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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

It's a common fallacy to associate quality with price. Generally yes, but not always. Sublime Text certainly isn't 70 dollars better than Atom or VS Code.

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For me, it is. Some of the main points that makes it worth money to me are the plugin ecosystem is huge, the editor is fast, its layout management (panes in columns/rows) is incredible, and it was the first editor I had that gave me multi-cursors. I like where VS Code is going and I try to use it when I can, but most of the keybindings and shortcuts I have memorized are for Sublime and IntelliJ based IDEs.

The only thing you listed that sublime uniquely offers is that it was your first and you prefer their key bindings.

Eh but it existed for long before Atom and VS code. (disclaimer I paid the $70 and felt it was well worth the money at the time, these days yeah maybe I wouldn't but I still do find myself using it a lot)

Edit: To expand, sublime is still by far my favorite TEXT editor. I just don't find doing everyday text editing tasks in VSCode to be pleasant at all, its an amazing IDE though!. Atom is much better for the task but the responsiveness and large file handling capabilities of sublime makes it the clear winner. If you already paid the $70 for a licence back when atom didn't exist anyways...

I wasn't only associating quality with price, but also pointing out that many of the 2016's Emacs and vi users would not use them if they were only available as commercial software.

Regardless of their quality, because the actual IT generation wants to earn money with tools they got for free (beer), while other professions people do pay for their tools.

> Regardless of their quality, because the actual IT generation wants to earn money with tools they got for free (beer), while other professions people do pay for their tools.

You seem to feel strongly enough about this to repeat it nearly word-for-word in multiple comments. Trust me, every profession wants to pay less for its tools. And no one, in IT or out, is choosing their tools "regardless of quality".

I feel strongly about it because this mentality reduced the market of selling software tools to a niche, to the point that to earn money selling tools, we have to sell them to enterprise customers, the only ones willing to pay for software.

This is why most companies selling such software tools have switched their basic versions from "trial during X days/trial license" to free (beer), while trying to seduce developers to eventually pay for the full version.

I think it depends on how much you treasure battery life. Electron based apps suffer from poor battery life due to the Chromium unpinning. JS is resource intensive compared to C++. You can probably get an extra 20-35% battery life out of Sublime vs Atom. If you don't have the ability to plugin while out, it might be worth the piece of mind.

It was for many years (because the others didn't exist)

Maybe not $70.. but I always find myself going back to it.

That depends on how valuable your time is.

Are you working on a project that makes money? Will a productivity tool increase your productivity by half a percent? Then that tool is worth hundreds of dollars. If not thousands.

I see you haven't abused multicursors.

VS Code has support of multiple cursors. See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/editingevolved#_mu...

I remember, it was less powerful when I tested it few month ago. Went back to sublime (even though I use idea at work).

VSCode and Atom both have multicursors.

Much, much less powerful fotms of them.

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