[HN Gopher] I still like Sublime Text
___________________________________________________________________
I still like Sublime Text
Author : james2doyle
Score : 1090 points
Date : 2025-01-29 06:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ohdoylerules.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ohdoylerules.com)
| james2doyle wrote:
| I often get asked why I still use Sublime. So I wrote this
| article singing it's praises.
| eastbound wrote:
| I never get asked. It's obvious. Just open a 4Gb log file as a
| developer.
|
| All my developers have it.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| I only keep sublime text around for opening +500mb dumps,
| everything else was moved to vscode years ago.
|
| Anything more than 500mb and I switch to less for instant
| reading/searching and sed for instant find/replace.
| noname120 wrote:
| VSCode is just as fast for opening 4 GB log files
| tasuki wrote:
| Vim is not slower!
| noname120 wrote:
| I agree and I do use Vim for all quick edits I need. Just
| wanted to challenge the idea that Sublime Text was better
| than alternatives in the space of GUI text editors
| tbriudmepn wrote:
| It is not just about the opening, it is about the
| searching. Vim is fantastique, although VSCode got faster
| over time too. Grep is fantastic too (I am not trying to
| out-hardcore here ... I mean specifically for log file
| searching not actual coding!). Splunk is better though, but
| sometimes you are local, and sometimes you don't have a few
| mill to burn.
| james2doyle wrote:
| Absolutely. I actually just made my own syntax for
| highlighting the log files in Laravel (Monolog):
| https://github.com/james2doyle/sublime-log-syntax
| saagarjha wrote:
| As a Sublime user I mostly agree, except for the project stuff.
| I can never bring myself to set that up. What are you using
| multiple LSP servers per file for?
| dijit wrote:
| If you have any in-lined code, SQL/HTML. I can see that being
| a great feature.
|
| My eyes widened at that part of the article, as I have to
| betray syntax highlighting when I in-line something, which
| makes me want to break it into it's own file to get the
| highlighting back. But for simple things (like one-liners);
| breaking it into its own file makes things even more messy.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Hmm, so while it's not LSP I do have a Markdown plugin that
| highlights code blocks. But I don't rely on autocomplete
| there.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I got a perfect example: an Astro site. I currently have the
| Astro LSP, Tailwind LSP, and the Biome LSP, all running on
| the same file. I even have Typos LSP too. Having them all
| going at the sam time and being able to tweak their settings
| on a per-project basis is ideal for my workflow.
| fergie wrote:
| I'm curious though- as somebody who is reasonably technical I
| get why you would prefer Sublime to something like VSCode, but
| why not Emacs?
| macNchz wrote:
| I'm a long-time Sublime user who also uses Emacs for single
| files/at the command line (I also have Emacs key bindings set
| up in ST), I have found over the years that I am prone to
| configuration rabbit holes with Emacs and that Sublime
| strikes a nice balance of good defaults, simplicity, and
| customizability.
|
| I think that every time I've worked on a large project with
| Emacs I've started trying to optimize the partial/fuzzy
| filename search, trying all of the different ways people
| suggest online to see which one feels natural until I realize
| I've spent an entire day on it.
|
| Over time I've come to really value software that is
| customizable, but that comes with defaults that I really
| like, rather than software that's even more customizable but
| that _must_ be customized for it to feel right. God forbid I
| run Emacs somewhere without my conf and forget to disable
| electric indent mode and want to flip my desk when it does
| its terrible default behavior.
| iLemming wrote:
| I can answer the opposite of that question. Why Emacs?
|
| For me, Emacs is valuable not for the things it can or cannot
| do, it's valuable because it gives me the perception of
| complete control over the things on my computer.
|
| The other day, I was watching my teammate showing me some
| stuff over Zoom, and I didn't want to derail his thoughts by
| constantly stopping him: "hey, wait, don't scroll away, I'm
| still reading that," "wait a second, what was that URL
| again?" etc. So, the only thing I could do was take
| screenshots.
|
| During the lunch break, I decided to solve this thing for
| myself. I wrote a command that checks ~/Desktop - it's where
| I drop my screenshots, then finds any .png file that was
| created no longer than 2 minutes ago, sends it to tesseract
| for OCR, and opens the text in a buffer. Took me less than 20
| minutes.
|
| Sure, there are many ways to get something like that done,
| but after trying so many different options, I was never able
| to extract the same feeling of control from any other
| alternative.
|
| I have a command that inserts the url of my active tab in the
| browser, with description, in the correct format (e.g.,
| markdown). I wrote that myself, because at some point it
| bothered me that I had to do that manually. There are many
| examples such that, where if I weren't using Emacs, I
| probably wouldn't even bother to acknowledge the existence of
| such small annoyances.
|
| What makes Emacs truly exceptional isn't its vast feature
| set, but rather its ability to foster a problem-solving
| mentality - the "Emacs brain" - where no obstacle, regardless
| of size, goes unaddressed or unresolved.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Sublime Text is so awesome, I don't mind it's constant begging
| for a license purchase or whatever. It's right up there with
| Winrar.
| eastbound wrote:
| And the license is awfully expensive. I was going to the
| website to pay $50 for my 7 developers, but it turns out it's
| $100. No way.
|
| Or $65 per year: https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text
| fastball wrote:
| Software you like for the equivlaent of 0-2 hours of that
| dev's pay seems worth it.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I think Sublime Text was the first software I ever paid for.
| It has paid that back handsomely. And no, I'm not doing the
| usual "I'm a working professional so my time is directly
| attributable to my text editor" thing. I understand there are
| free options. I pay for it _despite_ there being competition
| because of the extra value it brings me.
| noname120 wrote:
| What extra value does it bring you compared to free
| alternatives like Notepad++?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Not trying to be rude but the article does a pretty good
| job laying out some reasons why I pick it.
| noname120 wrote:
| I was interested in the value that it brings _you_. I 'm
| a former Sublime Text user and I switched to VS Code some
| time ago.
|
| Do you also use Sublime Text as your primary IDE just
| like author does?
|
| --------
|
| Mirroring the structure of the article:
|
| 1) Regarding the section about LSPs: do you also have the
| need to be able to "just add an LSP installed as a binary
| in on your usr/local/bin" even though by the author's own
| admission "VS Code is the LSP king"?
|
| Kind of ironic to have the author say in the introduction
| about VS Code that "it probably has taken inspiration
| from Sublime. So why not check out one of the OGs" and
| then a bit later proceeds to say that the LSP "tech
| originat[es] with that editor [VS Code]". I'm returning
| the question to the author and you: why not check out the
| OG?
|
| 2) Regarding the section about snippets author says that
| "VS Code can do this" and even that "the syntax for it is
| a bit nicer".
|
| 3) Regarding workspaces VS Code does all of that. Author
| admits that he "ha[s]n't used it personally, so [he]
| can't speak to it much".
|
| 4) Regarding build systems VS Code does all of that and
| it's easier because contrary to "the Package Control
| [that] is not part of Sublime" (and that you have to
| uglily inject in the Sublime Text console to get
| working), the VS Code plugin repository has everything
| already ready-to-use so that you don't need to reinvent
| the wheel. You can if you want though; Sublime Text
| doesn't provide anything extra in that regard.
|
| 5) Regarding the "Multiple cursors" VS Code has it as
| well.
|
| 6) Regarding the block-level key bindings, have you ever
| needed them? For me the last thing I want is for my
| shortcuts to change dynamically based on which block I am
| in the file. Note that in Sublime Text "they cannot be
| saved on a per-project basis", which is awkward to say
| the least. I would (much) rather have project-level
| keybindings rather than only block-level keybindings that
| apply globally.
|
| 7) Regarding using "Python all the way down" rather than
| JavaScript, I'm surprised that the author finds it to be
| a good thing considering that they primarily use it for
| "web-dev" and all their examples are frontend Javascript
| code.
|
| 8) Finally, the author complains about the terrible
| documentation of Sublime Text, the lack of a plugin
| system, and the fact that for the 3rd-party hacked-
| together plugin management system he finds that getting
| them on the "Package Control site to be quite a chore". I
| have a ton more complaints about Sublime Text to add on
| top of that.
|
| I would rather directly donate money[1] to small
| developers rather than -- as another commenter puts it --
| "supporting and using the products developed by a small
| team of dedicated engineers ..."
|
| --------
|
| [1] And I do! Currently sponsoring 14 developers on a
| monthly basis[1]:
| https://github.com/devnoname120?tab=sponsoring
| james2doyle wrote:
| On the LSP stuff, yes it did originate in VS code. I just
| find the experience in Sublime to be better. How ironic
| is that?
|
| I didn't consider the conflict between how I said "try
| the OG" but then say "VS code is the OG". It is a good
| point.
|
| I show an example of the block level key binding. So
| yeah, I needed it and used it. I only showed one example
| but I have a few more that are my own I just didnt write
| about them.
|
| Around python vs. js for plugins, have you tried to make
| a VS code plugin? You need a package.json, npm, and vsce
| installed globally. Which language is being used is
| usually the least of my problems. For Sublime, you need a
| single .py file! Someone shared this 9 line plugin they
| made: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/31500c17452b0fd8c55b
| c9460bd9c... - I don't tthink plugin development could be
| more simple
|
| I bet an LLM could spit out single file plugins very
| easily. VS code plugins are clearly more work to create
| and deploy even after taking into account my critiques of
| Package Control. At the end of the day you can just toss
| your plugin in a folder or push it to github and
| reference it with a URL.
|
| I didn't say the docs were "terrible". I just said they
| were disjointed. They are complete and fully document the
| APIs. I just wish they were more like the PHP docs or the
| ones for VS code which are docs plus guides.
|
| All your other points are fine critiques. I'll chalk the
| other complaints up as a matter of opinion
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| It doesn't look like arse
| bayindirh wrote:
| That guy is living off that money, and Sublime is one of the
| best text editors out there. Consider it like a SaaS, but
| something doesn't break or stop when your license expires.
|
| If you think the price doesn't reflect the value the software
| brings, then it's your choice, and that's fair. But as for
| the things it brings to the table, I don't think it's _that_
| expensive.
|
| I pay similar for BBEdit, and it saves my bacon regularly.
| Plus it's dependable.
| panza wrote:
| I often see downvotes when people criticise ST's pricing, but
| I mostly agree with the detractors - the price always seems
| to be just a few bucks over the magical limit I'd be willing
| to pay.
| guessmyname wrote:
| Tech workers often spend $100 or more on a fancy meal with
| friends in a single night--I've definitely done that more
| than once. So paying $100 for a software license that I'll
| be using almost every hour of the workday, and even more
| when working on personal projects, feels like a bargain.
| dijit wrote:
| I do wonder why it is that way though, because you're
| right, I've balked at the cost of software before, but
| had no issue in spending an order of magnitude more money
| on a flight to SF to meet up with other developers.
| awill wrote:
| probably because there's a free OSS equivalent to most
| software. The free equivalent to meeting up with
| friends/developers is a zoom call, and those suck.
| 0x073 wrote:
| Yes
|
| I liked sublime text, but 65$ per year you can get the jet
| brain ide you need and it already includes most things you
| need and depends not on plugins from third party.
| makapuf wrote:
| What it does not include is the hefty PC needed for it to
| run compared to sublime.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| I'm curious where you're seeing jet brains subscriptions
| for $65 per year? Only RustRover and WebStorm seem to be
| somewhat close, with the rest being significantly more
| expensive.
| nicoburns wrote:
| JetBrains runs a lot slower than sublime!
| blibble wrote:
| also now full of AI slop advertisements
|
| I've stopped paying them as a result
| coldtea wrote:
| $100 for 7 developers is "Awfully expensive"?
| guessmyname wrote:
| You're either hiring developers from countries where $100 is
| a lot of money, or you expect them to only open Sublime Text
| once a year. Don't be stingy--$100 is a steal when it's the
| primary tool for nearly every developer. You probably spend
| that much (or more) on a weekend outing with your partner or
| friends.
| justin66 wrote:
| You said in a separate comment that all your developers use
| it. You're in violation of the software's evaluation license.
| al_borland wrote:
| I paid for a license on one of the versions. I initially got
| upset when there was a major release that auto-updated and I
| got the pop up. However, I looked at my purchase date and it
| was so many years ago, and I was able to roll back to the
| version I paid for, so I definitely got my money's worth. I
| didn't end up buying the newer version, because work was
| forcing me onto VS Code.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Same. I tried zed but it doesn't come close.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Zed tries too hard to be magical, plus their license terms are
| not the best.
|
| Before anyone asks any further. See the CLA [0] and the Privacy
| Policy [1].
|
| [0]: https://zed.dev/cla
|
| [1]: https://zed.dev/privacy-policy
| vollbrecht wrote:
| I may see your first point, but how is GPL3 worse than a
| closed source software?
| 42lux wrote:
| Corps usually have problems with gpl software being used.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Everyone knows if you touch GPL you get cooties
| bayindirh wrote:
| Thanks for the info! I might be immune then. I swim in
| that thing.
| user432678 wrote:
| Yet the whole world runs on Linux with no issues :shrugs:
| bayindirh wrote:
| It's not the GPLv3 license, it's the attached CLA and
| Privacy Policy.
| bayindirh wrote:
| The code might be GPLv3, which is my favorite license BTW,
| but they have a "nice" CLA [0] and Privacy Policy [1] which
| doesn't inspire confidence.
|
| I think CLA is a nuanced thing, since Eclipse also has one
| and didn't rugpull anyone ever, but their Privacy Policy
| states that the tool is chockful with telemetry and can
| collect _any_ personal and non-personal data as they see
| fit.
|
| When somebody tells that you can opt-out of this, I have a
| hard time believing that the switches are connected to
| anything.
|
| [0]: https://zed.dev/cla
|
| [1]: https://zed.dev/privacy-policy
| WD-42 wrote:
| It's GPL. How is the license not the best?
| bayindirh wrote:
| See the attached CLA [0] and Privacy Policy [1].
|
| [0]: https://zed.dev/cla
|
| [1]: https://zed.dev/privacy-policy
| WD-42 wrote:
| And yet, ST is closed source. Still a wild comparison.
|
| This isn't just license preference either. I would
| imagine the efforts of the sublime lsp people would be
| greatly eased if they had access to the source.
|
| But nah zed bad because cla.
| bayindirh wrote:
| No it's not. I mostly find closed source application with
| clear lines more trustworthy than openwashed software.
|
| I'm a big Free Software supporter. For my personal
| projects, I only use (A)GPLv3 or later.
|
| However, I have a problem with software which comes with
| "GPLv3 BUT..." licenses. We have seen how CLAs weaponized
| against their contributors with rugpull license changes.
|
| Also, Zed was closed source at first. I had beta access
| to that thing. Then they pivoted to "Open source with
| closed source collaboration servers" thing, and they
| claimed rights on anything passing through their servers
| (collaboration / zed-ai).
|
| When software stops being local-only, being Free Software
| loses half the meaning, because you can do all the
| nefarious things on the backend, without people seeing
| them. "We only send harmless usage data" you may say, but
| you don't say how you process and which other signals you
| mix into that data from other sources or data brokers.
| That's a problem.
|
| Remember Go's opt-out telemetry debacle. The math was
| solid, it was anonymous, yes. However it was forced opt-
| out via an environment variable, so the burden was
| continuously on us, the users.
|
| If the Go team didn't change it to opt-in, I was ready to
| drop Go as a programming language, like many individuals
| and companies. Now the telemetry is opt-in, and users
| have better control.
|
| These things are nuanced. We should be diligent. For
| example, Eclipse (my favorite IDE for the last two
| decades) has CLA, but they never abused the power they
| have, plus that thing is Apache 2.0 licensed. However,
| Zed's actions, combined with their privacy policy,
| doesn't inspire confidence, so I don't use it, and share
| my view about Zed.
|
| If you don't agree that's fine, but pointing fingers like
| that is not.
|
| As I said, I have chosen BBEdit over sublime 15 years
| ago, and still use that, and if BBEdit can detect and run
| any supported LSP OOTB, like magic, Sublime can do the
| same technically. So they should barrage the bug tracker.
| It's on Sublime to make it better. It's closed source, so
| the developer has forced themselves to fix it by making
| it closed source.
| timeon wrote:
| > Then they pivoted to "Open source with closed source
| collaboration servers" thing, and they claimed rights on
| anything passing through their servers (collaboration /
| zed-ai).
|
| Does this apply if you use it same as Sublime? That is
| without collaboration / ai.
| bayindirh wrote:
| In my eyes, yes.
|
| In Zed's case, it's already dependent on "Magik". It
| _constantly_ downloads something to provide some
| functionality. I can 't vet, follow, verify that thing
| all day long.
|
| Moreover, if it wasn't doing that, again yes.
|
| If they _didn 't provide_ the functionality to begin
| with, then they can move on to "let's evaluate whether
| it's acceptable" phase.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| I wrote all my articles and three books with it.
|
| I love Sublime Text :) !
| suby wrote:
| I also like using Sublime as a text editor for my thoughts and
| notes. I don't need or want anything full fledged like a word
| processor. Sublime lets me write in a minimal format without
| distraction. Every action is instant and I'm not sure what I'd
| even change if given the chance.
| ad-astra wrote:
| Love how lightweight and fast it is. Use it every day!
| stonegray wrote:
| I recall a few times accidentally opening GB-sized files and
| sublime having no perceptable performance impact. Sublime is
| stupendously performant.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. I personally use Eclipse,
| BBEdit and KATE in 2025, and love them.
|
| Sublime is one of the tools which really grown and aged well, so
| it deserves the love it gets.
|
| I personally don't let anybody to tell me which tool to use. It's
| rude to mock and belittle the tools people use.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| AFAIU, Sublime Text and Kate (my editor of choice) are pretty
| similar in spirit, so when I read something nice about ST, I
| mentally insert "... and Kate". They are both snappy power
| editors, not IDEs, with LSP support.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Yes, KATE, ST and BBEdit (and VSCode) are "Code aware text
| editors". I use KATE and BBEdit for smaller project and Go
| mostly, and use Eclipse for the bigger stuff which needs its
| own "space" to be developed well and kept organized.
|
| It's a "correct tool for the job at hand" situation for me.
| muzani wrote:
| I'm happy with just fast, multiple cursors, plugins -> syntax
| highlighting. Sometimes I paste a JSON dump in there to prettify
| it.
|
| I refer to a lot of tools as knives, but Sublime Text is the
| chopping block.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| How do you prettify it in Sublime?
| muzani wrote:
| There's plugins like this:
| https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Pretty%20JSON
|
| There are others, this is the first that appears on a search.
| Sublime's package control makes it really easy to find tools
| like this. Another favorite is the one that renames the
| currently opened file.
| james2doyle wrote:
| A lot of the LSP plugins have a format feature, so you can
| format your code. I set most of mine up to trigger on save
| n0id34 wrote:
| I'm lazy, I don't want to leave the terminal.
| stonegray wrote:
| Alt-tabbing (or cmd-Q if you're done) back to your terminal
| window after running `subl` to edit a file is equivalent
| difficulty (as measured by keystrokes) to exiting nano or vim.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've been using iterm for years mainly because it has a Quake
| style terminal window. I realise how I just can't get to
| grips with tabbing through screens on either macos and
| windows anymore, not with having multiple browser profiles
| (personal and work) and screens open. I should figure out a
| solution to that, but at the same time I decided that I
| should keep my various employers (I'm a
| contractor/consultant/temp/whatever) separated better, so,
| different browser profiles, password databases, etc.
| smitelli wrote:
| Isn't that kind of where macOS features like Expose and
| Mission Control come in handy?
| nbenitezl wrote:
| I'm on Linux and I just use one keystroke to switch (F2). I
| have F1 F2 F3 F4 keys binded to change to virtual desktops 1
| 2 3 4. 1 -> Console(s) 2 -> Editor (sublime) 3 -> Browser
| (Firefox) 4 -> Misc (File browser, other apps)
| js2 wrote:
| Maybe it's time I migrated off TextMate.
| al_borland wrote:
| Is TextMate still being maintained? Last time I looked, there
| were very few signs of life. If that is accurate, the clock is
| ticking until Apple inevitably drops Rosetta support on Apple
| Silicon Macs sometime in the (probably not too distant) future.
| tectiv3 wrote:
| it is Apple Silicon native
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It's open source, think the developer is on a break from it.
| He's left it for a few years then done a set of updates in
| the past or fixed it if it broke because of an Apple update
| previously.
|
| Ultimately it kinda does everything it needs to.
| est wrote:
| I migrated off textmate to sublime, never regreted it.
| js2 wrote:
| I've tried a few times, but Sublime is so obviously not a
| native Mac app, I find it painful to use. It's definitely the
| closest match to TM though; it was pretty obvious it was
| inspired by TM. I think it even used to (still does?) use the
| same language grammars as TM (regexes that define scopes,
| basically).
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I still use it, just love the Mac style text manipulation
| shortcuts, the way spell check actually works properly and
| natively in code (Spell check within strings only) which VSCode
| can't seem to handle with any of the plugins that claim to.
|
| I use VSCode on Windows but no matter what I do to it I can't
| get it feeling right.
| ptico wrote:
| Tried few times, nothing beats TextMate ergonomics. It's just a
| small things like the cursor will be in a place where it should
| be after autocompletions or closing brackets will align where
| they belongs to, but it makes huge difference for me
| abraxas wrote:
| I guess your love is not unlike my long ago passion for
| CodeWright. It was such a flexible beast with perfect support for
| BRIEF bindings and an infinitely configurable user interface.
| Alas, the world preferred the simplicity of Visual Studio or
| JBuilder and the best programmer's editor for Windows slowly but
| surely withered away.
|
| I'm not planning on repeating the mistake of learning a complex
| environment only to see it disappear with the demise of its
| parent company. That's why these days I'm mostly investing time
| in the Emacs ecosystem while occasionally trying and failing to
| love mode based setups like vim and neovim.
| girvo wrote:
| Similar to my love of KomodoEdit/IDE. Being built on XUL was
| fascinating to me as a Firefox die hard, web tech powered the
| UI which made it easy to hack on, and I still reckon it was the
| best most advanced editor for PHP at the time.
| dabbz wrote:
| That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I loved Komodo.
| mxwsn wrote:
| I used sublime from 2013 to 2021. It was great. Since, I've
| switched to VS Code and haven't looked back.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Sublime does everything that I want to do with it.
|
| What I do with it is throw arbitrary text files at it, and do
| quick text manipulations, especially multi cursor edits. I'm sure
| I could do this stuff just as well with something else, but I'd
| have to relearn my muscle memory.
| niwtsol wrote:
| This is my use case as well - large .csv's, scratch pad,
| pasting some bug error message in a cleaner format - Sublime is
| perfect for that IMO.
| al_borland wrote:
| I've had VS Code crash on me (repeatedly) with very large text
| files. Sublime is able to handle these files, even if it has to
| chunk on them for a while, if I do something silly like try to
| edit with several thousand cursors, but it will still do it.
| submeta wrote:
| I can totally understand that. Why only one? I still use BBEdit
| on my Mac for all kinds of text editing (search/replace across
| files is excellent in it), even though I mainly use VS Code as
| IDE and Emacs for orgmode and automation via Elisp.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I love BBEdit, but it has one limitation that drives me batty:
| it has far fewer syntax highlighting scopes than many other
| editors. It's simply not possible to make it as pretty and
| color as others, and that's something I personally value. I
| have to look at a code editor all day, and I want it to look
| snazzy.
|
| I know it's minor and petty, but it stills grates on me every
| time I fire it up.
| submeta wrote:
| Yeah, it's from another era. The concept of beatiful code
| came up with TextMate, Sublime, VS Code. And old editors
| tried to catch up, but didn't really make it.
|
| But I have a nice-ish theme in BBEdit for markdown, and I'm
| ok. I don't code in it. Just plain text editing, using it as
| a scratchpad. It's open all day long.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's totally reasonable. And I know that's a goofy hill
| to die on, when it's otherwise architecturally beautiful.
|
| But darn it, even if it turned out to be my perfect car, I
| don't want to drive an Aztek.
| eviks wrote:
| Because it's too complicated to learn many complicated tools
| well instead of tweaking Sublime to do the search and replace
| across files, even if it's a bit worse. Also you're not limited
| to Macs
| bambax wrote:
| My files are on a NAS using Samba, and Sublime Text constantly
| does something (maybe it tries to poll the directory?) that makes
| it hang for around 10 seconds every minute, making it unusable.
|
| VS Code does nothing of the sort, it has plugins for any language
| imaginable; it's much faster and much better IMHO.
| makapuf wrote:
| You can prevent indexing in the config file
| mediumsmart wrote:
| _there can only be one true editor_
| saagarjha wrote:
| Careful, the ed fans are not to be trifled with
| rswail wrote:
| About 10 years ago, I was working with a much younger team
| (I'm 61 now), and we had a Sun box that was broken in a co-
| lo.
|
| The guy sent down there had a laptop and a serial cable.
|
| I talked him through how to use one of the serial comms
| programs (miniterm?) to connect, but of course, there was no
| ncurses or equivalent, so not even vi would work to edit a
| file.
|
| So I got him to use "ed". It was hilarious that he thought I
| was, in some way, a magician. He and the others I was working
| with (all at least 2 decades younger than me) didn't
| understand why you'd want a "line editor" or how you could
| possibly write code using a DECwriter or, even worse, an
| ASR-33.
|
| It was then that I started feeling "old" in this industry.
| knighthack wrote:
| Sublime Text is _the_ Swiss knife of all text editors:
|
| - Loads up fast, supports tons of very useful packages (e.g.
| TextPastry, SQLTools), extremely customisable.
|
| - Multi-cursors, multi-panes (e.g. with Origami), spellcheckers,
| extremely fast filesystem integration/browsing/preview (whether
| with/without projects and workspaces), color/UI schemes, syntax
| highlighting, search browsers, Git support (particularly when
| used with Sublime Merge), etc.
|
| Sure I love my Jetbrains IDEs and Vim, but nothing comes close;
| Sublime Text is in its own league.
| beAbU wrote:
| I reckon all text editors are some form of a Swiss army knife.
|
| IDE-ajacent text editors like VSCode et al are more like those
| ridiculous fat one with everything in it [1], and Sublime is
| the elegant model with only a blade and can opener, but the
| blade and can opener are both _really_ good.
|
| And then you get Microsoft Notepad, one of those shitty metal
| nail files that seemingly everyone's wife has in the bottom of
| her handbag.
|
| 1 - https://external-
| content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fp...
| nicbou wrote:
| I write everything on All About Berlin in a souped up version of
| Sublime Text. I made my own color scheme for Markdown files, my
| own linters for the content, a build system to run the static
| site generator etc. I love just how fast I can move across
| hundreds of Markdown files, finding and replacing thimgs with
| regular expressions. It's a night and day improvement over
| editing text in a CMS.
|
| I chose Sublime because it was blazing fast in my wee Macbook
| 12", which I used until a year ago. Sublime Merge complements it
| really well.
| qmmmur wrote:
| Thanks for your website, it helped me enormously.
| monokai_nl wrote:
| This is the one app I use every day. I practically live in it.
| Most editors are slower and more visually cluttered, or pack so
| much functionality that I often get lost. Sublime strikes the
| perfect balance between simplicity and functionality. Probably
| Emacs or Vim are even more expressive, but I've never bothered to
| learn those, Sublime just packs enough power for me. The LSP
| plugins are a good addition to give Sublime the same code
| completion / AI functionality of other editors.
| eknkc wrote:
| Sublime was going great at some point and I guess the dev burned
| out churning new releases every week. So it got abandoned for a
| good amount of time.
|
| Something like 2 years. At the same time Atom and VsCode came in
| with all the good ideas from Sublime.
|
| I hope they made tens of millions during the height of its
| popularity.
| vijaybritto wrote:
| They are a company and they are still good. They changed their
| licensing model for v4 onwards. I have been using it for most
| of my note keeping and lite code editing tasks and its
| excellent as always. I think they can still get back to the old
| hype if they choose to use typescript for their plugin system.
| A lot of vscode plugins can be ported that way I hope
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I doubt they'd want to create a schism and add a JS engine on
| top of the existing stuff. That said, Atom and VS Code's
| plugins being JS based was a huge benefit for them as at the
| time millions of developers started their career with or
| switched to using JS and web technology for their day job
| with webapps and nodejs.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > I hope they made tens of millions during the height of its
| popularity.
|
| I'm shocked at how often I'd see software engineers making
| software engineer salaries not pay for Sublime.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Sublime is just great software. It does everything I could
| possibly ever want an editor to do, and it does it with half the
| memory usage of VS Code. I like VS Code well enough, but I can't
| abide resource waste like that, especially when it doesn't
| actually buy me anything.
|
| Honestly, I use Sublime because nothing else can compare.
| Everything else is slow, bloated, worse to use, or some
| combination of the above.
| asmor wrote:
| Have you tried Zed, and if so, what's your opinion?
| tipiirai wrote:
| I have, but seems it has evolved quite a bit in the past year
| when looking at their new front page. I'll probably give it a
| shot. But in any case, I don't like their focus in
| collaborative features. It brings unnecessary bloat, that is
| not present in Sublime.
| andrepd wrote:
| Fwiw you can disable all AI bloat and online features with
| a couple of config keys
| nottorp wrote:
| But isn't that your "zed"'s selling point? What remains
| if you turn those off?
|
| Does it have gamification too, in addition to "AI" and
| "social"?
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| An open source, fast, customizable cross-platform text
| editor with native UI and support for plugins and
| language servers. I don't think there's any other
| software that can tick all these boxes.
| nottorp wrote:
| Language servers means "AI" right?
|
| The other boxes can be ticked by a lot of editors that
| were made before the js monopoly.
| asmor wrote:
| No, LSPs. Language servers is a pretty well-defined term.
| andrepd wrote:
| What an oddly aggressive tone x) It's not "my" Zed's
| selling point because I don't develop or even use zed
| daily atm. But it's also not the selling point period,
| it's one of them, the others being e.g. performance,
| responsiveness, and low memory footprint, as well as
| integration with tree sitter and LSP.
|
| Not sure what you mean by gamification and social, we're
| talking about collaborative editing, not posting to
| twitter lol
| shafyy wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, but I have tried Zed and I
| think it does too much things I don't need (like LLM
| integration, all that "multiplayer" stuff), and it's funded
| by VCs, so it will go down the road of enshittification (or
| sale, or shut down) eventually.
|
| I don't want to support VC-backed companies.
| jeltz wrote:
| I tried it a few months ago and it was a buggy mess with
| strange defalts. Totally unusable on a couple of the projects
| I tried it on.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I haven't tried Zed. I looked into it, but there was some
| reason I decided it wasn't for me. I want to say it was that
| they seemed focused on LLMs, but it's been a while so I
| forget exactly what it was that I didn't like about it when I
| researched.
| rayrrr wrote:
| Sublime is still my top choice for opening big data files, and
| there's nothing wrong with it. But, since VS Code is becoming the
| new lingua franca code editor, I made the switch so as to play
| nice with others going forward.
| dddw wrote:
| +1 I was amazed the first time I opened a multi-GB sized
| sqldump in sublime
| ch33zer wrote:
| I use sublime as a copy paste buffer when I need excellent visual
| regex search and replace. Vscodes regex search has awkward
| semantics (or at least I don't know them as well as sublimes) so
| I usually paste things into sublime, edit them with the regexes,
| then go back to what I was doing. My work has some extensions
| that only work in vscode so I'm stuck with it but it's good
| enough. I also never close sublime tabs and it persists them
| indefinitely with minimal memory usage, so I sometimes go back to
| grab things I was doing a few days ago. Definitely not the
| intended use but it works really well for me.
| carpo wrote:
| This is exactly how it use it too
| steinsgatezero wrote:
| Sounds like how I use Np++
| sander1095 wrote:
| If you use windows, you can use WIN + V instead of using an
| editor for a copy paste buffer.
|
| WIN + V activates clipboard history, so you can see and select
| things you copied previously.
| nyantaro1 wrote:
| This is the kind of thing I love HN for. Great tip!
| iforgot22 wrote:
| I'm gonna start doing that, cause TextEdit can't even copy-
| paste reliably, and vim isn't super convenient for this either.
|
| Edit: Wow Sublime is the nicest GUI text editor I've ever seen
| dmi3 wrote:
| Using Sublime Text since version 2, one of my relatively recent
| discoveries has been the Markdown Images Plugin[1], which renders
| images inline (rather than in a separate preview, as other
| editors do).
|
| I find it extremely convenient to include images alongside text,
| such as diagrams and schematics for work, photos of goods in a
| shopping list, and inspiration collections for hobby projects,
| etc.
|
| When combined with a simple web clipper script[2], it has been a
| game changer for me.
|
| [1]: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Markdown%20Images
|
| [2]: https://github.com/dmi3/bin/blob/master/url-preview-md.py
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've installed that plugin too, thanks for the recommendation.
| That said, installing it did show a big concern I have, maybe
| not so much for this plugin but for many others; its last
| release was in 2022, and many plugins I used to use back in
| 2012 haven't seen updates since 2016-17, roughly around the
| time VS Code became the most popular editor. I fear community
| support of plugins will become a major issue. I mean as long as
| the APIs etc don't change it's not a problem if these plugins
| are "done", but it just looks like things are no longer
| maintained and ST is a "dead" editor.
| dmi3 wrote:
| Welcome! I don't think the Sublime developers will change the
| plugin API dramatically at this point (@ben-schaaf is in this
| thread; we can ask him :) So, old plugins should remain
| compatible. What we should be concerned about is that if
| something new is invented, it will probably appear in a more
| widespread editors first. However, as practice shows, new
| plugins for Sublime continue to be created[1] so we are not
| missing lot.
|
| [1]: https://packagecontrol.io/browse/new
| supplemental wrote:
| You can use whatever editor you like .. some weirdos even use
| vim.
| eviks wrote:
| > If you thought Sublime was dead, well you couldn't be more
| wrong! The latest build of Sublime as of this post is "4192" and
| was released 20th January 2025.
|
| Since a huge chunk of value here is in the plugins (hello, there
| isn't even a built-in plugin manager, it's 3rd party and still
| haven't fully transitioned to 3.8 - and this isn't a nitpick, the
| fact that it's not part of the core, and the author went MIA is
| part of the problem), the release date of the editor itself
| doesn't determine the state of Schrodinger
|
| > I think the thing to consider is how Sublime is basically
| "done" software.
|
| Or, you know, take a look at the issue tracker, pick up a couple
| of dozen issues that impact you (directly or via the plugins that
| are blocked by these), and realize how far from reality this
| statement is. Or just look at your own wishlist...
|
| > Sublime is fast. It starts instantly.
|
| But it's not usable instantly because a lot of functionality is
| in the slower loading Python plugins, so if you have some
| shortcut that depends on a plugin, you can't use it right away...
|
| > But I prefer authoring snippets in XML rather than JSON. >
| Obviously, I'm twisted.
|
| Obviously
|
| > have tried Helix and I think it is a lot closer to what I would
| want from a modern editor
|
| Indeed, operation after selection is much more intuitive,
| especially when limited to the viewport, but then unfortunately
| Sublime doesn't have great modal editing support, and none that
| would mimic Helix visual-first paradigm
|
| > The key and mouse bindings are what you would expect from a
| modern editor.
|
| That's what you'd expect from a pre-modern editor, a modern one
| should have much more sophisticated keybinding support, for
| example, you'd be able to pick that great modal Helix or
| Spacemacs keybinding scheme. And have great searchable help for
| that instead of having to look into the void trying to understand
| where exactly that `` contextual javascript keybinding was set
| and how to disable it.
| james2doyle wrote:
| It sounds like you've had some unfortunate issues with Sublime
| in the past. Maybe it's just the different types of projects
| that we're both working on or what plugins we have installed. I
| haven't encountered any day-destroying bugs since at least
| version 3 came out. I think the most recent bug I came across
| was that a language-specific syntax broke, but that was because
| I updated Sublime and the syntax wasn't updated for it. I don't
| really know who's to blame in that scenario, though.
| zevon wrote:
| To echo many sentiments here: Sublime does all I want in a text
| editor and I use it a lot. When VSCode became all the rage, I
| tried it but became annoyed very quickly with the loading times
| and wasted resources, so I switched back to Sublime.
| noname120 wrote:
| You should consider trying it again, it's pretty fast now.
| zevon wrote:
| I have, from time to time. It certainly has become faster but
| Sublime still seems to be more nimble to me. On the more
| emotional side, I've also grown used to Sublime and I -
| mostly - just like using tools made by smaller shops or
| individual developers more than what the big corporations
| produce.
| rikroots wrote:
| In my last performance review 360 feedback colleagues suggested
| that my use of Sublime Text may be holding me back and I should
| consider moving over to VSCode. They're probably right ... but
| I'm old and there's more exciting things to learn than all the
| foibles of a new editor. Plus I like supporting and using the
| products developed by a small team of dedicated engineers ...
| it makes me feel less like a cog in the machine. Luckily I no
| longer seek promotions so I'll continue to resist moving to
| VSCode until I retire, or die.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| To be frank, it sounds like your colleagues may be holding
| you back.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Better the tool you know. Replace VSCode and Sublime with Vim
| and Emacs or Eclipse and hopefully they will realise how
| silly their feedback is. Maybe they should switch to Sublime
| or IntelliJ because I think their use of VSCode may be
| holding them back.
| BigJono wrote:
| > They're probably right ...
|
| Fuck them. TypeScript is a cult and they're gaslighting you.
| Seriously.
| yonisto wrote:
| I'm always up for trying new or old text editors, but they must
| have certain features that work out of the box for me to even
| consider them. A few clicks are fine, but I don't want to edit
| configuration files. In 2025, remote development support is a
| must for me.
|
| Sadly it seems that Sublime doesn't do that yet
| guessmyname wrote:
| Sublime Merge offers a graphical user interface to edit the
| settings. I'm not sure why they haven't implemented that in
| Sublime Text yet.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| They need to enhance their plugin API asap, i remember wanting to
| make a small assistant panel, the only choice was to use a pseudo
| mini-HTML api, it's not good for anything dynamic.. a shame
|
| I'd love an Immediate Mode API, give me full control, or give me
| access to your OpenGL context, i'll write my own UI
|
| They also need to improve the layout system for their panels,
| Origami is good, but sometimes using your mouse is better
|
| And i agree about getting stuff to Package Control, it's
| unnecessary painful
|
| Other than that, it's the perfect editor, but that plugin API
| holds it back, lots of missed opportunity, specially with the
| advent of AI stuff
| GenericDev wrote:
| There's dozens of us. Dozens! Seriously though, having a
| lightweight text editor like Sublime that I use is an interesting
| comparison when I see people immediately reach for tools like VS
| Code. Especially my juniors.
|
| The thing about VS Code is not that it's bad, it's just, like
| everything and the kitchen sink? Sublime Text just feels like a
| really nice tool bench that your craft for yourself.
|
| I'm really happy to hear there are others out there.
|
| (And yes, I totally bought the license, but never enter it in)
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm
| looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have
| any questions I'd be happy to answer.
| shakna wrote:
| One tiny thing, that I haven't investigated at all... And
| doesn't seem to be a common thing to worry about... If I have a
| file with an asterisk in it, then Sublime [0] seems to have
| issues displaying the file name.
|
| *.x will appear as [].x for some reason.
|
| [0] (Build 4180, out of date...)
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| That could be any number of things, I suggest posting an
| issue on our public issue tracker:
| https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues
| bussiere wrote:
| Promise, when my situation get better i will pay the 80$
| license. It is on my buylist since a lot of time :)
|
| Thanks for the software
| stevoski wrote:
| Sublime Text is great the way it is. If you have to change
| things, please make them just tiny, incremental changes.
| llama_person wrote:
| I bought Sublime with my first developer paycheck, eons ago.
| Thanks for your great work <3.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I think a big hit for ST's popularity - next to the rise of
| Atom and VS Code - was its upgrade from version 3 to 4; are you
| considering to do that again or, if funds are required, do a
| different way to raise money?
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| With the new licensing model we no longer need to hold back
| changes and do major releases. Avoiding the big pause in
| updates was partly why it was changed.
| james_in_the_uk wrote:
| It makes sense. As a mostly casual user I couldn't justify
| the new model so have kept the previous version, which
| still works for my needs.
| jamesmunns wrote:
| Thanks for Sublime Text! It's been my daily driver for over 15
| years :). 10 of those developing Rust, and making heavy use of
| the Rust Analyzer/LSP plugin infra.
|
| I also want to thank you for having such a reasonable licensing
| model, I'm launching my own desktop app in the next week or so,
| and I plan to have a very similar model to Sublime (free to use
| with nags, license is good for any personal usage, inclusive of
| updates for X period of time).
| tuyiown wrote:
| Thank a lot for sublime, this software is incredible,
| especially the consistent keyboard handling across all UI, all
| others editors messes up on this one !
|
| I've things I'd like to see with sublime:
|
| - I'd like to have all menu entries accessible from command
| palette.
|
| - I dont use files tabs (always hidden). I'd like to have a
| special mode that only tracks saved/unsaved status on files, no
| opened status, or something like auto close on file switch.
| I've just no use for the opened status, I'm not even sure why
| it exists besides being a relic of the past (good old) times
| where "goto file" did not exist.
|
| - I like sublime to be aware of git branches changes, eg having
| heuristic for auto closing or revert saved files are not
| present in FS after branch switch. The feature is partially
| here with the reload suggestion. (this partially overlaps the
| no-open status)
|
| - Goto default file listing should be last opened file present
| on fs, and then alnum sorted listing
|
| I suspect there are roadblocks for these suggestions, sorry if
| I overlooked obvious issues.
| jll29 wrote:
| For starters, I love the licensing, as it is very fair: I
| bought a personal license and I can take it to as many machines
| as I have (I do use many different computers). And you can buy
| it one time, no silly monthly subscription fees.
|
| As a result, Sublime ist the only commercial (locally
| installed) software I still use, and it is always open.
|
| There are situations, where I use macros, regex substitutions,
| or browsing the file system (using the keyboard only for speed)
| when I prefer to use my other editor, Emacs.
|
| I recently played with Zed, which looks cute, but I immediately
| lost an important file, so back I was in the Sublime buffer.
| (Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without
| explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything.)
|
| I tend to have many Windows open (several dozens), some of them
| for several years, others for five minutes. The only two
| features I would like are: - search across all open files and -
| a list of edit buffers that is itself an editable buffer that
| you can walk around using cursor key and select a file by
| hitting RETURN like Emacs has it.
|
| Generally, I prefer that I doesn't become a feature overloaded
| big monster of a program that can do everything (that's Emacs
| already, but I like both, I just want them to stay different).
|
| Although for longer-term programming of bigger projects I
| prefer IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or PyCharm CE, in recent time, I
| had to write mostly small programs, and both Emacs or Sublime
| fit that bill (no need for language servers for me for two
| screens full of a Python script as I also teach that stuff).
| the_duke wrote:
| > but I immediately lost an important file
|
| Zed has an "autosave" setting, it's just off by default.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Sublime's behaviour isn't an autosave, it just never loses
| text in a window. You can upgrade the entire OS, start
| Sublime and your windows and text will be waiting for you,
| regardless of saved or unsaved state. I've got five-year-
| old scratchpad windows open that I've never saved.
| andrepd wrote:
| Fwiw zed also has this explicit "sublime style" save all
| buffers since 3-4 months ago.
| JackMorgan wrote:
| How do you enable it? I just installed Zed yesterday and
| I was looking for this setting.
|
| Edit, I suspect what I wanted was the "after delay"
| setting here https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-
| zed#autosave
| kevinastone wrote:
| It doesn't save unnamed files which is mostly how I use
| this feature in sublime-text (as a scratch pad):
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4985
| computerthings wrote:
| That's still my favorite feature of all, it even
| remembers the undo history. Never lost anything to a
| crash.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I had no idea it preserved this too.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| I think you need to create a project file and then it
| stores things there.
|
| For a long time I would get paranoid about accepting Mac
| updates which would require a reboot because then I'd
| lose my undo history and then I discovered that this is
| all I would need to do.
| computerthings wrote:
| While I meant closing the whole application at once
| (which restores all windows/projects and unsaved changes
| when you restart ST), you're right that projects keep
| track of unsaved state on a per-project basis, too. So
| you can open and close project windows individually, but
| also do the same for Sublime Text as a whole.
| simplify wrote:
| It doesn't remember undo history after you close the tab,
| would love to see that feature though!
| pmarreck wrote:
| VSCode does this as well.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I do this with Notepad++ and honestly I have mixed
| feelings about it. It's _so convenient_ but I feel weird
| about constantly pasting semi-important notes and
| snippets into this unnamed, unsaved, unsynced doc that
| just sits there always open on my desktop.
|
| Basically I just feel guilty that I'm not using a
| "proper" note taking application when so many of them
| exist.
| a1o wrote:
| I use notepad++ in the same way without guilt, I also
| have a paper notebook where I write things in the same
| random chaos. In the past I had at a time a LG monitor
| that had really large bezels and I used to glue post its
| to it all the time as my "temporary" notes.
|
| Most of note taking applications I tried attempt to
| convince all my text is important and must be stored and
| if possible classified and that's just not how my
| relationship with physical notes is.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I resonate a lot with this. Like most of what goes into
| that system really is pretty disposable, but it would be
| nice if a note-taking app could just quietly swallow
| anything I didn't look at for a few days, while still
| making it available as an "also, this?" entry in full
| text search. Or maybe for a kind of context-aware
| search/browsing, if it were possible to do a query like
| "show me everything I added or altered around the same
| time I was working with keywords x and y".
| LoganDark wrote:
| I used to use a clipboard manager. It had two
| functionalities:
|
| - The ability to scroll or search my clipboard history
|
| - The ability to pin/favorite individual entries, which
| would then show up in the pinned/favorited tab
|
| That thing was practically my extra brain before the
| database corrupted itself... (that threw me so off that I
| don't even remember anymore most of the time from back
| when I had it.)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's saved, just not to separate files.
|
| And the solution to getting it synced is to back up your
| computer, which you should definitely be doing.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Fair, and I have a whole-system backup (Backblaze), but
| if the unsaved Notepad++ files were lost, I don't even
| know what it is I'd have to download from BB to recover
| them. Obviously I can Google that and figure it out, but
| who knows... maybe the BB agent will consider them a
| cache and exclude them? The point is that I haven't
| really taken the time to consider much of this because
| step 1 would be to literally just hit the save button,
| and I haven't even done that.
|
| More broadly, though, I don't know that I consider whole-
| system backups as important as I might have once. All my
| local important docs are in Dropbox, and all the code I'm
| working on is regularly synced out to git hosts. Other
| than some unimportant Fusion/Bambu projects, most of what
| I'd lose is honestly that same kind of ephemeral context
| that unsaved Notepad++ files are: terminal history,
| browser bar completions, my downloads folder, etc.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'll just say that if it was somehow not backing up
| AppData/Roaming that would be a big deal and you would
| want to figure that out and fix it ASAP.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Same. Although I just discovered UpNote, which seems good
| so far.
| pxoe wrote:
| >never loses
|
| That was not my experience with sublime because it'd just
| spontaneously lose a session along with all unsaved data.
| Some other people would have similar problems too (just
| look up 'sublime lost session', and apparently people are
| still having these kinds of problems with them
| complaining even quite recently).
| paulcarroty wrote:
| It works well, but Zed consuming too much CPU on Linux:
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14833
| elAhmo wrote:
| How did you lose a file?
| vijaybritto wrote:
| possibly restarting the System
| noname120 wrote:
| > but I immediately lost an important file
|
| Notepad++ has had that feature (persisting temporary text
| buffers) before Sublime Text even existed.
| jampekka wrote:
| I'd guess vim has had this (the .swp files) since the 90's.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without
| explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything._
|
| Unless, of course, you accidentally press "delete folder"
| instead of "remove folder from project" in the sidebar
| context menu.
| yladiz wrote:
| As far as I'm aware it just goes to the bin, it's not _rm_
| 'd, so it is recoverable.
| cobertos wrote:
| It's not a one-time purchase if you consider updates.
|
| > Personal licenses are a once off purchase, and come with 3
| years of updates. After 3 years, an upgrade will be required
| to receive further updates.[0]
|
| Tbh I think this is fair, but it surprises me every 3 years
| when I have to pay up again xD
|
| [0]: https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text
| guiambros wrote:
| I actually _like_ when I get the note that I need to pay
| for the upgrade. It 's a good reminder that I still find
| Sublime valuable (so much that I use almost daily), and
| that I got 3-4 years of free upgrades for a fair price (vs.
| subscription models like 1Password, or version-specific
| rip-offs, like VMware Workstation).
|
| It's one of my favorite piece of software. Obsidian being
| another one.
| redmandarin wrote:
| Sublime Text team, thank you so much for creating the best tool
| out there! I truly appreciate the stability and simplicity of
| your product.
|
| My main request is to add a tool similar to Cursor Composer and
| Chat. Thank you again!
| shafyy wrote:
| Long time Sublime customer here: Please, please do not add
| any LLM integrations. One of the main reasons I love Sublime
| is that I can just focus on writing code, without 100
| distracting things popping in and popping out. Also, that I
| support a business with my money that does not spend
| resources on the LLM hype.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| I am in the exact opposite boat - AI is significantly
| improving my programming flow and having to use VSCode
| (well, VSCodium in my case) rather than something
| lightweight like Sublime is suboptimal - I would love a
| good plugin for LLM integration ala Cody and frankly that's
| the only way I could see myself as a paying customer.
| computerthings wrote:
| I'm in the best boat, I don't want to use LLM but I think
| ST having hooks to allow people to make such plugins (if
| those don't already exist) would be a fine thing.
| Luckily, that boat has loads of space and you're all
| invited :P
| shafyy wrote:
| Sure, I'm fine with this boat :D
| bobxmax wrote:
| The resistance developers have to LLMs considering how much
| they're 10xing myself and many other devs I know is just
| sad to see. Anytime new disruptive technology comes in
| there's always an old guard that doesn't adapt in time.
| Syzygies wrote:
| In this thread you're seeing survivorship bias. We're
| discussing an editor that doesn't support AI.
|
| AI is Rashomon. It's just an association engine of
| immense scope. We're not talking to an alien
| intelligence; we're talking to ourselves. It's an
| existential mirror, and each person's experience will
| vary. Some people can control the dance of the campfire
| flames. Some people just aren't cut out to be shamans.
|
| Evolution is always making failed experiments, as a hedge
| against catastrophic ecosystem change. I'm convinced that
| neurodivergents are better suited to becoming AI
| Centaurs, in the sense Gary Kasparov promoted after he
| came to terms with his chess loss to IBM's Big Blue.
|
| I made my career by computerizing a branch of mathematics
| that did not want to cooperate. Now in retirement, I see
| AI as the key to achieving my dreams before my father's
| dementia arrives. It has radically transformed my past
| month.
|
| My preferred language is Lean 4, and AI has as hard a
| time coding in it as people. This morning's retooling has
| been distilling the Lean 4 website down to fit well
| within a 200K token context window. I prefer AI chat at
| arms length so I make the mistakes not it, but with
| enough editor integration that we can both see what we're
| doing.
|
| I loved Sublime Text when I used it. And AI coding
| doesn't primarily accelerate one's original spec, it
| encourages tool scopes one might never have dared
| attempt. So writing a Sublime Text plugin that interfaces
| with an Anthropic API key is something any of us could
| probably knock off.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Would be good to have it opt-in, without any sort of
| inpact, for users, who aren't using it.
| SnowingXIV wrote:
| As someone who also loves ST, please do not do this. Stay far
| away from bringing in something like that. If someone really
| wants this it seems much better suited for a plugin, which
| anyone can make.
| blibble wrote:
| as a paying customer I will stop renewing my license if AI
| slop generation appears in the product
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| Similar to LSPs our approach to this sort of thing is to
| enable plugins authors to integrate 3rd party tools.
| scop wrote:
| I just added a "Open In Cursor" plugin:
|
| https://github.com/spencerchristensen/sublime-open-in-cursor
|
| It isn't on Package Control yet as I just submitted the PR.
|
| I made this as I love Sublime Text as a _text editor_ and do
| not want to pollute it with AI garbage. However, there are
| times where I want to quickly open the same file in Cursor to
| hash out some their agents. Workflow is:
|
| - lovely text editing in Sublime
|
| - encounter something I would like AI assistance for
|
| - quickly pop open the thing in Cursor and do the AI stuff
|
| - hop back to Sublime to continue my lovely editing
| catwell wrote:
| Hey! I'm a Sublime Text user since ST2 in 2011.
|
| I love ST (my last blog post is
| https://blog.separateconcerns.com/2025-01-04-teal-lsp-
| sublim...) and I think the main thing lacking compared to the
| competition is the remote development experience.
|
| I work in AI so we typically work over SSH on machines with big
| GPUs. Most of my colleagues use VSCode because it has a very
| good Remote Development extension.
| eitland wrote:
| Can't this be solved using a remote file system these days?
|
| I haven't done it in years since with every customer from the
| last few years the only official way to get to prod is a CI-
| pipeline, but I think I remember using sfpt or ssh-based file
| systems even a decade back?
| catwell wrote:
| You can use a remote FS but it is nowhere close to the
| experience VSCode gives you. For instance, running code
| will run it locally, not on the remote machine.
| InfinityByTen wrote:
| Likewise!
|
| The only reason I moved away from subl is that I got access
| to a big ass machine and I needed to work remotely. The
| performance of VS code here is so good that often times I
| forget that the code and terminal is not my local machine.
| achairapart wrote:
| This! Upvote for ST SSH remote development, currently using
| ST for local dev and VSCode for remote.
| zxvkhkxvdvbdxz wrote:
| IMO remote mounts is a feature of the OS.
|
| For Linux and macOS, you can mount ssh directly.
|
| Unfortunatley, Windows makes it a little more complicated.
|
| But there's hope. You can use yasfw with dokany (dokan
| fork).
|
| https://github.com/DDoSolitary/yasfw
|
| https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
|
| Or mount from inside WSL.
| jebarker wrote:
| In principle I agree, in practice I haven't found an OS
| based filesystem mount that works as reliably as vscode.
| In particular, I mean the connection is relatively
| robust, reconnects automatically most of the time after
| an outage and editing is totally asynchronous, i.e.
| there's no noticeable pause after saving before
| continuing editing and no lag (other than what's induced
| by the electron) when editing.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Same here, for 15 years. I mainly use vi on the remote
| machine.
| csimon80 wrote:
| My preference is that it could use .ssh/config to explore the
| remote machine and then open/edit the file/dir.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I actually have heard that working over a remote connection
| can be a pain. From what I've seen from other Sublime users
| is that they will usually just mount a drive and then edit
| off that. There are also a couple of SSH plugins that can be
| used. In the past, I've just downloaded the files I've needed
| and then used rsync or scp. Not slick, but it works.
| kakuri wrote:
| Remote development is VSCode's killer feature.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| This would be my top feature request. In addition to being
| great to have generally, there are increasingly environments
| where this is essentially a requirement and local copies are
| often verboten so you can't just use rsync/ssh.
| cobertos wrote:
| Same experience. My local machine at $Job is so slow and
| locked down that spinning up a VM in the cloud + VSCode
| remote plugin is the only way I can develop now. I would not
| have switched if I could edit the remote filesystem without
| syncing. I've worked on a ton of projects with the paid SFTP
| plugin but it was too painful in this case.
| snowl wrote:
| Please fix the bug if possible with Sublime Merge where the UI
| just becomes completely unresponsive... it always happens due
| to using it on a workspace and its so annoying to force close
| and reopen it every day! I love sublime merge otherwise!
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| My colleague does Sublime Merge, but I can look into this for
| you. Have you reported this on our issue tracker:
| https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_merge/issues?
| dpjohnst wrote:
| G'day, I head up the Sublime Merge team.
|
| Firstly, thanks for using it and supporting us!
|
| If you haven't already, it would help immensely to get a bug
| report here:
| https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_merge/issues/new/choose
|
| I'll definitely look into this further and get it sorted
| arghwhat wrote:
| Was a sublime user through version 2 and 3, which were always
| champions of performance, but while I installed and used 4 for
| a bit it never quite became part of my workflow.
|
| I think part of it was because it sat between using neovim vs.
| using vscode, and if I had to reach out for vscode I probably
| wanted to use remote code editing, code intelligence or AI
| integration which a default sublime setup wasn't quite
| offering, and the plugin game seemed stale. Maybe there were
| also some Wayland issues, don't remember.
|
| Maybe I'll try again and see what you have been up to. Using a
| proprietary text editor in ${current_year} feels a bit weird
| though.
| culebron21 wrote:
| I'm happy with the most of the features, bought v2, 3 & 4 over
| the last 13 years, but it lacks debugger, so for Rusti, I have
| to use VS Code -- which is awful, but there's no better
| alternative. I'd pay for a special plugin that will work faster
| than VS Code.
| pims wrote:
| Piling up to the grateful comments, I've been using Sublime
| Text for years and still love it. It has never quite done it as
| an IDE for me as I'm used to more fully fledged ones like
| IntelliJ, however it is an amazing scratch pad and text
| manipulation tool. I pretty much have it permanently open. This
| post made me realise I had never bought a license, it is now
| done. Thank you for it being fair, by the way.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I have a lot of respect for Sublime Text not being yet-another-
| electron-monster. Thanks for your work.
| vsgherzi wrote:
| Love sublime text! Would be amazing to see a blog post from you
| guys go over the gui framework. Really cool tech! It's my
| editor of choice!
| hmottestad wrote:
| I don't use it much for programming, since I mostly use
| IntelliJ for that.
|
| Where Sublime shines for me is opening large files, and opening
| pretty much any file. So many times MacOS wants me to open a
| json file in Xcode, or a txt file in TextEdit, when all i want
| to do is open it in Sublime! And I know that i can open files
| that are multiple GB without issues, just takes a few seconds
| :P
|
| And the Ctrl-D shortcut and multi-cursor in general is so neat.
| I know other editors have it too now, but when I showed my wife
| how useful it was for simple tasks like formatting a list of
| emails...she ended up making her company buy her a license and
| teaching others how to use it.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Just in case you or another reader doens't know (you probably
| do), it is very easy to configure MacOS to by default open
| .txt or .json (or whatever) files in the app of your choice,
| such as ST. I have ST opening .txt and .json, yeah.
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/choose-an-app-to-
| op...
|
| (There's also prob some way to do it from terminal, but I do
| it the above way)
| andrepd wrote:
| Semantic highlighting! The LSP thing I mean [1]. It's the one
| thing which I thought was just an aesthetic nicety but actually
| makes a huge difference. In C++ for example:
|
| - Color virtual calls differently from direct calls to tell
| them at a glance
|
| - Class members in a different color than regular variables
|
| - Arguments in a different color than locals, in a different
| color than statics
|
| - Consts in red, mutable variables in orange
|
| makes a huge difference in effortlessly reading the code.
|
| It's not supported in Sublime (though you can hack a kludge to
| make a basic version of it work).
|
| [1]
| https://gist.github.com/swarn/fb37d9eefe1bc616c2a7e476c0bc03...
| timeon wrote:
| Thank you for well crafted and performant software! I'm
| oscillating often between Helix/Zed/Sublime but I'm probably
| never going to drop Sublime Text even if I would have to obtain
| new licenses for next versions.
| Stoo wrote:
| I've been using Sublime Text since version 2, so probably close
| to 15 years, and I love it! It's my go to editor for code
| (mostly front end web dev but I've used it for C# as well, when
| VS won't get out of the way) as well as all of my writing
| (using Markdown). I've published 5 tabletop RPGs and related
| supplements (with another on the way) all written using Sublime
| plus so many lines of notes and blog posts. It's a dream to
| work with!
|
| I've paid for my licence but is there a tip jar anywhere?
| laserbeam wrote:
| Is there any chance we'd see a Sublime Debug? Loved Sublime
| Text and Sublime Merge. The main thing I'm missing in my life
| is a really good and fast cross platform UI for a LOT of
| debugger backends. (I tend to works with a lot of programming
| languages, and CLI debuggers are really clunky to use).
| alibarber wrote:
| I'd also be delighted with, and happy to part with cash for,
| such a thing.
| blibble wrote:
| I have found this plugin works surprisingly well
|
| https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Debugger
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Wow, I did not know about this.
|
| ST user who is on it still mostly just by inertia (learning
| tools is my least favorite part of the job) but really not
| getting the features I want/need from it. This'll help!
| laserbeam wrote:
| Cool, but git integration in the editor was also cool until
| SublimeHQ decided to spin out a dedicated client for it.
|
| The only debugger I'm happy with right now (in terms of
| performance/features) is RemedyBG, but it's windows only
| and compiled languages only. In general, I mostly live with
| painfully slow debugging in VSCode.
|
| I would really love to see RemedyBG's dedicated debugging
| UI/UX approach refined by some group like SublimeHQ. A
| group who knows how to turn the UX up to 11.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > Cool, but git integration in the editor was also cool
| until SublimeHQ decided to spin out a dedicated client
| for it.
|
| Is it completely removed from Sublime Text?
|
| I love merge, but the simplest controls like
| stage/unstage/commit/indicate file status seem kind of
| essential.
|
| Having said that, Merge is far and away the best git UI
| I've used. It has saved my bacon a few times. I'm not
| terrible with git in the terminal (I use it there 98% of
| the time), but sometimes... I really don't want to be
| doing things without a decent visual representation of
| the mess and chaos, and intuitive access to the tools
| available. I get why they wanted to create Merge.
| laserbeam wrote:
| > Is it completely removed from Sublime Text?
|
| Of course not. I was just describing 2 different levels
| of coolness.
| ThouYS wrote:
| absolutely loving SublimeMerge!
| dpjohnst wrote:
| Thank you! Let me know if anything is missing for you and I
| can work on getting it added in.
| mathijs wrote:
| I've used it for 15 years and ST is still the first thing I
| install on a new PC.
|
| All thoughts, meeting notes, journals, blog post drafts...
| everything is jotted down in ST first. I even went as far as
| writing my own to-do list syntax highlighter[1] which is the
| main reason ST is always open, at home and at work, even though
| I mostly use VSCode and IntelliJ for coding nowadays.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mlagerberg/todo
| seedie wrote:
| Love the simplicity of your to to-do list syntax highlighter
| in comparison to todo.txt. That's more how my brain works, as
| simple as possible. Especially your take on the due date vs.
| date when you plan to do it. Will definitely try it out.
| techiferous wrote:
| Same! I use ST for my to-do list and personal wiki, with
| custom highlighting and commands, and VSCode for coding.
| DarkCrusader2 wrote:
| I also use sublime for managing todo and IDE for coding as my
| work repo uses custom tooling for build and autocomplete
| which only supports Visual Studio.
|
| I use PlainTasks [0] which is very similar to your plugin but
| also has a few keyboard shortcuts to toggle the item state.
| Using this with a watered down GTD setup has really brought a
| lot of peace in both my personal and professional life.
|
| [0] https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks
| james2doyle wrote:
| Wow, you really pulled out all the tricks for this one!
| Commands, key bindings, completions, snippets, and a
| syntax! Nicely done!
| james2doyle wrote:
| That's really cool. Great work!
| vijaybritto wrote:
| Have y'all considered something like vscode's extension
| experience in sublime. The current one is not really intuitive
| or easier to setup
| privacyking wrote:
| I bought sublime text 3 over a decade ago. What are the top new
| features of sublime text 4 that make it worth upgrading too?
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| We list the big ones on our front page: * GPU
| rendering * Apple & Linux arm64 support * Tab
| multi-select * context-aware auto-complete *
| TypeScript, TSX and JSX syntax support * Much more
| powerful syntax engine * Adding python 3.8 for plugins
|
| Some personal standouts not listed are: *
| Syntax-aware code folding * Mixed-indentation
| highlighting ("draw_white_space" setting) * Kinetic
| scrolling on Linux * Preserved undo history *
| Change-aware white-space trimming * Asynchronous file
| saving * Find result highlighting in the scroll bar
| * Find-in-files filtering by gitignore
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Has the UI become more Mac-like on the Mac? This is the
| only reason I still go back to TextMate even though I
| purchased SublimeText.
| mixmix wrote:
| Not really a question, but please do not deprecate
| mini_auto_complete! It is one of the most useful (despite being
| hidden/undocumented) features of ST to me.
| jsx2 wrote:
| Hi! Could you explain how to use it?
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I'd happily pay again if you come up with remote editing like
| VSCode has. It's the killer feature. You can forbid me from
| using any of its extensions and turn off syntax highlighting,
| but as long as I can connect somewhere over SSH and still have
| the latency of local editing, I'd be using it.
|
| That said, it seems like in 2025 AD the LSP client should come
| baked in and integrated, with configurations for how to start
| individual LSP servers possibly shipping on the side. I liked
| how the whole Go shebang was accessible in Zed in one click,
| same in VSCode.
|
| That all said, I still use Sublime Text whenever I can.
| revorad wrote:
| Sublime user for many many years now. I've tried VSCode many
| times, never liked it. I use Cursor a bit now but still prefer
| Sublime. Thank you for building it!
| bloomingkales wrote:
| You really should write a book on programming a text editor. It
| seems like we've all been on this journey with you.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Why does sublime do code navigation in such a clunky way? Such
| as "go to definition". Control click does not work, instead you
| need to press the far away F12 key. It then opens up a new tab
| instead of an inline dropdown. Apparently that tab isn't normal
| text, it's clickable text. it contains usages as well as
| definitions so you need to manually scan and decipher the
| results. When you click on a result, it opens the file, but
| doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view
| (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)
|
| The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you
| press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not
| accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate
| terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just
| use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never
| provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST
| either when I press ctrlB again.
|
| Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various
| Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when
| I press ctrl shift B.
|
| Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different
| directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do
| I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am
| editing a python file?
|
| Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection"
| is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that
| RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want
| to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then
| tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that
| area.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > It then opens up a new tab instead of an inline dropdown.
| Apparently that tab isn't normal text, it's clickable text.
|
| If you're talking about the built-in goto-definition then
| it's definitely not a tab, it's a popup similar to goto-
| anything and the command palette. You can type to filter, use
| the arrow keys, press enter, ctrl+enter for side-by-side,
| etc.
|
| If you want to use the mouse you can hover over the symbol
| and get a list of definitions and references.
|
| > it contains usages as well as definitions
|
| That sounds like you've got a syntax that isn't classifying
| its symbols correctly. I vaguely remember Microsoft's
| Typescript package doing this. All the built-in syntaxes
| properly classify definitions so you won't have references
| show up in that list. It's possibly simply removing a package
| will fix this for you.
|
| > When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't
| quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but
| not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)
|
| Not scrolling to the definition is odd, it's working fine for
| me. I agree we could highlight the definition better; by
| default the line is highlighted though. You can enable line
| highlighting if that's too subtle.
|
| > The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when
| you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it
| not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate
| terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just
| use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can
| never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by
| ST either when I press ctrlB again.
|
| We don't currently have a terminal, but the Terminus plugin
| is fairly popular if that's what you're looking for.
|
| > Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various
| Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make
| when I press ctrl shift B.
|
| We generally don't integrate that tightly with build systems;
| doing so effectively requires a plugin per external build
| system. Though I don't know if you'd actually want to have
| all targets listed for Make, since virtually everything is a
| target (and apparently this wasn't possible until --print-
| targets was added last year).
|
| > Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a
| different directory, that it should use a different build
| system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python
| instead of C when I am editing a python file?
|
| If you have the build system set to "Automatic", then ST will
| automatically pick which ones to make available. For Make
| it'll check for a Makefile for instance. You can then use
| _Build With..._ to select the one you want to use. If you 've
| manually picked a different build system then that's what ST
| will use.
|
| > Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within
| selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search
| term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over.
| Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to
| look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all
| within that area.
|
| The behavior you want it to have sounds like how I remember
| it being, but that's clearly not the case; I'll have to look
| into that, thanks.
| xwkd wrote:
| It's rare for an app dev (of such a popular tool) to go out
| of their way to respond to a random forum user. Even rarer
| is to address every point on their list with patience and
| consideration.
|
| You must be a remarkable person and I wish you nothing but
| success.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Thank you for responding. I was wrong about some of these
| in hind sight.
|
| Today when I tried goto-definition, it worked as expected.
| I'm not sure why it didn't before. This was for a C
| project. I do have various Package Control packages
| installed: "Golang Build", "Package
| Control", "PackageResourceViewer",
| "SublimeLinter", "SublimeLinter-clang", "Theme
| - One",
|
| And you were right, I had set my build process manually.
| I'm sorry for slandering.
|
| What I meant by "terminal" is the output monitoring pane.
| Whenever I build "C - single file" or "Python - single
| file", a pane with <textarea> behavior appears in the
| bottom, showing the program output. But if said program is
| interactive, there's no way to send it any input. Nor to
| stop the program. Building it again leads to a new instance
| of the program being spawned, but the old one stays
| running.
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| I've been a Sublime Text user for ten years, bought it and
| Sublime Merge multiple times. A year ago, I permanently moved
| to VSCode because of three things:
|
| 1. Solid coding AI integration with frequent improvements.
| Sublime Text at best gives you an option to plug an LSP with
| modest capabilities. It's behind the times.
|
| 2. Small community, infrequent extension updates.
|
| 3. Limited UI capabilities. Extensions have to contort hard to
| fit into available extension points.
|
| What's your vision of ST future?
| mrThe wrote:
| That's basically my experience. I've switched from ruby to
| golang a while ago and developing in sublime text was become
| a pure pain, while vscode provided a lot of plugins to solve
| basic needs. Then i switched back to ruby and discovered that
| vscode also have superior ruby support.
|
| I still love sublime text, but there is no way i'm going back
| to it.
| fauria wrote:
| Those are actually some of the reasons why I use Sublime.
| ok_computer wrote:
| Yeah I have accessibility/distraction issues with all the
| flair and animations and small text in vs code.
|
| I know all text editors need some degree of config to be
| comfortable but sublime is nearly immediately usable. Vs
| code is the only thing I need to configure to remove flair
| and features vs extend them.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I agree. The last thing I want from Sublime is to have AI
| nonsense.
| kapitanluffy wrote:
| Here's my two (or three?) cents
|
| 1. There are several plugins that allow AI integration 2.
| There is an active community on
| https://discord.sublimetext.io
|
| 3. From what I can perceive based on Sublime HQ's responses,
| it's main focus for Sublime Text is simplicity and to be a
| text editor. You can notice this if you look at the banner
| text in the website; it says "Text Editing, Done Right". And
| while it is mainly used for code and most of its users are
| developers, it tries not to be. However, it does provide
| people the ability to extend it however they please.
|
| Overall, Sublime Text is indeed not as fully featured as
| VSCode because it is not supposed to.
| heelix wrote:
| Big fan of the tool. Sublime was one of the few editors that
| could even open the massive logs one project was generating.
| The recovery is so good, I've realized I had dozens of tabs
| unsaved for years until IT updated machines.
|
| One question: is there going to be another 3.x release? The
| popup takes you to a 4.x release, which is great if you are on
| 4.x. If it hit EOL, it makes it easy for us to force the
| update. Right now, it is in a bit of a weird in between.
| FichteFoll wrote:
| The last release of ST3 was in 2019 [1], 2 years before the
| first stable release of ST4. It is dead.
|
| [1]: https://www.sublimetext.com/3
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| ST3 won't be receiving any bugfixes or new features, so it's
| effectively EOL. Anyone's of course free to use ST3 or 2 or 1
| if they don't wish to upgrade, we still make those available
| on our website.
| carterschonwald wrote:
| I've been a happy user customer for subl and smerge since
| launch even when a student.
|
| I really really appreciate how few regressions, amazing low
| latency and always refining everything. And I've def had
| positive interactions with everyone who is working on the
| sublime sublime software since it's been out. So like 10-15
| years ish I'm going to guess without looking stuff up
| microflash wrote:
| Are there are plans to improve Search UI and make sidebar more
| capable. I really like the way VSCode's search interface where
| results are listed on sidebar and clicking an item opens the
| file in the editor.
|
| Regardless of the above experience, Sublime Text is still my
| daily driver since 2012. Nothing has come close to it.
| kapitanluffy wrote:
| there is a "Find in Files" feature. It will show you a new
| tab with results where you can use key binds to navigate
| (next, previous, open line of result)
|
| You can see the feature under "Find > Find in Files" You can
| see the "navigation" under "Find > Find Results"
|
| For more help, head over to https://discord.sublimetext.io
| (and tag me, I'll reply when I can)
| microflash wrote:
| This is what I use. Unfortunately, when I'm doing a search
| and replace, the search results don't update automatically
| once I've edited a file.
|
| But thank you for replying. I'll hop into Discord
| eventually.
| mtotheb wrote:
| FYI the latest update on the site and when updating via UI says
| "20 Jan 2024", not 2025.
|
| Great product, thank you for being awesome :-).
| calini wrote:
| Hi! I was a Sublime Text fan throughout University, and I would
| have loved to continue using it. Unfortunately for me Sublime
| lacks too many necessities, and that forced me off Sublime and
| onto the much slower VSCode.
|
| I really wish Sublime would develop a more solid plugin system
| and have some sane built-ins such as a terminal.
| dartos wrote:
| > sane built-ins such as a terminal.
|
| It's all preference. I think it's insane that people use the
| terminal in their editors.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Why is it insane? Along with a terminal, I also use a
| database editor inside my code editor.
|
| That's the point behind an IDE - integrated developer
| environment.
| kgermino wrote:
| But Sublime isn't an IDE, it's just a text editor. The
| line is blurry (especially with how VS Code is used these
| days) but I have ST running next to IntelliJ all day,
| they serve different roles.
| dartos wrote:
| At this point I'd call vscode an IDE.
|
| Or at least an IDE platform where plugins provide the
| language integration.
| dartos wrote:
| It's insane bc I don't like it :)
|
| Like I said, it's all personal preference.
|
| I mainly code in neovim, I do a lot of work ssh-ing into
| other machines (sometimes with multiple hops.)
|
| I live in the terminal and sometimes cat very very large
| log files and would like an experience that is terminal
| centric.
|
| It very much surprised me to learn how many devs there
| are nowadays who aren't terminal centric (outside of
| windows land)
|
| Also I use my text editor to edit database records (via a
| plugin) as well. Editing DB rows in vim is the kind of
| crazy I like.
| hwj wrote:
| I've been using ldapvi to manage the LDAP of an entire
| college faculty.
|
| Which plugin do you use for DBs?
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I get where you're coming from and generally agree. The
| trouble is that the integrated tools are all pretty bad,
| in my experience. If I can use DataGrip instead of some
| VS Code extension called "Database Client", I'm going to
| use DataGrip. I will often even prefer pgsql for many
| tasks. A mediocre tool might save time here and there
| because it's convenient, but I find their broader impact
| is poorer work done in worse ways.
|
| Of course, this is all opinion in a very subjective
| context. Some people do best-in-class work with terrible
| tools.
| Macha wrote:
| Datagrip, of course, is just the integrated database
| editor of intellij packaged without the rest of intellij,
| so it's not a rule that integrated tools are always bad
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Is it integrated into their IDEs? That's incredible. Fair
| point, then.
|
| Maybe I should consider using their IDEs.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Yes and since few weeks ago it now comes for free with
| WebStorm.
| thecrumb wrote:
| Sublime isn't an IDE - it's an editor.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| You don't like quickly accessing the terminal? The biggest
| draw for me is that VSCode can easily attaches to terminal
| processes, so I can launch a debugging session with custom
| arguments with a simple "CTRL+~" and a "npm run foo".
| dartos wrote:
| "Alt+tab" works all the time.
|
| Guake is a great terminal for quick access too.
|
| I have a hot key for opening kitty as well.
|
| Vscode attaching the debugger automatically is a really
| nice feature, though.
|
| Nothing you couldn't do with a few shell scripts, but
| it's nice that it does it automatically.
| pwenzel wrote:
| 100%. I prefer having a separate client for various tasks.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I'd use those terminals, maybe, if the implementations
| weren't so bad. The one in VS Code is a sad version of
| what's possible.
| keb_ wrote:
| > sane built-ins such as a terminal
|
| After I initially switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text,
| I used Terminus [1], which I used to swear by. But then I
| made an effort to strip back the amount of plugins I used,
| and just bound a hotkey to focus my default terminal (Konsole
| on KDE), and I don't really miss the integrated terminal
| anymore.
|
| [1] https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Terminus
| muppetman wrote:
| Why don't you request a text editor inside of your terminal
| program? ;)
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Suggestion: implement a vimtutor: subltutor
| 8ig8 wrote:
| There's this...
|
| https://sublimetutor.com
|
| But for v3.
|
| See also on Package Control...
|
| https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Sublime%20Tutor
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm genuinely interested in seeing what you kind of envision
| for Sublime Text, its evolved nicely, and arguably I would say
| that it inspired some of today's top editors like VS Code and
| even Atom, I definitely felt like those took strong inspiration
| from ST.
| alberth wrote:
| Just FYI - I think there is an incorrect date in the change
| log.
|
| The latest build (4192), says it was released in _" 2024"_ when
| I think you mean to say "2025".
|
| https://www.sublimetext.com/download
| have_faith wrote:
| I don't use ST as my daily driver any more but I still use it
| for fast editing of large files occasionally. I am daily
| driving Merge though. Any other Sublime apps in the works?
|
| Have you also considered offering ST and SM as a bundle price
| with a discount? I'd be interested just because of my lopsided
| use of the two apps.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| We already offer ST and SM in a discounted bundle :)
| have_faith wrote:
| Duh, I completely missed it somehow! Skim reading is a bad
| habit kids.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thank you! Can you share some technical details of the product,
| if not against the contract you signed?
|
| I'm mostly interested in UI so would love to know how is the
| custom UI code structured?
|
| Would also be very nice if you could talk a bit about
| interesting text editor programming/challenges you encountered.
|
| Thanks for the product.
| tsukikage wrote:
| Bought Sublime a decade ago, bought the new version last year,
| still love it.
|
| If we're doing feature requests: a "recently closed windows"
| alongside the "recently closed files" would be amazing, for
| when I misclick and close a window containing a bunch of open
| files and a folder or two :)
| quickslowdown wrote:
| Thank you so much for the tool you've built, and for being so
| generous in how you license it. Sublime is always installed on
| my machine, Sublime Merge is great too :)
| philipov wrote:
| I paid for a license for Sublime, but then I was forced to
| upgrade a while ago, and my license no longer works with the
| new version. Is there a solution to this?
| pwgentleman wrote:
| I'd start here:
| http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/previous_versions.html (^:
| philipov wrote:
| Thank you!
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Not a question, but by God I hope Sublime makes enough money to
| justify continuing to do business, because if you can't both
| make something you love and get paid a good chunk of change for
| one of the best quality editors in the industry, then it would
| make me very sad.
| rustybolt wrote:
| On the odd chance that you read this and feel like replying, I
| have always been in awe of Sublime Text's UI. Can you elaborate
| a bit on how it works? There was a short comment by Jon Skinner
| that it is custom and written on top of a cross-platform
| portability layer, but I mean, I'd love to hear some more
| details.
| ok_computer wrote:
| Hi, I just renewed my sublime text and merge licenses after
| starting in 2021. Thank you for sticking to simple product
| excellence and not following trends. Thanks for focusing on the
| editor for human users and not pushing some service based
| enterprise licensing system or ai tooling where the company
| aspires to 1000x. It's a great product and my most used PC
| software.
| silverwind wrote:
| Maybe you can priorize
| https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/1649. As a
| heavy LSP user, I find it very inconvenient not being able to
| copy text out of popups.
|
| Also, I think you should open-source `minihtml`.
| james2doyle wrote:
| That would be handy. I tend to use the "diagnostic panel"
| like one of the comments suggests for that reason. It isn't
| perfect but it works.
| james2doyle wrote:
| You're welcome. Keep up the good work. I will keep buying it as
| long as I keep using it!
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Please make an Evernote competitor out of Sublime...
| LNSY wrote:
| Oooh, or an Obsidian competitor that doesn't take 10 minutes
| to boot.
|
| Some notetaking app would be amazing
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Thank you for sublime! Have used it for the past 10 years. Do
| you mind if I ask is it your full time job?
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| It's myself and my colleagues full time jobs, yes. Jon
| Skinner (ST's creator and owner) also works full time with
| us.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| - build system that understand colors.. out of the box..
|
| - revamped project system so i don't have to store extra files
| in my root directory, there is a plugin for it, but this should
| be working out of the box imo
|
| - drag&drop panels to create layout with the mouse
|
| - tabs in output/temporary panels
|
| - UI API for status panel, side panel and in the views
|
| - a proper built-in terminal, i know there is Terminus, but
| color support is lacking, tabs support is lacking, doesn't work
| well with tmux, overall it's very janky (wrt to scrolling)
|
| - sticky scrolling (the thing that pins the scope name) or -
| the thingy that says where in the code we are, i forgot how
| it's called: [MyStruct > my_function]
|
| I'd be willing to pay extra for a proper terminal for ST
| LNSY wrote:
| First: I love your software, it is such an inspiration. I have
| been a fan for more than a decade at a point.
|
| There are two pieces of software I would love you to implement,
| and I would buy both:
|
| 1. Spreadsheet App 2. An AI aware editor like Cursor that uses
| DeepSeek or equivalent. You could sell a subscription to it
| like Cursor also.
|
| I think you could make both of these sing.
| ricardbejarano wrote:
| ST user here, just wanted to say thank you.
| ellis0n wrote:
| Sublime is the best! I've been creating a new programming
| language ACPUL with Sublime for 10 years
| https://old.reddit.com/r/acpu/comments/1fxxjtx/acpu_mobile_d...
| .
|
| I don't have the resources, so please add support for the ACPUL
| programming language. If Sublime had a good debugger, it would
| be even more powerful.
| kapitanluffy wrote:
| Support for syntaxes (and/or debuggers) are mostly provided
| by the community. Creating a syntax for your language
| shouldn't be that hard afaik. Just head over to
| https://discord.sublimetext.io to talk to the active
| community
| jiehong wrote:
| Perhaps Sublime Text could run some annual anonymous survey?
|
| It could both be an indicator of what the community is doing,
| and who your users are, and also a way to promote some new
| features people might have missed (like the survey "state of
| CSS").
|
| I enjoy both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge almost everyday,
| thank you very much for making them!
|
| Some annoyances, though:
|
| - the way plugins are displayed inside ST while browsing for
| them is limited. Other editors usually provide a much better
| UI. The web version of package control is required in the end.
|
| - Ctrl-P does not the same thing in ST and SM, and it always
| tricks me. I wished they would be more aligned by default, but
| that ship has sailed I guess. I should rebind them.
|
| - SM UI can be slow / be unresponsive for a while like when a
| tool has run and 20k files were created but not part of git
| ignore yet. It makes deleting them quite difficult from the UI.
|
| - I wish SM would allow me to pick up patch files from the diff
| UI and import them from there more easily.
|
| - I wish Mac OS dictation would be more native in SM, and allow
| me to change language like in other Mac OS apps.
| ixmerof wrote:
| The most important thing for me as I am using ST since ca.
| 2009. I am retro programming fan and ST is the only editor that
| still allows me to conveniently work on windowses across 98 to
| 7. I am not using the most recent version, heck I haven't
| upgraded it for few years now, but I hope the compatibility
| still remains.
| chucky123 wrote:
| Sublime rules.
|
| I started my career with Brackets, then Sublime, then Atom for a
| short while. Then switched to VS Code for a few years and just
| recently switched back to Sublime because of how slow VS Code
| became.
|
| Also great pricing! One time purchase for Sublime is still
| available in 2025!
| donatj wrote:
| Where is one time purchase available? The only option I see is
| $99 for three years.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| The license does not expire after 3 years, it is perpetual,
| but it doesn't apply to versions released more than 3 years
| after your purchase. If you don't want any newer features or
| fixes you can simply turn off updates. We warn you before
| updating to a version not covered by your license.
| blame-troi wrote:
| I find this to be a very reasonable license. Cost is low
| but provides an ongoing revenue source. I like free or
| perpetual licensing as much as the next guy, but us
| programmers gotta eat and pay the rent.
| sandbags wrote:
| How did you arrive at this model?
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| There's not much to it: we wanted steadier income and our
| customers wanted more consistent updates but also
| perpetual licenses. This model was the natural
| conclusion. We tried it out with Sublime Merge and then
| brought it over with ST4.
| chucky123 wrote:
| Unlike traditional Saas, you can still use Sublime after 3
| years. You just won't get regular updates.
|
| I drive a 18 year old car. I don't need all the upgrades I
| just need something to drive me from a to b. This business
| model is similar.
|
| PS I believe you can use it without paying anything. They nag
| you to pay but in a very subtle way.
| kennydude wrote:
| Sublime Text has always been great and reliable.
|
| But like with everything, having a great choice of fantastic text
| editors is always good so everyone finds something they enjoy
| using.
| dmi3 wrote:
| In the argument of Sublime Text vs. VS Code, the deal breaker for
| me has always been VS Code telemetry. Of course, you can disable
| it in the settings or firewall, but then you have to constantly
| monitor it to ensure that some "bug" or "update" does not re-
| enable it back. Alternatively, you can choose not to care about
| potentially sharing everything with Microsoft and their 829+
| partners. However, I prefer to pay for Sublime rather than
| participate in some manager's brilliant idea to extract revenue
| from a "free" user base.
| Ballas wrote:
| If telementry is your main concern, just use vscodium. (or
| stick to SublimeText - I use both)
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases
| warrenski wrote:
| Have a look at VSCodium (https://vscodium.com/), it's a freely-
| licensed binary distribution of VS Code without the telemetry.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| I use both Sublime and Vscode every day for different things.
| Sublime is just so fast and responsive all the time, while vscode
| can get annoying slow and laggy, often because of all the many
| plugins I have running. If I just need simple text file editing
| with syntax highlighting, say while editing a markdown file,
| Sublime is just snappier. For actual coding VScode is much better
| because of all the IDE features.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I like VSCode's feature where it doesn't constantly bitch and
| moan about buying a license. Like cmon, there's billions of
| text editors to pick from, it would be like paying for
| breathing air or worse, for winrar.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Maybe I'm a sucker, but I bought a license for Sublime in
| like 2009 and re-upped for a later version. I also actually
| bought WinRAR from Eugene. It's good to support dedicated
| devs who make high quality tools that you use all the time.
| moffkalast wrote:
| The line between dedication and delusion is apparently
| pretty blurry. One can't seriously expect to profit with
| closed software in a space where free and open alternatives
| are the norm. VSCode is open source, 7-Zip is open source,
| they are both objectively better in every way. If anything
| I would rather support those by contributing directly.
|
| Besides absurd levels of market saturation, code editors
| are a complement to software, just like libraries and
| frameworks, and we benefit most as a society by keeping
| tools open. Imagine having to pay a monthly subscription
| for a json lib. I find the entire concept ridiculous.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| That wasn't the case in 2009. And yeah, I do use 7zip
| mostly now, but it was a different story back then and
| WinRar was really fast and had really great compression
| and features. And who cares, it was like $20 or
| something.
| klardotsh wrote:
| Yeah, screw devs for making a industry-renowned product and
| wanting to be able to eat food or pay the rent for having
| made that thing, right?!
|
| The pricing on Sublime Text is a steal for what value a
| frequent user of it derives from it. And they even let you
| use it forever with just a nag screen if you still refuse to,
| or can't afford to, pay that fee, unlike a SaaS product which
| would just lock you out.
|
| I can totally get the high school student not paying for
| Sublime because they can't, but IMO no industry professional
| has any legs to stand on for using ST but refusing to pay for
| it on principle.
| fersarr wrote:
| +1 love sublime
| helloguillecl wrote:
| I used Sublime for coding before switching to VS Code for coding,
| but I could never leave Sublime text for some use cases. For
| example:
|
| The possibility to edit large SQL dump files, which I cannot even
| open in VS Code.
| karpovv-boris wrote:
| Ha, I,m cannot use st for large file editing, in this case
| vscode is more performant.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've reinstalled ST a while ago, for years I've tried VS Code and
| I do my main work in IntelliJ but I never got that feeling of
| productivity and an editor that isn't in the way back after
| stopping to use Sublime back in the day.
|
| Mind you, at the time the world had moved on as well; my main ST
| days were developing a JS application in the days before
| Typescript / Flow and the like, so all my work relied on my own
| memory, consistent naming, global search and cmd+p to open files.
| There was a "gap" in between editors like IntelliJ having better
| / smarter support for JS and the rise of LSPs, making those
| features available for all editors again. IntelliJ had a
| competitive advantage for a while.
|
| Likewise, VS Code had a competitive advantage along with Atom for
| having all its code written in web language / JS, which millions
| of developers learned or pivoted to in the 2010's. I still can't
| fully grasp how huge it was, but the last few jobs I had
| interviews with all used JS for back-end, migrating from PHP.
| z3t4 wrote:
| > my main ST days were developing a JS application in the days
| before Typescript / Flow and the like, so all my work relied on
| my own memory, consistent naming, global search and cmd+p to
| open files.
|
| Ohh the days where you could open a JS project, immediately
| understand what it did and make a quick fix. Now it's 15 lines
| of imports, then one line of code that you have no idea what it
| does because you have to find what it actually does by digging
| 10 layers down in the import inception. Buf if you have a IDE
| you can tell by the type annotation that it's an
| EnterpriseJavaScriptBeanConstructorFactorFunctionIterator and
| by clicking ctrl+space you can see that it has four methods:
| .create() .read() .update() and .delete()
| amatecha wrote:
| I've used Sublime since 2012 or 2013 or so. It's really legit.
| Lightweight, "it just works", and has generally stayed the same
| while adding some nice features along the way. Thank you!! <3
| mstade wrote:
| I too still like Sublime Text in 2025, largely for the same
| reasons.
|
| I have liked it very much for the past decade or so, and at this
| rate, I'll most likely keep liking Sublime Text for many years to
| come. It's an incredible tool that does its job extremely well.
|
| Worth every penny!
| grougnax wrote:
| I love Sublime Text, it is so snappy and lightweight. Great
| software!
| factsaresacred wrote:
| Reluctant VScode user here. Sublime's speed make it the best
| editor to work with by far, but its package manager is in a sorry
| state. A good 70%+ of packages are outdated or don't work.
|
| Fix this and I'd be back in a flash.
| turblety wrote:
| I used to love Sublime Text and used it for my daily driver. Even
| bought a license.
|
| But just downloaded it again, and while it definitely felt
| snappy, after 15 minutes I still couldn't find a way to get
| TypeScript type checking working, or even any type of
| JavaScript/TypeScript autocomplete.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| If you want IDE-like behavior you'll need to install the
| TypeScript LSP: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/LSP-
| typescript. We do have our own limited language-agnostic
| indexing and auto-complete if you open your projects folder; it
| relies on existing code to provide suggestions.
| turblety wrote:
| I installed that. Spent 15 minutes trying to get it to work.
| No joy :(
| james2doyle wrote:
| Oh, that's frustrating. I think it'd be great to have some
| more concrete guides for modern Sublime. Maybe I'll write
| one about getting TypeScript and everything working
| starting from scratch
| fergie wrote:
| If you are locked in to TypeScript, you are basically locked in
| to VSCode (albeit a "soft" lock-in).
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| Not really, I didn't see much difference between ST with all
| LSPs configured and VSCode. What features do you find
| missing?
| fergie wrote:
| See parent comment
| unwind wrote:
| So, uh, the author mentions the "command palette" as being a
| killer feature, and links to an article about them, that has
| _zero images_ of this GUI feature. I can 't even ... what?
|
| I found [1] which at least shows what it looks like, for those of
| us who haven't had the pleasure to test Sublime Text. I gather
| that the search that is integrated in the palette is an important
| aspect of their use, so perhaps it's hard to show actual UX in a
| still image.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sublime_text/sublime_text_com...
| ghiculescu wrote:
| Very relatable piece, the intro felt like I could have written it
| (I like the URL too).
|
| "It fast" is enough for me, many of the "features" in editors are
| noise, and Sublime is the simplest and least noisy.
| ElectronBadger wrote:
| Sublime Text user here, it's been my go to editor for the last
| few years. The best. A keeper.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I came to Sublime Text 3 from Atom because I wanted a native
| editor. It boggles my mind that so many people love VS Code.
|
| I've tried Zed, it's a beautiful editor...it's just too
| opinionated. For whatever reason, it doesn't understand my Deno
| projects and I content get rid of the red squigglies.
|
| Sublime lives up to its name.
| dominicrose wrote:
| VS code has good defaults and extensions but if you have time
| to configure it precisely it's also possible. When configured
| to your needs the differences between ST and VSC aren't big.
| What I don't understand is why would anyone use Eclipse.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Eclipse is a full IDE. Sublime Text and VSCode are not.
|
| A competitor to Eclipse would be JetBrains IntelliJ or Visual
| Studio (not Code), both are often considered superior by far,
| but neither are free.
|
| Eclipse is also a platform for creating applications
| (RCP/RAP).
| juleiie wrote:
| Free or paid what's the difference. If you have company you
| can afford it professionally, if you are a student you can
| get a free license, if you are NEET dev you can -----------
| it.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I understand the downvotes but it is an interesting
| point.
|
| First thing, Eclipse is not just free as in free beer, it
| is also free as in freedom, which can matter.
|
| In addition, you may be surprised how much free (as in
| free beer) matters to large companies and governments. Of
| course, a multi-billion dollar company can pay, but the
| simple act of acquiring a license, no matter the cost,
| can be a lengthy bureaucratic process for the lowly
| developer who needs it. It is usually much easier to use
| free software, especially big names like Eclipse that may
| be pre-approved. Of course, using a free licence you have
| no right to, let alone piracy is a big no no.
|
| And while I don't think corporate inefficiency is a good
| reason, it is a reality and you have to work with it.
| Asraelite wrote:
| > Eclipse is a full IDE. Sublime Text and VSCode are not.
|
| I don't understand what practical difference there is
| between Eclipse/IntelliJ and VSCode with extensions that
| makes one an IDE and the other not.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Ugh, typo.
|
| *"cannot", not "content"
| ciaovietnam wrote:
| I also use ST and use browser if I need some AI assisted coding.
| What about you guys? Is using IDEs with native AI coding plugin a
| good reason to switch away from ST?
| mulle_nat wrote:
| Frankly yes, though I still prefer text editing in Sublime
| Text.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If anything, ST taught me that I didn't actually need an IDE to
| be productive, but mind you this was in the years where JS
| became huge but didn't have good editor support yet.
| Duke64 wrote:
| I bought a "double license" for Text and Merge three years ago
| and spent money on Sublime for the first time. I will definitely
| be renewing it in February.
| pavelevst wrote:
| I still like textmate and use it daily, together with heavy IDEs,
| imo best multiline editing and search in large codebase
| tectiv3 wrote:
| As do I. TextMate is still unbeatable, especially after I added
| Copilot and LSP to it!
| aequitas wrote:
| I recently switched from TextMate to Zed because of the lack
| of LSP support and other modern features. Zed comes closest
| to a native macOS app of all the editors I tried, but nothing
| could beat TextMate at that. What did you do to get LSP
| supported? I might give TextMate another try.
| tectiv3 wrote:
| Zed is as close as it gets, I also use it, but it is still
| slow and cumbersome sometimes.
|
| https://github.com/tectiv3/lsp-client/issues/1
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| I'm a Sublime fanboy, but have been using VSCode for years as I
| like the Github Copilot integration
|
| :-(
| alibarber wrote:
| There's a, community supported, Copilot LSP plugin for Sublime.
| It can be rough around the edges - but I tried it and it was
| enough to get me to buy a 1yr Copilot seat (at current
| pricing).
|
| Completely understand if Copilot is enough to make people want
| to switch over - but for me it wasn't, and I don't feel like
| I'm missing out with this setup.
| modernfears wrote:
| Can't not mention tonsky's post about most important feature of
| Sublime: https://tonsky.me/blog/sublime/
| lopatin wrote:
| Step 1. Write blog post about how unnecessary feature churn can
| make a product worse.
|
| Step 2. Put an avalanche of moving snowflakes in the background
| of the blog post to make it nearly unreadable.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| I really want to like Sublime (it's so fast, I like the minimal
| UI), but VS Code has so much inertia, and does so much out of the
| box or with minimal extra effort that it's hard to not use it
| instead.
|
| At the end of the day, I have things to get done, I'm not here to
| tinker with tools. Same reason I never got into vim/emacs etc as
| a daily driver.
| andrepd wrote:
| Well that is my rationale for working with Sublime instead of
| VScode!
| dguest wrote:
| That's also why I use emacs. It was the first text editor I
| learned.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Emacs and Neovim are things one gets into in ones free time and
| gets good enough to make the switch at some point at the job.
| Of course that is mostly only feasible, if the projects at the
| job are set up in a tool agnostic way or choice exists in the
| first place.
|
| I also want to like Sublime, but I already have a well
| configured Emacs and I like using free/libre software. While
| Sublime was great when I used it in the past, I am not sure I
| would use it much, since I use Emacs all day now. But the
| reason for Sublime over VS code is, that it is way less bloated
| and not running in a browser. Would need to see a direct
| comparison, but wouldn't be surprised, if it showed to be way
| snappier. If one does not need lots of specifically VS code
| features, I think Dublime gets out of ones way and lets you get
| shit done.
| diggan wrote:
| > Emacs and Neovim are things one gets into in ones free time
| and gets good enough to make the switch at some point at the
| job.
|
| I'd probably never end up proficient with vim (and today
| neovim) if I didn't do the complete opposite of this and
| forced myself to use it for real work directly. True, I went
| a bit slower for one/two weeks, but if you really have to use
| something foreign for most of your work, you'll learn it
| really quickly, as long as you're up for looking things up as
| you go along. Of course, YMMV and all that yadda yadda.
| mufasachan wrote:
| I would be curious to know how you managed to do this. I
| really tried to do this but the tons of dev tools I am
| using was too much for transitioning to neovim for my daily
| work. Namely, I need a DAP, multiple dev tools (lsps,
| linters, formatters) because I work with several projects
| which do not have the same tools[^1]. Luckily, I do not mix
| multiple programming languages. Plus, I containerize all my
| dev env. There might be some elements missing, but the
| point is the number of tools is overwhelming and it makes
| me think that I should do the whole configuration/setup on
| my free time.
|
| Did you face similar issues? If yes, how did you solve
| them? Or maybe your work does not need that much tools? Or
| you have been more minimalistic than me for the number of
| features to be included in the neovim configuration?
|
| [1]: I work in R&D, I need to tweak and contribute in many
| papers code or different toolboxes/frameworks on top of the
| team projects.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| LSP and formatter were really fast to set up. I used
| kickstart.nvim to get started and lsp and formatter are
| already mostly configured.
|
| DAP is trickier to set up but is doable. How often are
| you really debugging though? In the beginning just run
| both neovim and your ide and just switch when you debug.
|
| Back when LSP wasn't a thing I still used vim but would
| just switch to an IDE when I needed to go code exploring
| and needed to be able to jump to definition and stuff
| like that. Wasn't a big deal and was worth it to use both
| tools because vim is such a superior method for editing
| text.
| mufasachan wrote:
| Thank you for your answer. Some code base have chaotic
| execution path through a monolithic code base (by
| design). So, for these code bases, I heavily rely on the
| debugger. But I like your suggestion to use both of them,
| I think it's a good way to transition slowly and
| efficiently.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| Another good way to transition is to use your editor's
| vim plugin.
|
| Pretty much every IDE has a vim plugin that's at least
| adequate. I've had good experiences with vscode,
| jetbrains, and visual studio vim plugins.
| diggan wrote:
| > Did you face similar issues?
|
| I don't remember what exact year I did the transition at,
| but around 2014 - 2016 I think. At the time I was working
| on a PHP Symfony application (and its frontend made with
| Backbone.js) powering Typeform, and I think this was
| right about when docker entered the scene, we were still
| using Vagrant with what I think was NFS syncing or
| something else dog-slow. But both Docker and Vagrant
| works fine with vim, as long as you have a generic
| VM/container setup, it shouldn't matter what editor you
| use, in my mind.
|
| But before that I was using Sublime Text 2, with minimal
| plugins/extensions, so moving to vim was mostly getting
| used to moving around and manipulating text, using some
| very basic text-based autocomplete, before eventually
| migrating to a "proper" setup years later. Since then, I
| honestly haven't touched my config much, so I'm sure
| there are smoother/better ways now.
|
| Since then, I've used (neo)vim to write JavaScript
| (+HTML+CSS), Ruby, Go, Python, Rust, various other
| languages, but mostly Clojure/Script. When trying out a
| new language, I find some (neo)vim plugin that seems
| suitable and try it out. If it works well, great,
| otherwise try another one.
| mufasachan wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience!
| VHRanger wrote:
| I would include helix in the list with nvim nowadays.
|
| The LSP support is native and very easy to set up for most
| languages.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Yeah, I got used to vim while I was in school and probably
| wouldn't have put in the investment otherwise. It was worth.
| I'm not an expert in it, nor do I have a ton of fancy things
| installed, but it's fast and works in basically any situation
| (esp over SSH). My coworkers keep getting forced to change
| IDEs while I stick with vim.
| wuliwong wrote:
| I didn't want to switch to VS Code and kinda did b/c there is
| less friction when I'm using the same tools as my counterparts.
| I like VS Code just fine. My first true love was textmate tbh.
| :)
| james2doyle wrote:
| I hear you. I think that is why I prefer Helix to Neovim when
| it comes to editors in terminals. There is a lot that is just
| done and there are sane defaults. I think the default Sublime
| experience is pretty slim and trim. Maybe too much for some but
| just right for me
| buu700 wrote:
| Same, after a certain point (for TypeScript particularly) I
| found it was too big a hassle not to switch to VS Code. All
| these years later, I still have VS Code configured to look and
| behave like Sublime. I found it funny one time when someone
| noticed me working on my laptop in public and said it was nice
| to see another Sublime user, which I had to correct him on.
| unnamedd wrote:
| I have always loved Sublime Text, but in 2023, Zed captured my
| heart, and now I have neither Sublime Text nor VS Code installed
| on my machine anymore.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Is Zed's AI integration optional or are they pushing it hard
| like intellij, vs code and warp are?
| herrherrmann wrote:
| I think you can opt out of its AI features more or less
| completely, but you do have to look up all the relevant
| config options (mostly to hide buttons in the UI leading to
| AI festures).
| nbenitezl wrote:
| Another happy customer of Sublime Text here, but still not dare
| to take the step to buy SublimeMerge, I'm pretty well served in
| console for my git use, except for 'git blame' that I prefer to
| do in a UI tool, but SublimeMerge blame support is awful.
| dpjohnst wrote:
| G'day, I head up the Sublime Merge team.
|
| I'd love to hear your feedback on how we can improve the blame
| functionality! I can look into getting anything resolved there.
| dsego wrote:
| Not sure how projects and workspaces are a feature, it's the most
| convoluted thing ever. I just use `subl .` to open my project
| directory. I think it would be saner to just have a dot file in
| the directory if you want to tweak settings for that
| project/directory.
| andrepd wrote:
| Well that exactly how it works ahaha! There's the .sublime-
| project file with settings for that directory.
| lopatin wrote:
| The main feature of Sublime Text for me is that it doesn't throw
| away your buffers. Ever. So it's mainly a note taking app with
| vim key bindings for me / snappy scratch pad. All of my actual
| code editing happens in an IDE or actual VIM when on a server.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| This is similar to how I use Kate on Windows. The configs can
| be somewhat complicated but it is very flexible and nice to
| use.
| quesera wrote:
| I see how the separation of "persisted active buffers" from
| "saved files" is important, but FWIW I have vim configured to
| (for a specific note-taking FileType) write the buffer out on
| 60 seconds of inactivity.
|
| Not the same, but adequate for my needs.
| jc_811 wrote:
| I. Love. Sublime
|
| I've tried all the other main editors but always come back to
| Sublime. The simplicity, the speed, the near instantaneous load
| time.
|
| I feel like I'm such an outlier but for my text editor I don't
| want all the fancy bells and whistles that come with all the IDEs
| nowadays. It feels like Sublime is the only one that is so
| intuitive OOTB while allowing access to a plethora of features
| (if you need/want them). Whereas the others throw everything in
| your face and it feels like a battle to just get it configured
| for your needs.
|
| Granted, I mainly code for personal and side projects, and
| actually enjoy the coding part so I don't want AI, or advanced
| features, writing code for me! Even for the productivity gains, I
| just find coding on my own enjoyable and solving problems as they
| arise.
|
| That being said, I can totally understand why devs who need to
| collaborate with large teams, under strict deadline, across
| multiple countries - probably absolutely need the fancy features
| that come with enterprise IDEs.
|
| I just love my Sublime editor and never plan on switching :)
| pshirshov wrote:
| vscode keybindings are insane. There are couple of thousands of
| them turned on by default with multiple duplications and no
| abstrations. So you have to negate them all first (that takes
| around 5000 lines of json) and then carefully go over around
| 500-700 definitions which might be important for you. So, my
| custom keymap in intellij has 44 definition, the vscode
| equivalent takes 675 and 2000 lines of json.
| kristianp wrote:
| I've bought a license recently. I found the LSP-clangd plugin to
| be useful for the linting features of clangd and clangd-tidy for
| a C++ project recently. Having the lint highlighting helped me
| clean up some possible problems, (after reducing the number of
| types of lint to a shortish whtielist)
| ototot wrote:
| Sublime is my default editor on Windows since 2012. I really
| enjoy its lightweight and cleanness.
| kergonath wrote:
| Hell, I still like TextMate in 2025 :)
|
| (Though I use Sublime more, and I like it as well)
| infinitifall wrote:
| Sublime Text used to be my go-to editor when I didn't need a full
| fledged IDE. A rare gem in an arena of slow mammoths. I've since
| switched over to Lite XL, which is FOSS, just as fast (if not
| faster), and the plugins cover nearly all my niche use cases.
|
| While I respect the effort that goes into creating quality
| software and am not averse to spending money, I'd rather not live
| in a world where the best softwares are closed source.
| DaveMcMartin wrote:
| This brings back good old memories. Sublime was my editor from
| 2010 until 2016, when I switched to VS Code. Eventually, I got
| hooked on Neovim, and I still use it to this day since I can't
| live without Vim motions anymore.
|
| But I built dozens of websites using Sublime, so in a way, it
| helped me earn $300k.
| braggerxyz wrote:
| Maybe Sublime Text is good, but I refuse to pay for something as
| profane as a text editor. A decent editor (syntax highlighting,
| LSP, regex search, keybindings for the 21st century etc) needs to
| be part of every operarting system.
|
| For me nowadays, Lapce is quickly growing on me.
| pell wrote:
| You can essentially use Sublime for free indefinitely. It shows
| you a prompt to buy a license for every few saves you make but
| that's about it. Not invasive in my book. I also think people
| underestimate the amount of work that goes into building a good
| text editor and keeping it up to date over the years.
| noname120 wrote:
| You can, but then the license explicitly forbids you from
| using it for commercial purposes.
| braggerxyz wrote:
| Which is basically anything that is done on company
| hardware. Also there is a compliance factor, at least at my
| company.
| braggerxyz wrote:
| I cannot use Sublime without license in my work setting
| without violating License terms. That's a huge deal breaker
| pell wrote:
| That's a good point. I think if you really like the editor
| it might be something your employer could pay for. At least
| ST only offers a one-time fee for each major version. Of
| course that depends on where you work and their policies.
| So I see how it's not so easy and my comment definitely
| missed that part.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I have actually tried Lapce because I like Lua and I thought it
| would be a nice alternative to building plugins in Lua rather
| than Python. But I can't get over how clunky the UI is in
| Lapce. I also find it will randomly crash on me and I can't
| really tell why. There's also no easy way to add additional
| LSPs. You have to look at these extensions, and there is a very
| limited number of them. I wish they would just allow you to
| configure the LSP through a JSON object like Sublime does.
| braggerxyz wrote:
| Agreed, it has rough edges. But the UI got improved with the
| last update to 0.4.2. Havent had crashes on Linux, had some
| on Windows through. But still, its Beta quality Software and
| better than most other editors already. And its cross
| platform and really fast
| sneak wrote:
| Kernel, compiler, text editor: all must be free software, with
| full source code and permissive licenses.
|
| I will die on this hill.
|
| Closed source editors (including VS Code) are simply nonstarters
| for me.
|
| This is my toolchain, my job, my life, my hobby, my passion. The
| legal prohibition on modifying it is against every single thing I
| sit down at a computer to do.
|
| It might sound snobbish, but if you can't (or don't) modify your
| #1 tool (your editor), are you really a hacker? What are you
| hacking on, and why, then?
| sksrbWgbfK wrote:
| Are you really a hacker if you haven't soldered you CPU and RAM
| yourself? Is your electricity coming from a OSS treadmill? I
| question your dedication.
| sneak wrote:
| Not remotely the same, false equivalence. I don't regularly
| need to add CPU instructions; I do regularly need to amend my
| tools.
| leftnode wrote:
| Yes.
| timmfin wrote:
| I'm another "use Sublime text for all kinds of scratch and random
| needs, but vscode daily driver". But this was a good reminder for
| me of the value I still get out of Sublime and that I should
| upgrade my license.
|
| One small pet peeve, I do wish more of the functionality in the
| menu bar (mac?) was available in the command menu (cmd+shift+p).
| I still fairly frequently try cmd+shift+p "Spel..." to try and
| turn on Spell check mode, but then realize I need to hit my mac
| shortcut to search the menu bar (cmd+shift+/) and then type
| "Spel..."
| james2doyle wrote:
| That's a good one. I also noticed that I couldn't create new
| snippets or plugins from the command prompt. So, there are
| definitely some things missing from there.
| mmustapic wrote:
| Besides Sublime Text, the same company makes Sublime Merge, a
| great git UI.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I've used Sublime Text since it's initial release, and later on
| Sublime Merge, and i own licenses for every major version
| released.
|
| However, my ST4 license recently expired, and that caused me to
| look back at the previous 3 years to see what my money was
| actually buying me, and it turns out it was mostly bugfixes.
| There have been, rather consistently, 2 releases per year
| (november and august), and the last major feature was in 2022
| with syntax code folding and recent files integration, and those
| are the only "new features" added since ST4 was released in 2021.
|
| Don't get me wrong, i don't mind paying for software, especially
| software i use every day, but ST4 more or less feels like it's on
| the backburner, with nothing much going on, so i let my
| "subscription" (ST4 licensing is more or less a subscription for
| 3 years) lapse.
|
| I've instead switched to Zed (zed.dev) as my "main and fast"
| editor. Yes it has some rough edges, but feature wise it's very
| much like Sublime Text.
|
| It doesn't support Windows (yet), which is not a problem for me,
| but i can see how that could be a dealbreaker for some.
| rollcat wrote:
| I think that as software asymptotically approaches mostly-
| bugfix releases, it's a good sign that it's "done", and
| therefore just stable, reliable, and "boring".
|
| Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit. It
| can free up your energy to spend it on more interesting things,
| like actual coding.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| > Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit.
|
| I agree, but considering the "editor space" has progressed a
| lot in the past decade or so, i would hardly call Sublime
| Text "done".
|
| It has it's strengths and weaknesses, and while it was a
| great editor 15 years ago, and had it's share of innovative
| features, things have stagnated quite a bit in recent years.
| ST4 felt more like a minor update to ST3, and ST3 was
| probably also just a minor update to ST2 (i forgot which one
| was the big rewrite, but i think it was ST2).
|
| Compare that to what has been going on with VSCode and Zed in
| recent years, which far surpass Sublime Text in many ways,
| and doing it for free.
|
| So, in the end, for me, it turned out to be a subscription
| based "slightly better than average" editor. Yes, i still
| love it, and i would love for it to get a revival and spring
| to life again, and i would switch back in a heartbeat, but
| sadly the "maintenance mode" has been going on for almost a
| decade now.
| skytwosea wrote:
| I can empathize with your take, but my sentiment is the
| polar opposite. I like the toolchain shuffle - exploring
| this, trying out that - but I always, always come back to
| Sublime specifically because they have not implemented
| major changes. I _deeply_ appreciate the fact that it has
| remained essentially the same for years, and I very
| sincerely hope that it doesn't change much going forward.
| This boringness is what keeps me coming back, and is what
| I'm paying for.
|
| Sublime has become my refuge from the crap that other
| editors are trying to cram in to every available nook and
| cranny. Zed was pleasant at first blush, but the way that
| AI is central to the platform was a huge turn-off and
| disabling that (and a few other things) was not intuitive.
| Same goes for many other editors I've tried over the years.
|
| I would like to see more activity in plugin development and
| maintenance, but always peripheral to the core Sublime
| experience. Give me a stable, quiet, boring platform and
| let me choose the features and noise!
| Fnoord wrote:
| The Apple macOS model of implementing useful features from
| apps (in ST's case: plugins) stands out as long as there are
| reasonable trade offs.
|
| Without it, you have to use so much glue for a good
| experience. So, look at the very popular extensions and see
| if they can become native.
| rollcat wrote:
| Well, Apple is giving me more and more reasons to switch
| away from their default apps (which I used to love) with
| every release. They focus too much on new features, too
| little on stability and good experience.
|
| I've already ditched Music (macOS: Cog; iOS: Decoupled),
| I'm holding off upgrading for Photos' sake, Home on macOS
| is an absolute nightmare, Mail is meh but ok (fingers
| crossed they won't accidentally break it), and I'm hoping
| they will never go after Notes - it's central to so many
| things in my life.
|
| Meanwhile, I'm still using Emacs, because despite its many
| shortcomings (mostly the legacy architecture), ELisp makes
| writing simple plugins simple, and the few that I use are
| too excellent to get me to switch.
| bradgessler wrote:
| I similarly switched from ST4 to Zed after using it for
| several years. I agree that good software eventually becomes
| "bugfixes", but if you expand the universe of ST4 out to
| popular plugins for specific programming languages, it starts
| to become really buggy. That's something I wish ST would
| focus on, make the most popular plugins more stable and
| continue doing that for the next decade.
|
| I posted in the ST forum that achieving a stable
| configuration of plugins in ST4 seems more difficult than it
| should be, but they declined to take this on as a problem.
|
| Meanwhile Zed made it pretty easy to achieve a stable set of
| plugins very quickly, particularly around language services,
| shell integration, etc. That's what prompted me to switch;
| however Zed has taken a few steps backwards in that
| department since they started spinning out language
| extensions into plugins that require more configuration and
| are more prone to breaking.
| nottorp wrote:
| Do you prefer the modern style of application that breaks your
| workflow every 6 hours with popups advertising the latest
| feature you don't care about?
|
| I'm assuming "license expired" means losing just access to
| newer versions. Which you explicitly said that you don't need.
|
| Why change the tool then?
| Fnoord wrote:
| I got a burn-out and lost my job. In the meantime my license
| expired. Once I get a job again (if ever) I will once again buy
| a license.
|
| I'll give zed a look. One thing I miss with ST is remote
| editing.
| robblbobbl wrote:
| Recommended due to the good property of a file system search.
| nneonneo wrote:
| I don't use ST3 as my daily driver (I use BBEdit instead - still
| not on the VSCode train), but I do use it for lots of random
| editing and scratch needs.
|
| Shameless plug - I wrote a plugin ages ago which makes it
| possible to replace and sort text using Python code
| (https://nneonneo.github.io/sublime-replace-with-python/). This
| little plugin has been incredibly useful for certain tasks, and
| serves both as a useful prototyping tool (playing with text
| modifications before implementing a full-blown script) as well as
| a general-purpose text wrangling utility. Basically, you can
| select some text (or find it with regex), then activate the
| plugin and type a line of Python code; it will then run the code
| for each selection region and produce the replacement. Sorting
| works similarly - select some regions, enter an expression as a
| sort key, and the selections will be rearranged according to the
| key.
|
| I love how a plugin I wrote nearly a decade ago is still working
| with essentially no changes needed since 2017. Stable software is
| reliable software!
| nanook wrote:
| Why BBEdit? What languages do you code in?
| rollcat wrote:
| > Shameless plug - I wrote a plugin ages ago which makes it
| possible to replace and sort text using Python code [...]
|
| I've been trying out Lite XL, and I have a crude (WIP) plugin
| that can pipe selected text thru any shell command (sed, sort,
| etc), and either output to a new buffer, or replace the
| selection. Then I started writing some scripts to supply the
| commands I miss from Emacs, like align-regexp. Since it's just
| shell commands, you can write them in any language.
|
| I'm not sure if I like Lite XL, but the scripts I already wrote
| would be easily reusable in any editor that supports piping
| selections. Perhaps it would be a fun project to create a
| collection of such portable scripts, sort of like what LSP did.
| brainzap wrote:
| Sometimes when the OS built in search does not work I Open the
| directory in Sublime and use it as search tool.
| scop wrote:
| So glad to see this. I have been down a long road of text
| editors:
|
| - Sublime - Vim - Emacs - Atom - VSCode - Jetbrains IDE - Neovim
| - Zed - Cursor
|
| And these aren't just little flings. I've spent months if not
| years in most of these editors. However, at the end of the day I
| always come back to one: Sublime.
|
| It is a beautiful piece of software. It feels like writing with
| one's "good pen and good paper", that high quality stationary
| sort of thing. It is just me and the code. There is something
| that just _feels_ different or even tactile about Sublime. That
| actually leads me to ask as this is outside of my expertise: why
| does Sublime feel more tactile /real than other editors? When I
| look at the code in other editors it feels like I'm looking at a
| projector on a wall. When I look at the code in Sublime it feels
| like I'm looking at something painted on the wall. Anybody else
| have the same experience? What's the psychological/software
| reason for that?
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Sublime is really snappy and responsive. But it also doesn't
| have as many fancy automation like jetbrains. Maybe that keeps
| the code "real", rather than some artifact that you have the
| computer manipulate for you.
| scop wrote:
| That's definitely part of it. Though even before I start
| typing and am just looking at the characters on the screen,
| they seem more dense, tactile, and real. Is there a
| categorical difference for how Sublime renders text vs other
| editors out there?
| 91bananas wrote:
| This is the main reason I've ever found myself using it if
| not vscode or now cursor. If I have some massive file that
| needs messing with nothing handles it as well as sublime
| does.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I don't use or actually even like Sublime, but I have the exact
| same experience of it. Quick loads and lack of "extras" that
| cause even portions of lag in the experience; there's an
| immediacy to Sublime.
|
| But those things that introduce clunkiness are often very
| useful. They take away from the aesthetic feel of writing code,
| but give advantages that are too useful to give up, imho.
| munificent wrote:
| _> That actually leads me to ask as this is outside of my
| expertise: why does Sublime feel more tactile /real than other
| editors?_
|
| Performance is a _big_ part of that.
|
| Even a few millisecond delay changes the user experience from
| "I am physically interacting with an object" to "I am
| requesting this service do a thing on my behalf". Sublime is
| consistently fast enough to feel like the former. Most other
| IDEs feel like the latter.
|
| (Another example of this effect is the difference between
| driving a manual transmission and an automatic. When I drive a
| manual, it feels like I'm in control of the engine. When I
| drive an automatic, it feels like I'm executive sending
| messages to my engineer who then applies changes to the
| engine... eventually.)
| scop wrote:
| Thanks for the info! I was wondering if it was something more
| than speed, but what you said makes a lot sense. Love the "I
| am interacting" vs "I am requesting" way of putting it as it
| highlights just how dramatically different of an experience
| it is.
| jojva wrote:
| I wonder how much of it is simply that Sublime has a very
| pleasant default color theme (Monokai) in my opinion. It feels
| warmer than other IDEs. I actually use it in VScode too now.
| ckunte wrote:
| Long time Sublime Text and Sublime Merge fan, and a paying user
| since 2011. It's very good; I use all three OSes (Windows at
| work, MacOS on occasion, Linux is primary driver, and I've now
| switched to Pi 5. Zed does not even load on this, whereas ST just
| flies. (The only real competition is Neovim.)
|
| That reminds me, I wonder if Sublime Text still has room to
| improve in some areas. Here's an example, in Vim generating a
| date stamp is a one liner incl. text expansion[0], whereas in
| Sublime Text, one has to write a multi line plugin and a separate
| keyboard shortcut[1] to get the same functionality as that of
| Vim.
|
| [0]:
| https://gist.github.com/ckunte/2d7a750e6cf8b96f98f028e90c8ab...
|
| [1]:
| https://gist.github.com/ckunte/31500c17452b0fd8c55bc9460bd9c...
| james2doyle wrote:
| I think it would be cool to see some built-in commands for
| common things like that. But I think the fact that your plugin
| is so small and so quick to add, proves that going that route
| is probably the best one. I'm sure if there was a plugin out
| there that added dozens of these little commands, it would
| probably do pretty well.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| You can achieve the same thing using the arithmetic command in
| the command palette:
| `__import__('datetime').datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d
| %H:%M")`.
| pupppet wrote:
| I find ST and the SFTP plugin (paid) a killer workflow combo,
| super useful for updating WordPress sites.
|
| Update your file locally, hit the shortcut to upload, done. I
| find this experience superior to editing directly on the external
| file as I may want to save but not necessarily commit that
| change. And for smaller projects you are the only developer on,
| git can be overkill.
| jokoon wrote:
| They finally fixed some syntax highlighting issues.
|
| But yeah, it's the best editor out there, I still uses it.
|
| I wish I could have more tab rows.
|
| Still a bit expensive, in my view.
|
| I tried sublime text projects/workspace once, but they are not
| that great.
| brine wrote:
| I was 100% with you... until 3 days ago I tried
| [Zed](https://zed.dev) -\\_(tsu)_/-
| james2doyle wrote:
| There is a lot to like about Zed. But I still can't get past
| how it doesn't feel as snappy as Sublime. As I mentioned in the
| post, their snippet solution is not ideal for my needs.
| Something I didn't mention, though, was that I find the LSP
| configuration to be really frustrating in Zed. Their
| configuration/settings file is kind of a mess. They've clearly
| gone through a couple different versions of how to configure
| things because every couple of releases. They have changed the
| way that LSP formatting is configured at least twice.
| kopirgan wrote:
| I hard a hard time getting LSP to work with Neovim, had to give
| up. Didn't want to install yet another plug-in manager like Mason
| etc some of which go out of circulation or could be risky. Maybe
| I am below average. As it is free, I just use it without any
| extras although that is less productive of course.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thank you. Sublime text is my goto text editor. I code in VSCode
| but whenever I need to edit a text file I switch to Sublime text.
| nijuashi wrote:
| The only gripe I have is I have like 100 project windows open and
| I need to look for it (ctrl+P only works within the project
| window). Otherwise, it's pretty much a perfect editor. Maybe I'm
| missing a plugin.
| dishsoap wrote:
| Yeah this, it's annoying to find a specific open file if you
| have tons of windows. Absolutely love sublime text apart from
| that.
| nroize wrote:
| Switched to it last year for working on a large C codebase, huge
| fan. Visual Studio Code was always way too slow at indexing,
| Sublime is _fast_.
| fifticon wrote:
| I use a mix of sublime and vscode. I often pick sublime, because
| I want peace of mind. I trust it to not try to make me 'do
| something else'. It (mostly) doesn't pester me with things to
| update or that are out-of-date, it doesn't run or fail with weird
| things in the background I didn't ask it to do. It sticks to a
| minimal layout. I had a similar love relationship with early
| versions of paintshop-pro - it contained the right balance of
| 'enough to do what you need, but not too much to overwhelm you'.
| Whenever I ran into a too-new version of paintshop-pro, I closed
| it again because I didn't want to deal with their lost-sense-of-
| balance. Sublime for me is like that, it is a hammer where the
| head won't suddenly fall off.
|
| I had an eye-opening experience with VSCode recently: I had
| brought one of my laptops on a car drive, where I had a few hours
| before the people (family) I chauffeured would come back, and I
| had a coding project I wanted to update some stuff on. The
| kicker: I didn't have internet in the car, but for local vscode
| editing, that shouldn't be a problem, right(?) At least, I had
| not thought it would be.
|
| Well, for some reason, VSCode suddenly became stupid. It could
| not longer figure out where my methods and classes were defined,
| so I had to navigate my code-base by hand (god forbid). It also
| flashed something about not being able to connect to "dot net" /
| ".NET" or something similar. I am not quite sure what was going
| on, maybe copilot..? Whatever, my VSCode was in a mode where it
| seemed to rely on some online resource to operate, and suddenly
| had become braindead by severing the cord..??
|
| This reminds me why I like sublime.
| singhrac wrote:
| I was a longtime user of Sublime Text and switched to VSCode
| because of Remote Development and Pylance. Everything else is
| pretty much fine and Sublime has always had better performance,
| though these days having support for AI integration (a la
| Copilot) is also necessary for me.
|
| I tried Zed recently because it has remote support and AI
| integration, but the Python integration is limited to Pyright so
| I gave up temporarily (I guess I can recreate Pylance using this
| doc: https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-
| release/blob/main/USING...).
| racl101 wrote:
| It's my new notepad. When I don't need the bloat of VSCode, or
| any JetBrains editor, etc. nor have the will to fight with Vim
| and, yet, still need something that supports code syntax.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| +1
| thecrumb wrote:
| I'd probably move back if the sidebar could move to the right
| LOL. I still see people ask on the forum post and I'm always
| amazed this simple feature hasn't been added yet.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I haven't heard that complaint before. But it's a good one! I
| personally don't use a sidebar, but I can see that being
| annoying if you do
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| I use Sublime as my notepad alternative. I use no plugins and
| don't know any keyboard shortcuts but I love it. It's quick, the
| tabs work well, you don't have to save files for it to remember
| them...
| kasperset wrote:
| Just a shout out to Sublime Text. My first text editor that I
| have used for serious work. Even though I have moved to Vscode,
| it is my go to open text files in GUI. It rarely fails me.
| OutsmartDan wrote:
| Love Sublime and have used it since its inception long ago,
| however as the times changes with different built-in convenience
| tooling (such as AI), Zed has overtaken Sublime IMO. It's fast,
| has VIM mode, extensions, and takes away some of the hassle that
| you have to go through with ST.
|
| I still use ST for basic editing, but for day-to-day, Zed is the
| go to, simply because it just helps me get my work done slightly
| faster.
|
| PS I still pay for a ST License every 3 years <3
| wkirby wrote:
| Sublime is still great. I wish it had a tighter LSP integration
| -- the plugin is decent, but individual language implementations
| are hit or miss. I sincerely appreciate that it has an old school
| fallback for languages that don't have robust LSP support
| (looking at you Ruby).
| mcflubbins wrote:
| Long live Sublime Text!
|
| also pretty please give us a native FreeBSD port...
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I definitely still use Sublime. It's not my go-to for everything
| now, but my job has drifted in a way that means I don't DO those
| kinds of tasks that often anymore. For writing I've gravitated
| towards tools with better innate outlining and/or Markdown
| support (Obsidian); my work notes are still mostly in
| emacs/orgmode.
|
| But if I need to open a big-ass text file, or process something
| in a pure text environment without anything helping me or trying
| to preserve formatting... yeah, it's probably still Sublime.
| mcflubbins wrote:
| Sublime text is the best. I change _one_ setting (disable word
| wrap by default) and I have an entirely usable editor, I then
| install syntax packages as needed. Its beautiful, simple, and
| performant.
| wvlia5 wrote:
| I implemented the Python Debugger plugin for ST
| mezod wrote:
| Yesterday, I got laughed at for "still" using ST. Today, HN
| delivers.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I got you
| hit8run wrote:
| I use Sublime everyday and pay for it for more than 10 years.
| It's hands down the best piece of proprietary software I ever
| bought. I heavily customize Sublime and supercharge it with a few
| high quality plugins. I also contribute to the ecosystem. To
| another 10 sublime years.
| legend11 wrote:
| It's what i started programming with . Used it until i fell into
| the neovim rabbit hole . Still use it sometimes to write my notes
| and to make simple changes to code
| geenat wrote:
| Sublimes' skeleton is excellent- Python extensions are a pleasure
| to write compared to VS Code.
|
| HOWEVER it desperately needs a UI/UX polish pass to stay
| competitive:
|
| * Drag and drop in the sidebar folder list.
|
| * Drag and drop tab to create 2+ column view.
|
| * Focus the open tab if a file is already open in any Sublime
| window.. Please stop opening duplicates- one mistake and you've
| overwritten your work.
| nine_k wrote:
| The first two points are a good illustration of how varied an
| audience may be. Most of the time I see people striving to make
| their text editor experience such that they don't have to reach
| for the mouse at all.
|
| The last point is a good illustration that your product may
| have terrible bugs that destroy user data, and still be well-
| loved because the overall experience is slick, and certain
| other capabilities are second to none.
| codeslord wrote:
| I appreciate all of them-- VS Code, Vi, Emacs, Sublime,
| JetBrains, Cursor. At the end of the day, they're all text
| editors, and each has its own strengths.
| antfarm wrote:
| I still like TextMate.
| readingnews wrote:
| Used to use sublime, and wanted to purchase a license, but it is
| only good for the version you are on. Since I use gentoo and it
| upgrades frequently, my license would require me to hold it back,
| and eventually it will break. How do others deal with this? Just
| keep purchasing a license?
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| That is kind of why so many software companies switched to
| subscription models.
| smitelli wrote:
| I used ST2 for like five years in its unregistered state. (I
| rationalized that by telling myself that nothing I used it for
| made me money, but I still feel a little gross about it.) In
| practice it was no problem.
|
| I paid for an ST3 license, then I paid again for an ST4
| license. Whenever ST5 comes out, if they ask, I'll pay for that
| too.
| robinhood wrote:
| Sublime is extraordinary. It's one of the softwares I've loved
| the most, by far. Even today, it's always opened and I use it for
| quick fixes and code browsing.
|
| However, despite my fondness for it, VS Code, and now Cursor,
| have largely taken over for me. Cursor, in particular, has
| literally completely transformed how I code. And yes, it's slower
| and more bloated, but the value-added of Cursor is worse it.
| tclancy wrote:
| That is an early candidate for Freudian Slip of the Year.
| robinhood wrote:
| How come?
| balls187 wrote:
| Your typo: "worse it", vs "worth it." E.g. Cusors Bloat
| makes it worth it, but also makes it worse.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Bloated compared to sublime, yes. But VScode is absolutely
| lightweight compared to something like eclipse or one of those
| other heavyweight enterprise Java IDE's.
|
| Cursor is lightweight but have you ever seen the amount of
| memory that thing seems to consume? Holy mother of silicone.
| robinhood wrote:
| I completely agree. It takes a lot of resources. Again - it's
| all about the value it gives in return of what it takes. For
| me, it's worth it. For many others, it's not.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Been using it and upgrading each new version. One of the best
| software applications I've ever used that's both multi platform
| and actually-good on every platform, not just a skinned web app
| like Photoshop
| TheKyleAmbert wrote:
| I'm a professional data scientist and still use TextMate, AMA
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| I don't really use it as a (lightweight) IDE or the like anymore,
| but as a place to keep unstructured notes and snippets and the
| like because SublimeText never ever loses anything unsaved. It's
| pretty much indispensable at this point, whenever I compose
| something a bit longer or have some text to do a search-replace
| on or just some text I need three steps later in what I'm doing,
| it goes in another tab in Sublime. I have at least one tab I re-
| use since before Covid-19, it's absolutely fantastic how stable
| it is. Love it for that.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| That's interesting. I use BBEdit for that purpose and VSCode
| for code editing. I really don't like BBEdit's layout except
| for log viewing and unsaved snipets/notes. I might have to try
| Sublime now...
| christiangenco wrote:
| I freakin' love Sublime Text but the AI chat features of Cursor
| make all of the benefits in this post irrelevant.
|
| It's fast? Not as fast as an LLM.
|
| LSP code completion? Not as good as LLM completions aware of your
| entire codebase at once.
|
| Snippets? These don't matter if an LLM can just make them up on
| the fly.
|
| We've entered a new paradigm of what it means to be a good code
| editor. I'd love if Sublime added the LLM chat and code diff from
| Cursor but I think the new way to edit code is going to look a
| lot more like having a conversation (text or voice) with an LLM
| that's making the changes for you.
| zaphod420 wrote:
| Deep understanding and being able to reason about problems is
| more important than speed. Offloading too much to LLMs has a
| detrimental effect on our brains.
|
| I'm not saying don't use LLMs. Use them in ways that increase
| your skills, and be wary of using them in ways that atrophy
| your skills.
| james2doyle wrote:
| AI LSPs are coming. There are about half a dozen of them right
| now that you can find on GitHub, but I haven't been able to get
| any of them working really nicely and Sublime. But I have faith
| that eventually they'll mature up and a good one will surface
| as the go-to solution.
| emigre wrote:
| I love Sublime Text and would use it and pay for a license
| regularly if it were open source.
| keb_ wrote:
| Sublime Text is my primary editor. I had a brief 2 years where I
| used VSCode and got addicted to plugins, until I realized I was
| spending too much time configuring plugins and went back to
| Sublime Text with the release of ST4. It was mind-boggling to me
| after those 2 years how much _faster_ ST was than VSCode. The LSP
| plugin was icing on the cake. Even in instances where I lack LSP,
| Sublime Text 4 's context-aware autocomplete/finder works
| surprisingly well. The only thing I really find myself missing is
| a visual debugger.
|
| I've tried Neovim and Zed -- Sublime Text is still faster and
| more polished in my experience. It embodies the "do one thing
| well" philosophy perfectly. Also, Sublime Merge is awesome.
| zaphod420 wrote:
| I use neovim, but I also pay for sublime text because it's just
| good.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I had been considering switching to VS Code because of its plugin
| support, but decided against it because it couldn't regex-grep a
| codebase anywhere nearly as fast as Sublime Text, or with
| extended regex features
| kigiri wrote:
| What I love most is how well "out of the box" sublime work for
| me. Even on a fresh install it's very usable without doing
| anything, I usually install about 3 extensions (not counting
| specific language syntax support).
|
| Integrated LSP would be nice to have, but most of the time I
| don't use it and I like to be able to turn it of and have the
| simple autocomplete that is very predictable and unintrusive.
|
| And performance, I know Zed showed some benchmarks on how fast it
| is, I still had some hang up from time to time with it and some
| crash, I can't suffer jankiness in my editor, it stress me out.
|
| Thanks for the work done on Sublime.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I think the best thing about Sublime's LSP plugin is that you
| have everything off by default and then only turn it on on a
| per-project basis. I actually have an example of that in the
| article. Do a search on the article for "eslint" and you'll
| find the section where I show ESLint being disabled and Biome
| being enabled
| brachkow wrote:
| Few years ago I wrote a guide about turning Sublime Text into IDE
| which will be on-par with IDE features of VSCode while retaining
| performance benefits of ST --
| https://www.brachkow.com/notes/sublime-text/.
|
| Sadly, I almost stopped using Sublime Text around a half year
| ago. Development of AI coding tools made flexible UI plugins
| support a must. Right now when I'm using ST as main editor I feel
| like 0.5x developer compared to myself and my colleagues with
| Cursor, because of being limited to very lazy and limited Copilot
| suggestions passed via LSP.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I think once we get some good LSPs that can do AI work then you
| can come back to Sublime! There are some out there. I have
| tried about 3. But they haven't really worked well for me yet.
| I think the best option for me right now is just a simple build
| system that calls Ollama or a remote API. I don't want code
| completion. I usually want some type of "enhanced google"
| didip wrote:
| I tried really hard to stay on Sublime Text.
|
| But one fateful day, the Go plugin made itself hard to install so
| I downloaded VSCode, installed all the useful plugins, and never
| look back.
| silverwind wrote:
| Using Sublime since 2008. Never liked the bloated and telemetry-
| infested mess that VSCode is.
| lbrito wrote:
| Sublime user since 2014.
|
| I tried vim and nvim. Its just more overall effort and I'm never
| as productive as with Sublime. I tried zed and it doesn't work
| with Linux. I briefly opened vscode but haven't tried it out
| earnestly yet.
|
| I think its mostly muscle memory. I'm just too used to the
| shortcuts, workflow etc. You can teach new tricks to an old dog;
| I can learn and get used to another editor, but ultimately I
| always ask myself -- why? I have to get shit done and unless the
| new thing has some other benefit that compensates for the
| productivity decline in the first weeks/months/years, it will
| always be a hard sell.
| james2doyle wrote:
| I hear you. Zed does supply a Sublime key mapping. But it isn't
| the same. There is something off about it. With all the
| investment in Zed and its GPU-based rendering, it still doesn't
| feel as snappy as Sublime to me!
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| > I tried zed and it doesn't work with Linux
|
| Did you mean to say Windows? It definitely does work with Linux
| lbrito wrote:
| I mean Linux. I know they offer a Linux build, I've tried it.
| It doesn't work out of the box on arguably the most popular
| Linux distribution. The "fixes" are doing a bunch of config I
| frankly don't have time for.
|
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14204
|
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14237
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| Fair enough, I've only tried it on Kubuntu 24.04 and it's
| been really good.
| ddingus wrote:
| So do I. Thank you devs.
| sadcodemonkey wrote:
| I went back to Sublime Text after trying VS Code for a few
| months.
|
| VS Code is very nice, when it works. My main problems had to do
| with the extension ecosystem. It felt very chaotic: it was hard
| to figure out which ones to install to get the functionality I
| wanted. Updates to Python extensions sometimes caused
| instability, crashing the editor. And I found it difficult to set
| extension preferences: the UI tries to be slick but in practice
| it ends up being clunky and awkward. On top of that, there was an
| annoying bug on Linux, related to Electron, that prevented the
| Save dialog box from appearing properly, which... kind of sucks.
| https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/32857
|
| Sublime is the perfect programmer's editor for dynamic languages
| like Python, and for general text editing. It's lightning fast.
| LSP is just enough to be helpful without getting in the way.
| Workspaces work the way I would expect. I prefer editing JSON
| files for preferences over navigating a complex GUI.
|
| Best money I've ever spent on a license, and I'll happily renew
| just for maintenance updates, to be honest.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The way Sublime makes a strong effort to not only smooth out
| per-platform kinks but also better integrate into each platform
| it runs on is definitely a factor for my choice to use it over
| VS Code. macOS, Windows, Linux, whatever, it works correctly
| everywhere without also taking a "least common denominator"
| approach which I really appreciate. I wish more cross platform
| apps would do this.
| kunley wrote:
| Also: great API for creating own plugins.
| anonymous344 wrote:
| vscode would be better than sublime, but I hate so much every
| notification and dialogs every time popping up when i just trying
| to focus on my work. for this reason i still use sublime 3, yes
| not the 4 because the 3 was supposed to have lifetime licesense.
| munificent wrote:
| I love Sublime Text. It's one of my favorite pieces of software.
| I have it running 100% of the time on every machine I work on.
|
| It's where I write all of my personal notes, blog posts, and it's
| where I wrote both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting
| Interpreters".
|
| At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For
| programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm
| working in. Over time, that's been Visual C++, Visual Studio,
| XCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and most recently VS Code.
|
| That doesn't mean to me that I want Sublime to turn into an IDE.
| I _like_ that it 's lighterweight than that. It's the perfect
| sweet spot for me of rich enough to handle piles of notes and
| documents and small scale code editing, but not so huge and
| cumbersome that it gets in my way.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I've been a big fan of VS Code but the latest updates have
| shown Microsoft simply can't shake their addiction to bloating
| software with unnecessary features, so likely back to Sublime
| Text I go.
| zxvkhkxvdvbdxz wrote:
| I've been running vscodium for a couple of years now, and
| they rip out the MS specific stuff so no ChatGPT and so
| forth. I haven't noticed any slowdowns.
|
| Maybe give it a try? https://vscodium.com/
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Well that'd be just about perfect! Thank you stranger!
| electrondood wrote:
| 100% ditto for me. It's the interface for my external brain.
| The file search and global search are exactly what I need, and
| the multi-cursor editing, etc. are fantastic.
|
| I always have my IDE up on one monitor and Sublime on the
| other.
| iman453 wrote:
| Do you mostly use your file explorer to see the list of
| files? Or do you use any plugins to sort and view your files?
| muppetman wrote:
| Well said. I work in networking, and I use Sublime for editing
| router configurations before updating them/applying them etc. I
| love that it's fast and performant and isn't chock-full of IDE
| features. I've been a vim user for almost all my life, but a
| workmate showed me him editing configs using Sublime and he was
| so fast and quick (especially multiple pointers) - plus we use
| git a lot (sublime merge) so I tried it and was very impressed.
| I still use vim a lot, but I simply love Sublime Text (and
| Merge) as well.
| brailsafe wrote:
| > At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For
| programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language
| I'm working in. Over time, that's been Visual C++, Visual
| Studio, XCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and most recently VS Code.
|
| This is what I do too, some IDEs are just well-suited for one
| language or stack over others. That said, I wish languages and
| IDEs and editors would share ideas more often. I actually don't
| hate XCode except for the performance, but I prefer the git
| interface of VSCode, and I prefer the ability to dangle commas
| and easily format JS/TS consistently (although the tools
| somehow used to be easier to set up) in VSCode. (absolutely
| hate prettier)
| bbor wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what is it about an IDE that you find
| useful...? I'm probably just a heathen, but I've always done
| the build/run steps on the command line, and Sublime has LSP
| for all the syntax & semantics goodies other than that -- like
| for Python, I've got Ruff (syntax), Jedi (semantics), and
| CoPilot (autocomplete) running happily, with what I feel is an
| impressive amount of configurability.
|
| Are people just working on more complex software than I am so
| you need the build steps hidden behind a UX, or am I missing
| some killer IDE feature that I don't even know about?
|
| EDIT: It probably helps that I'm a vim die-hard and couldn't
| imagine _clicking_ on something to rebuild the program! And
| Sublime 's Vim support is better than any real vim program I've
| ever used, much less the half-hearted versions available in the
| IDEs I've tried. Maybe that's the main disconnect, and y'all
| just prefer having dropdown menus?
| snozolli wrote:
| _couldn 't imagine clicking on something to rebuild the
| program!_
|
| Do you really think that's how people use IDEs?
|
| I've never used an IDE that didn't have comprehensive
| keyboard shortcuts, and I don't remember one that didn't
| allow customization of shortcuts.
| bccdee wrote:
| I assume they mean they build their projects by typing in
| the terminal commands directly, not that they have vim
| rigged up to build stuff via keyboard shortcut. I don't
| think most people use their IDEs like a text editor with a
| built-in terminal.
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| You didn't mention debugging (breakpoints, step through,
| inspecting variable values at runtime). If you are writing
| code and aren't doing these things, you probably should be!
| pbalau wrote:
| Not sure if you are facetious or not, but here's why I use an
| IDE.
|
| Many years ago I saw an advertisement about some cooking
| tool. This old East Asian grandma, ninja grandma looking, was
| doing some prep work for some dish. She stops, looks in
| disgust at the tool she was using and says "this is meant to
| bring joy, but this is not bringing any joy". She then
| switched to the "better" tool and all was good with the
| universe and much joy for everyone.
|
| This is why I use the tools I use, because they bring me joy.
| There is an argument to be made that I use some of my tools
| because they bring me less sadness, but oh well.
|
| I use vscode because it brings me joy, nevermind that I use
| less than 10% of its capabilities (eyeballing). I compile,
| run tests, use source control in Windows Terminal, because
| Windows Terminal brings me more joy than the vscode terminal.
|
| I use a cage on my photo camera because it brings me joy. I
| use a Peak Design sling because it brings me joy. I use my
| Lowepro sling bag, that I got as a bonus after buying a
| cheapish tripod, because it brings me joy. The next version
| of my bag, size wise, it's a proper backpack, now I'm
| planning to get one and see how the joy levels are.
|
| You use whatever you use because that brings you joy. You can
| try and rationalize this in any way you want, at the end of
| the day, the amount of joy is the only real reason you use
| what you use. Whatever we use doesn't make us better or
| worse, it makes us human.
| nsm wrote:
| IDEs can have just as powerful keyboard shortcuts. IdeaVIM
| within Jetbrains is probably the most feature complete vim
| emulation?
|
| What sets IDEs apart from trying to convert an editor to an
| IDE with a bunch of plugins is:
|
| - somebody somewhere is hopefully sitting down with a
| cohesive vision of tying these tools together, instead of an
| assemblage of plugins each with their own visions. I would
| very much prefer to use their vision (a la
| macos/windows/Ubuntu) vs trying to configure each plugin to
| my own (arch/Gentoo). It could be an age thing, but at this
| point I really don't have the enthusiasm to become an expert
| at 12 different config file syntaxes and read the docs for
| all the options for each plugin i would need to tweak.
|
| - an IDE is all encompassing in certain ways that is amazing.
| For example, Jetbrains is not only a fantastic code
| editor/refactoring swiss knife, it also has excellent git
| integration, and can leverage the same code navigation
| capabilities within diffs and PRs. It will autostash in
| branch specific stashes, and I can visually browse and diff
| these. I can attach to databases and get full SQL query and
| view capabilities, so it isn't just about general purpose
| programming languages.
|
| - it can be hard to explain to people who haven't used a
| language specific IDE, how much further along its refactoring
| capabilities are compared to any LSP. Note that this applies
| much more to Java/C# than to something like python, both
| because of static typing and decades of investment.
|
| - as an example of integration, say you add a new function in
| a file. Not only does Jetbrains highlight the modified file
| in the Git commit panel, but the structure panel will
| actually color that function differently and so on.
|
| - due to widespread use of Jetbrains in certain communities,
| people will build valuable plugins to relatively niche
| things. So Jetbrains has excellent CMake support and decent
| Bazel support.
|
| - I like the keyboard, but I also like and acknowledge that
| the mouse is much better at certain things. For interactive
| reading, I like I can right click on a commit and say "rebase
| from here" instead of looking up, copying and posting the red
| into my git rebase -i command. Conflict resolution, line by
| line inclusion etc. is also easier with a mouse.
|
| I am very competent at the command line, but beyond a certain
| project size, IDEs just make sense to me.
| munificent wrote:
| For me, it's:
|
| * Automated type-based code navigation: go to definition,
| find all uses, etc.
|
| * Auto-complete: Personally, I prefer simple auto-complete
| based on static analysis over AI "hope for the best"-style
| auto-complete.
|
| * Debugger with all the bells and whistles: Step in and out,
| inspect variables, modify variables, breakpoints, conditional
| breakpoints, etc.
|
| * Automated refactoring: Rename, etc.
|
| Most text editors can do most of those, but I find that good
| debugger integration is rare outside of a dedicated IDE.
| xcv123 wrote:
| Some of us have jobs and do this professionally, not as a
| hobby. That's why we use an IDE. Vim is a fun toy where you
| can hack together a poor man's IDE but I grew out of that
| phase a long time ago.
|
| In some cases we are forced to use a specific IDE. Not
| optional.
| nine_k wrote:
| Funnily, my approach is somehow opposite. I run Emacs with all
| bells and whistles to write whatever language. With LSPs, you
| are now not married to a language-specific IDE. As a developer,
| I just start Emacs in server mode and never shut it down.
|
| Then I use emacsclient to edit all kinds of files. It loads
| instantly, handles any reasonable files, can access remote
| files when needed, and has all the tools I want handy.
|
| OTOH the IDE features do not clutter anything: I have no tabs,
| no toolbars, no file trees -- not until I ask for them.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| That sounds like an academic exercise rather than anything
| practical
| nine_k wrote:
| It looks like the comment is posted to a wrong thread.
|
| (FTR, the setup above is used for practical, mostly
| commercial programming; I've left academia without even
| finishing my post-grad study, decades ago.)
| nativeit wrote:
| I don't believe they were referencing anything about
| literal higher education. In this context, saying
| something is an "academic exercise" is just a way of
| saying it's being done more for one's own edification,
| rather than any purely practical purposes.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| In what world does the topic of setting up an editor have
| any _academic_ value?
| pinoy420 wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/academic
|
| 3.b.
| alt227 wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd
|
| https://xkcd.com/378/
| curvaturearth wrote:
| Thanks for your books!
| devmor wrote:
| I feel exactly the same about it.
|
| SublimeText is where I go to take some notes I want to write
| unformatted, or with some markdown.
|
| It's where I go to paste some blob of JSON or logs from a
| random command that I want to parse out into something more
| readable than my terminal gave me.
|
| It's where I write a random snippet of code to help someone
| who's asking me a question, or a bash script for a one-off job.
|
| It's not my IDE and I don't want it to replace my IDE, just
| like I don't want my leatherman tool or swiss army knife to
| replace my power drill or pliers.
| zxvkhkxvdvbdxz wrote:
| Same! I love that it is so snappy and fast, and don't choke on
| larger files. I use it for all of my non-programming note
| taking. I also hope it don't turn into a IDE.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I use sublime in exactly the same way. I've written hundreds of
| blog post on it. I use it for light data manipulation and other
| file editing. For writing, I like how I can move text up/down
| like code when I want to move around items in my outline. I
| showed a writer friend of mine this and it blew his mind (he
| doesn't know anything about text editors).
|
| For data manipulation, I like multi-line cursors. Sure, I have
| expensive IDEs that can do this too, but sublime is great for
| non-technical people and it's very affordable and lightweight
| as you mentioned.
|
| My other friend spends a lot of time in spreadsheets, and he
| was trying to import a bunch of tabular data one time and it
| didn't quite work due to the source formatting. I showed him
| how to pull it into sublime, quickly add some commas and remove
| some junk data on every line to get it in shape for importing
| into Excel. He loved it!
| dazzaji wrote:
| I've been using Sublime Text many times a day since around 2010
| for my daily and weekly logs. My Mac is set to use it as the
| default for .py, .md, and .txt files, so I find myself in Sublime
| all the time--and I absolutely love it! Sure, I develop in VS
| Code, but I live in sublime. It's fast, clean, and dependable.
| Thanks to the team for building such a fantastic editor!
| wnevets wrote:
| I love sublime text but it has been feeling like its falling
| behind other editors. Whenever see someone showing off a tip or
| trick in VSCode I am disappointment to learn it doesn't exist in
| sublime text and there isn't a package for it.
| alfredxing wrote:
| I love Sublime and am probably the only one at work still using
| it. LSP support is nice but there doesn't seem to be great
| support for a TypeScript LSP server that works reliably with
| large projects. VSCode is slow here, too, but there are some
| specific optimizations they do I think that help a bit.
| erdaniels wrote:
| I love it. I had to drop it temporarily recently for a go project
| using bazel that simply just doesn't work well in many editors
| other than Intellij. But I got back to it recently on another go
| project and god damn it's so fast. I'm so much more productive
| using it. Global symbol search is always amazing and everything
| is always so damn snappy. If I could buy a lifetime license I
| would. I hope it doesn't go away for as long as I want to write
| code
| curvaturearth wrote:
| Sublime Text is a great piece of software
| BorisMelnik wrote:
| I am gen x and stuck in my ways. I still love Notepad++ What are
| people using now instead of this that is supposedly better?
| htamas wrote:
| I used to use Sublime Text around 8-10 years ago, but once VS
| Code became a thing, I switched to that, then to Zed last year.
| Inspired by this post, I decided to give ST another try. Here's
| how it went:
|
| 1. Installed ST via brew, all good so far. Let's open my hobby
| project written in Go.
|
| 2. Syntax highlighting works by default, great! But uh-oh,
| there's no autocomplete or any LSP. Alright, let's install one.
|
| 3. Hmm I need to install package control first - right I'm
| starting to remember now. I'm thinking it's strange how they are
| still two separate entities.
|
| 4. Ok, PC installed. Let's install a... ok Package Control
| crashed...
|
| 5. Copying the error from the debug console points me to a two-
| year-old forum post where the accepted solution is to either
| remove OpenSSL (?!) or install a beta PC version (outdated now)
| or try to uninstall Package Control and reinstall it.
|
| 6. Ok, how do I uninstall Package Control? The documentation says
| they are just package files stored on my machine. It doesn't tell
| me where those files are, and I can't find a menu point to open
| the folder containing them...
|
| 7. Open Zed.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I love it too, though I never use it for working with entire
| projects but rather for smaller text editing tasks because it's
| so snappy. It's my scratchpad for notes and stuff, I will
| investigate and edit single files, and I use it for find-and-
| replace within a directory.
|
| Though for the single file operations, it really depends on how
| I'm currently interacting with the system. If I'm browsing the
| files in a GUI then I'll use ST. If I'm in a terminal I'll use
| neovim.
|
| One enhancement I would love to see to ST is better large file
| support. If I open a 330MB CSV in Notepad++ it displays instantly
| and uses 350MB of RAM. If I open the same file in ST it takes a
| few seconds to show and uses 1.5GB of RAM. (This is with both
| editors using no plugins beyond whatever is default)
| sigmonsays wrote:
| I use sublime text to edit all my notes for both work and
| personal. It runs on every computer and laptop I have.
|
| I love sublime text. I'm on version 3, i think there is a 4 out
| but nothing is drawing me to use it.
| sr3d wrote:
| I love using Sublime for Python. It's still my go-to IDE for
| development.
| jd3 wrote:
| sublime still has the lowest latency compared to any other major
| text editor i've tried
| mgaunard wrote:
| I also prefer Sublime Text to all of the clones.
|
| I'm more of less forced to use VS Code at present and it's an
| overengineered slow mess.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I still like BBEdit, and I've been using it for over 30 years.
|
| https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
| aerb wrote:
| You should fix your atom feed
| gamedever wrote:
| I'm going to comment on sublime merge since I see others have.
|
| (I'm a paid user and paid again for the latest year or whatever
| the term of support is).
|
| To be honest, I'm not sure what this product does or does better
| than all the other similar apps. VSCode has git tools. There's
| gitlens add on. There's also github's git UI app and some other
| ones. https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis
|
| In all of them I see diffs. I can stash/stage/commit. I'm not
| sure what "amazing" features one has over the other.
|
| What I can't do
|
| * I can't copy text from anywhere in the UI. I might be looking
| at a diff, a path appears, I want to open that path in my editor,
| so, I want to be able to copy the path from Sublime Merge and
| paste the path into my editor or shell. Sorry, S.O.L.
|
| * It puts headings on diff sections. I want to copy text that
| from Sublime Merge and search for the identifier in my editor.
| Sorry, S.O.L.
|
| * I want to search for things across changes - sorry, S.O.L. -
| "someIdenifier" doesn't exist in the current code. When was it
| deleted? Let me search.
|
| Also a minor nit. I hate that it doesn't respect platform
| conventions. The default folder to open should not be root, it
| should be my user folder (or something) but definitely not root.
| No other app on my Mac does this. If you want yours to be root
| find, add a pref, but by default it should do what other apps do.
|
| ---
|
| As for Sublime Text - Of course you can use whatever you want. I
| used SlickEdit since ~1994 through ~2015 (forgot when I switched
| to VSCode). The thing is, you should at least know what you're
| missing.
|
| In VSCode I use it's SSH remote feature to connect to my linux
| machine. This is not simple SSH file sharing (Slickedit had that
| and FTP even). VSCode starts a custom server on the remote
| machine and uses it to coordinate. Examples:
|
| * open remote /usr/my/project1
|
| VSCode loads that project remotely. It edits the files locally
| (meaning when you open a file, it copies it from my linux box
| back to the mac in the local editor. IIUC, it proxies the
| language server stuff so it launches language server support on
| linux remotely. This means all the TS/C++/Rust etc intellisense
| stuff is being indexed on Linux in that project's environment.
|
| VSCode opens a terminal to /usr/my/project1 in VSCode. I can
| start running shell commands. I used to use separate terminals,
| external to VSCode, and I still do. But the nice thing about the
| VS code ones is they're per project. If I switch over the a
| different project (multiple projects at once), each one has it's
| own terminal, relevant to that project
|
| VSCode monitors and forwards servers from that terminal. If I
| type `python3 -m http.server 9000` in the VSCode terminal, it
| will launch python3 and then VSCode will automatically forward
| that port to my mac. I can open http://locahost:9000 on my mac
| and access the server running on linux (yes I can do that
| manually. It's nice that it's zero effort)
|
| VSCode debugs remotely. If I launch the debugger it will debugger
| (gdb/llvm) on linux but the UI will be local (mac). I can set
| breakpoints in VSCode in mac, it will set them remotely on linux.
| I can view data etc.
|
| VScode opens local UIs remotely. If, in the terminal for
| /usr/me/project1 I `cd ../project2 && code .` or `code
| ../project2` (so these commands are running on linux), it spawns
| a new window on Mac connected via SSH automatically to
| /usr/me/project2
|
| VSCode's terminal is using an editor window and keeping it
| synchronized with the remote shell. This means it's more
| responsive than SSH from a normal terminal. In a normal terminal
| IIUC. I type 'x' on my keyboard. It's sent to the remote server
| over SSH. The shell over there emits an 'x' which is sent back to
| my local machine. In VSCode. I type 'x', the 'x' is put in the
| editor control that's shadowing the terminal. It's assumed the
| remote machine will return 'x' but it doesn't wait for it.
| Rather, you're typing locally, and it's catching up. So, even and
| a slow connection you can type faster in VSCode's terminal than
| you could in a standard SSH terminal. I'm sure there are places
| where this is not perfect but the general experience is it's way
| more responsive .
|
| This is a short list of some of the things that VSCode is doing
| that AFAIK, most other editors are not (yet?). There's lot of
| other features though.
|
| I have lots of issues with VSCode. I wish it had keyboard macros.
| I wish it it's undo system didn't suck. I wish it did auto
| backups like Slickedit did. I wish it had search and replace
| across a folder tree with undo like Slickedit did. I wish it had
| column select (different than multi-cursor as a column can go
| into virtual space and multi-cursor can't)
|
| All that said, the pluses outweigh the minuses and I can't go
| back.
| gamedever wrote:
| apparently I can't edit that previous comment so to add
|
| sublime merge
|
| * I want to see blame and modified dates for folders and files.
| This lets me look at folders and find the one that has a recent
| change and then glance at the files and see which ones changed
| recently. Maybe that feature is in there but "View Tree" is not
| it. That shows a plain tree. No modified dates, no people
|
| VSCode
|
| VSCode loads that project remotely. It edits the files locally
| (meaning when you open a file, it copies it from my linux box
| back to the mac in the local editor. IIUC, it proxies the
| language server stuff so it launches language server support on
| linux remotely. This means all the TS/C++/Rust etc intellisense
| stuff is being indexed on Linux in that project's environment
| and then that info is proxied back to the Mac and shows up in
| VSCode on the mac as info/completions/docs
| dpjohnst wrote:
| G'day, I head up the Sublime Merge team.
|
| Thank you for taking the time to share all this feedback - I
| genuinely appreciate it and will be looking into this
| further.
|
| A couple of things to note:
|
| > It puts headings on diff sections. I want to copy text that
| from Sublime Merge and search for the identifier in my
| editor. Sorry, S.O.L.
|
| I've just added support for this internally, thank you for
| the feedback!
|
| > I want to search for things across changes - sorry, S.O.L.
| - "someIdenifier" doesn't exist in the current code. When was
| it deleted? Let me search.
|
| You can use the search tool (Ctrl + F) and add the query
| `contents: someIdentifier`. It will return every commit which
| contains that term within the changes.
|
| Thanks again for the feedback!
| gamedever wrote:
| thanks! to be clear tho. searching the commit comment is
| one thing. I want to search the file contents across
| history. which files used to contain the word "foo"
|
| also, the tree based folder and file blame. GitHub, the
| website, shows this info by default. It would be nice if
| sublime merge had a similar view. The code view on github,
| the default view for any project, shows a line for each
| file and folder, followed by the commit msg summary in the
| middle, and a commit date on the right
| McUsr wrote:
| I'm glad you're fond of Sublime Text.
|
| Personally I'm totally sold on 'Vim' I have lsp through
| 'YouCompleteMe', which works great for C-languages, and I have
| Automatic update of tags with 'GutenTagsPlus', And I also use
| 'c-scope', 'Git' and 'Id-utils', and I have 'ulti-snips' which I
| probably use too little. So yeah, this and the GCC toolchain, is
| pretty much the ultimate for me, and I have tried a lot of
| Editors through the years.
| kapitanluffy wrote:
| If you (or anyone here) feel Sublime Text is dead, the community
| is super active at discord. You can actively engage with ST devs
| and package developers there.
|
| Just head over to the unofficial discord server:
| https://discord.sublimetext.io/
| winrid wrote:
| I still use the Sublime shortcuts in my IDE to this day. Sublime
| had a big impact on me when I got my first job as it introduced
| me to multiple cursors. It's still the best tool for many tasks.
| DigitalSea wrote:
| I love Sublime Text editor. Have been using it for 15 years now
| and despite the fact most of my development is done inside of
| VSCode or other editors, I still use ST for large files and
| notes. I can confidently open up a 1gb SQL dump in ST and it
| won't break a sweat, try that in VSCode and you can see it freeze
| up for a bit and that's on a decent machine too.
| hatmanstack wrote:
| How dare you.
| ponsfrilus wrote:
| Nobody mentionned *Pulsar* (https://pulsar-edit.dev/) which is
| the community maintained _Atom_ since its sunsetting (Dec 2022).
| Atom was created by Nathan Sobo, who is now working on _Zed_
| (https://zed.dev/).
| jchook wrote:
| ELI5 Why use Sublime over NeoVim?
| andreyazimov wrote:
| I'm also still using Sublime with ChatGPT. I've tried Cursor for
| a week and went back to Sublime. I wonder if Sublime will ever
| have AI integration like Cursor
| nzd wrote:
| I'm sort of married to Sublime Text. I install all my plugins via
| "git clone" and never Package Control. Then I study their
| details, customize them in the source, modify keybindings etc. If
| you are this attached to a tool, it becomes an extension to your
| body.
|
| P.S. No need to say that I update my plugins through code review!
| 0n0n0m0uz wrote:
| I use it too. What do most people consider as a better
| alternative?
| EmileSonneveld wrote:
| Even non coders enjoy it. I got 2 people hooked up that now use
| it as a notes app.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-30 23:02 UTC)