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Comment by bigtunacan | Hacker News Reader

A huge portion of value with any of these text editors come from plugins and ubiquity. Over the years I have seen text editors come and go as the new "one true editor", but only Vim and Emacs have had true staying power.

Back when it was hot (some of you are probably too young to remember this) I used jEdit. It is still around and gets some maintenance updates from time to time (http://www.jedit.org/), but the plugin ecosystem has languished so you better be ready to roll your own.

With Vim and Emacs (Vim for me) I can trust it to go anywhere I want to be. If I'm ssh-ing into a Redhat 5 production server needing to do an emergency fix at 3 in the am Vim is there for me.

And when I need syntax support or any plugin under the sun, that is available as well. Vim is also blazingly fast compared to Atom (the latest fad) which is sluggish by comparison. Sublime seems to be falling into that sunsetting stage the same as jEdit

Just my 2 cents.

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I'm not sure I understand what your comment has to do with Sublime...but in any case, Sublime does have a very active plugin ecosystem: https://packagecontrol.io/

I thought my points were fairly clear.

1) Vim and Emacs are already on your production servers so a large number of people have to use them anyway so that's extra mental overhead.

2) Sublime development is languishing this will eventually lead to a stalled plugin pipeline and the need to learn a new tool or write your own plugins.

3) Stick with a tool that you can have a level of faith will still be well supported for the next 20 years.

Not all of us are stuck in the cult of the editing paradigm of the 70s despite the fervent mistaken belief that it is objectively superior.

How is sublime fundamentally different? Sure, it might be shinier and easier to get into, but is it a different "paradigm"? No way.

If anything, vim is the most unique editor with the most unique "paradigm" I've ever really had much experience with. Atom, Sublime and Emacs all seem pretty much the same in terms of how you interact with them.

Pretty sure saint ignucius will damn you to proprietary software hell for dissing on the One True Editor (tm).

If vim is different from sublime, then sublime must, by definition, be different from vim.

Parent is saying that vim is a 70's paradigm and people not stuck in the past enjoy the modern paradigm that sublime follows.

Emacs is also from the 70s, so that's why what he said doesn't really make sense.

> 1) Vim and Emacs are already on your production servers so a large number of people have to use them anyway so that's extra mental overhead.

Production servers usually have no vim plugins. Basic vim editing is good enough to get by if you're just looking at logs.

In my workplace and I guess it's pretty standard these days (in Linux shops at least) where the code repository resides on a server in a data center and not locally on your laptop/desktop.

Here are the issues with this development work flow:

- There are a lot of hurdles to go through to install all the vim plugins (no root access, security of plugins etc.)

- Which plugin manager to use (Vundle, pathogen or some variant??). Why isn't there a standard for this after all these years?

- Unreadable .vimrc file with all sorts of key bindings (Yes I know it's "write once use everywhere", it still is unreadable a few months down the line)

- In my experience, using vim on a mounted drive with the plugins I need (git,ctrl-p,ctags,cscope,nerd tree and a few others) is slower as compared to Sublime Text.

> 2) Sublime development is languishing this will eventually lead to a stalled plugin pipeline and the need to learn a new tool or write your own plugins.

https://packagecontrol.io/stats

I don't think these are low numbers by any means.

I'm not a vim basher, I just don't prefer working with it.

From OP…

> Sublime seems to be falling into that sunsetting stage the same as jEdit

The Java runtime is not bundled with OSX anymore, and with its poor security record it's not something I'm eager to install. Java GUI apps also tend to use too much resources, feel laggy and look bad & non-native, jEdit is not an exception.

My dream editor is Sublime3 with an extensible UI layer for plugins in HTML/JS.

> The Java runtime is not bundled with OSX anymore, and with its poor security record it's not something I'm eager to install. Java GUI apps also tend to use too much resources, feel laggy and look bad & non-native, jEdit is not an exception.

This is a funny myth.

Now to some facts:

1. It’s the Applet part that has a bad security record. Not standalone Applications.

2. Java GUI apps use less resources, are less laggy, and more native than any node.JS app out there. jEdit is not an exception.

It’s crazy to see people hype Atom for being node-webkit, extensible, etc, but complain about Java apps for "bundles a whole runtime" (while node-webkit bundles a whole browser), for "so slow and laggy" (but faster than node-webkit), for "looks not native" (but more than node-webkit)

Consider JetBrains' products, most of which are JVM based.

I can't remember any instances where IntelliJ was "laggy" except during processes that inherently take time for larger code bases (indexing, etc.).

I found that intellij was indexing all the time, slowly. In comparison eclipse never seems to index anything (and it has great type etc. search capabilities). Intellij really seems like a slow java-app compared with eclipse (which of course is java but using a better toolkit).

Yes off topic; sublime rocks! :)

Intellij is fantastic !

I did not mention Atom. Yes, it's also a resource hog, though the good parts offset the pain.

I was certainly not advocating anyone should adopt jEdit these days. I was merely comparing it's rise and decline to be similar to what I believe is currently happening with Sublime. I suspect in time we will see the same thing happen with Atom.

Incidentally, I have used Atom and while I found it to be too slow and lacking features, I'm quite pleased it was made since it spawned the Electron project which is pretty awesome.

Electron is cool and all, but every application with it bundles its own entire web browser stack and uses ~200MB+ of RAM (and that's the low end—VS Code with 2 small files open).

It's my opinion that Electron is a terrible idea.

Thanks for the tip. Very interesting. For other curious people:

https://github.com/atom/electron

"Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies http://electron.atom.io"

Yes Vim is great. This post has nothing to do with Vim, why did you make a comment about how much you love Vim? Is your point that you think Sublime has no staying power so everyone should just use Vim or Emacs?

There's reasons other than staying power to use an application. If I only used applications that I expect to be around forever I'd be paralyzed and unable to make a decision a lot of the time.

I agree that staying power is not the only reason to stick with an application, however I don't believe Sublime offers any compellingly advantages over Vim or Emacs and that there are better ways to spend one's time than learning the current text editor of the year.

So because you prefer Vim/Emacs you came into a thread about the new version of another editor and posted a comment about how much you prefer something else? Do you get why that's immature and pointless?

Notepad++ is my light-weight text editor, for the stuff I don't already have in my Visual Studio solutions. It's free, it's good, it's fast, and you can run it portable if you want to. Windows only, but that's not a problem for me.

Good old jEdit - I was also a heavy user, usually running CVS HEAD and I even got a few bugfixes of mine commited.

Recently, I found its old main author (Slava Pestov) again on the swift-evolution mailing list - this time with an @apple.com address.

Vim and Emacs are great for a certain percentage of people, but for the rest of us mere mortals, Sublime is a great choice.

It's very fast, handles huge files/projects and has plugins and extensions for a wide range of tasks.

The only downside is that the developer retains complete control and updates are few and far between. It would be great if the project could become more open and we could see more focused development on it.

Exactly. When it comes to text editors there's Emacs and there's Vim. The rest are passing fads that seem to appeal mostly to trendy kids.

Nope. I absolutely love ST3, writing with it is enjoyment. Vim of course is a requisite skill.

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