I see a lot of people here bitchin about bad Linux desktop experience and they I see they were all using Gnome. Just give KDE a try people. It is very light, clean NixOS KDE5 installation consumed 450MBs of RAM.
Now try and open up Sublime after some time spent in VSCode. You will see what I am talking about, yeah go and try scroll that Side bar, scroll editor, enter some text fast, scroll fast the minimap. Everything is very smooth! I mean I get it, if you want rich plugins and all that fancy stuff go down the Atom/VSCode way. Even though I was using Emacs and Vim for the biggest part of my development time, I always had Sublime somewhere in there, I use editor just as an editor. Some nice light git integration, fast file searching and fast and correct code navigation is all I need that goes out of the $EDITOR scope. I have all of that with Sublime and it works reliably and flawlessly.
I agree, for a basic editor Sublime is faster, generally speaking. (ie, open, navigate, search, etc...)
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...)
For me personally, VSCode doesn't compete with Sublime. Sublime is my primary text editor with some advanced features for convenience. VSCode is a replacement for all of the IDEs I don't want to install or launch right now.
Agree with you. VSCode used to be somewhat slower about a year back but not anymore. Yes it uses more RAM than Sublime but for anyone with a decent computer, that is not a concern. The productivity boost with VSCode is much better than with Sublime. Especially for Javascript, there is not even a contest.
On OSX, Sublime Text 2 and 3 never felt much faster than VSCode to me. Small and medium sized files were snappy enough for me not to notice, and they both choked hard on larger (multi-GB or many millions/billions/etc. of lines) files.
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.
Also maybe worth mentioning that Sublime costs $80 as opposed to VSCode, Emacs and Vim being free... of course any working developer/shop should be able to afford that if the editor experience truly is (forgive the pun) sublime.
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.
I am a lurker and don't have a account or comment on Hacker News.
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.
It is unfair. However, unless you have a principle of ignoring freely (free as in beer and code in this case) released software from bigger companies it's a comparison that will be made.
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!
I can appreciate their need to charge but the $80 for personal use is rather prohibitive. It is a bit odd they differentiate a personal and business license yet charge the same for both. I'd buy a copy for personal use if it was more reasonable since I do like how it works but I just stick to xed for simple editing and IDEs like vscode for more in-depth work instead.
$80 is a lot for personal use, but how many personal users actually pay it? It's not difficult to ignore the occasional nag message, so people who can't or don't want to pay aren't forced to.
To be honest... yes, it is rather much. You are in the price range of full fledged IDEs, whole operating systems, and office suites just for a text editor, even though it is quite a good one. As the sibling comment mentioned, I'm sure many personal users just use the unregistered version to the point that they'd probably make quite a bit of extra revenue if they offered a more attractive price point for those users.
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.
That is quite generous but I don't know that it'd sit well having someone else pay for me for what I consider too much to use. I suppose it's all just my principles since I could just use it in an unregistered state as many personal users likely do. I like supporting software like this... I just can't justify the cost, particularly since it's just for my own use.
I have been wanting to buy a license to get rid of the license nag pop up, but wasn’t sure if development was ongoing since it had been quite a while since the last release. Also, I figured Sublime Text 4 might be coming down the pipeline soon.
If I buy a license, does that cover potentially upgrading to the next major version? If not, is there a roadmap for version 3?
One of my previous employers, millioniar (in euros), was too cheap to buy a license... Myself, 1/10000 of a millionaire bought several licenses, one for myself and a few for internet coding friends
If you think $80 dollars is too much for a tool that you can expect to use for 5+ years without issues (I'm at 5 years with Sublime currently), I don't know what to tell you. If you work a trade, you should expect to invest in high quality tools (a laptop, maybe a second monitor, etc.).
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.
Vim and Emacs may work for GP's workflow, but I can't say the same for me (at this time). In that context, I would say that cheaper doesn't always mean better (I prefer to be productive than bill for learning new tools unless that is part of the project).
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.
I'm currently using Windows with WSL + wsltty + tmux + terminal vim with no issues.
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....
I have an i3 so I might not have as awesome experience as you may have... had to optimize for longer battery life because I was traveling a fair bit at the time of purchase.
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)?
I'm on an i5 3.2ghz from around 5 years ago but most slowdown issues with WSL will be I/O bound, not CPU (unless you happen to be compiling code a lot).
Yeah I use the window key + arrow key shortcuts a lot but it's not the same as a dedicated window manager. Thanks though.
Wow that’s good! I want to get used x220 and new 9 cell battery. If I could pull of 7-9h battery life I would consider it a great success. Btw i would be using only StumpWM, Firefox and Emacs. For media consumption I got MacBooks.
The reason I don't believe it is because I doubt it has drivers for the latest graphics cards and modern desktop environments such as Gnome/KDE. Is Ryzen even supported? What about sleep/suspend and resume? What's the story on package management? Can you run VirtualBox / VMWare on it?
Problem with C/C++ is maintaining and writing code. I am sure you are well aware of Jonathan Blow's efforts in writing Jai programming language. If not take a look at his Youtube channel. Pretty eye opening. (I am no game dev btw)
I did too, but was forced back because I need their API. Their latest move is to close of much of their Event API so people are forced to use their Facebook Local app, naturally this was justified with "privacy".
I don't use swiper, but Emacs + Elfeed is indeed a great experience; especially so if you tag all your RSS feeds when adding them. Also, if you have EMMS, you can play podcasts right away pressing P in the * elfeed-show * buffer.
