuts.
I also felt the same for Sublime, but I think they need to innovate much faster if they want to complete in this space.
With Visual Studio Code, I think, MS is trying to reinvent their VS family of products. Since the current Visual Studio is strongly tied to Windows and MS has accepted the multiple operating systems future (I think, in MS roadmap, revenue from Cloud Operations is one of the major factor), it's important for them to have a developer platform which works great on all the operating systems. HTML5 and JavaScript provide this opportunity to create that development tools platform for the future.
It also leaves the possibility open to port it inside browser/cloud with a lot of code reuse. If Internet Speeds improve a lot and computing in cloud becomes a lot more cheap, I think in next 10 years, for typical web projects, developers might just prefer remote development environments, which they use for coding from an App/Browser.
It's good to see that MS didn't wait to first port .Net on major Operating Systems as part of their .Net Core initiative and then write their cross platform development environment on top of that. Instead they have taken the bet on HTML5/Electron.
It's already integrated in various websites. The Monaco editor is used on Azure and you basically get VS Code in your browser along with a console and error log. I believe they also use it in other places like Bing.
They are providing the same tools they use to drive VSC to many popular editors, including Emacs and Vim as well. It seems that Microsoft wants to give you the best support they can in whatever environment you like!
Those were not invented by Sublime. Lots of older editors have those things, including TextMate and even GNU Emacs and XEmacs. XEmacs had a package manager since the early 1990s.
What Sublime has going for it versus these other editors is ease of use and a much better looking UI. But VS Code has that too, and it's free.
This is why we cannot have nice desktop tooling unless it comes from Big Corp getting their revenue from licenses and what have you.
FOSS has spread so much that IT is probably the only industry where people nowadays expect to sell their work using tools they got from others for free.
It is very hard to make a living from donations and books (which tend to get pirated) alone.
For me at least, it still lacks this 'perceived' reactiveness, that millisecond of delay that I don't have with Sublime or vim. I don't know if it's placebo but I have got to use what _feels_ right to me.
Don't feel bad for them. They paved the way for all the great text editors we have now, but they missed the point where they should have opened up their core. If they didn't, there's a good chance Atom, VSC and others wouldn't exist.
Sublime doesn't lag to the point whole words disappear when typing over Citrix. VsCode with VIM over any connection is a nightmare. Sublime handles it like it is local. Big big difference on the main reason you use a text editor, to edit text.
