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Comment by swah | Hacker News Reader

Sublime fans and VSC fans are almost disjoint sets...

Using both is very good. Sublime has some text transformation features that VSC doesn't have (I use a ton of regex replace and multi-cursor typing -- VSC has these but there are some menu items in ST that are not in VSC), VSC has a debugger, source control out of the box, and can use symbol servers.

VSC is very much prepared for cross-platform .NET Core development. ST3 is more generally prepared for a lot of other languages and project types. If you're on Windows using a .NET language, Visual Studio should supersede VSC in almost every way though, and ST works better as your lightweight text editor.

And now, a moment of silence for those poor Notepad++ fans. :)

Sublime does keyboard macros that make my life easier which VSC and its add-on don't have. Now if Sublime had a option to delete trailing whitespace every time I hit return, I could return to my PFE days of macro productivity.

When I start doing coding and text manipulation again, it looks like it will be Sublime I purchase.

I use the editorconfig plugin at work. You have an .editorconfig file at the base of your projects and everyones text editor gets the same settings on a per-project basis.

One of the default settings is to trim excess whitespaces.

Sublime has the settings: `trim_trailing_white_space_on_save` and `ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save`, I found these very satisfactory.

But there's almost certainly a ST extension for your particular taste.

I actually want it to trigger on each line when hitting return. It really helps with macros you can write when text munging. I didn't spend as much time as I would have liked looking at each editor but a command-key that deletes all ending whitspace on a line would also be acceptable.

For vim you can bind: `:%s/\s/+$//e`

I usually have ST and vim open at the same time myself.

VS Code is one of the most organised/well-run open source projects that I know. Just take a look at their updates ie. (https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_11). I'm just as excited to read the updates as I am to try each new release.

It's a bit unfair to compare a well-backed enterprise team to a small one (with 2-3 devs?), but it sure does make for an awesome user experience for developers.

You'd be surprised. I'm tempted to go to the VSC side from time to time because of the more polish -- it's the speed that brings me back.

You'd t think with their big team and resources, they would have been able to use a more performant cross platform toolkit, say Qt or maybe some of their .Net stuff.

Why did they choose to base their editor on Electron, of all things, especially considering the existing results of Atom (horrible) is beyond me.

They went that way because of TypeScript I suppose. And in the end VSC is great marketing for successful open source JS/TS project.

It is an example that all the gazillion dollars and huge number of s/w engineers will not automatically do the right thing just because it is right. Most likely they will hop on the bandwagon, add cool words to their quickly concocted webapp masquerading as powerful editor.

In addition 1M+ plugins, open-source, cross-platform etc will keep cool kids not just happy but they will also aggressively challenge whoever is using old but efficient software products.

I think the development of VS Code was kind of an accident. They built Monaco (the editor component) for Visual Studio Online, then made it a standalone text editor as a side project and it ended taking off big time.

I'd rather have VSC team have members working on making underlying electron API'S faster. Get it to speed of sublime.

If you compare it to the likes of Brackets and Atom, it was significantly faster than the others at release... I'm not sure what can be done to make significant performance gains... I mean being able to even handle large files (disabling any highlighting/autocomplete, and only displaying portion of the file may be necessary)... as it is, for most of what I've used it for vsc is great.

Electron is essentially Node grafted to Chromium... There are a few things that could be done, but would depend on a lot of upstream cooperation to do so.

Sublime uses skia as its rendering library, which is what blink (chromium frontend) uses for rendering. May be electron can provide a nicer api to interface directly with skia.

By giving performant lower level access to render, may be VSC can move some of the perf sensitive code directly to compiled optimized binaries.

Sort of like what node native libraries do.

Sublime does some pretty great dark magic. I was impressed to see vscode approach similar speeds to sublime in search. I believe there is plenty that can be done to make rendering fast, reduce memory consumption and make it a bit light weight. But it would require access to metal APIs

VSCode's plugin model is pretty impressive and tends to isolate the side effects of poorly performing plugins (including language/autocomplete, etc)... so that the main editor tends to be responsive. There should be room to tweak, but I'm pretty happy overall. Way better experience than any full IDE I've tried... I only hope they keep it that way as features come in.

Also, as an Electron app, there is a node element, so compiled components are already an option.

I'm between VS17 with Resharper and Ncrunch, VSC, and Sublime Text myself. (VS17 for all my .net stuff, which picked up about 16 months ago). Even with a 4.2ghz 6 core CPU/32/NVME, the formers are slow compared to ST. Sublime is just so instantaneous it never gets old.

Yet VSC is like a polished machine with so much weight behind, it's almost a wonder ST3 can stand up to it. That's why I'd like the 3.0 release to be official.

(Fwiw I used Textpad for over 15 years before finding ST. Compared to Eclipse etc that was another speed demon).

I tried to switch to VSC the other day but its insane. I have a Surface Pro 3 and it was so slow to edit an 80 line Golang file (With the go plugin). I just cant use a text editor like that to get anything done. Like scrolling lagged, keystrokes lagged. Meanwhile with Sublime and GoSublime on the same laptop there is zero lag.

I agree - you can pry sublime text from my cold, dead hands. VSC/Atom/whatever is way too slow for every day use

I've used sublime 2 for some time, but changed to VSCode. Reason: VSCode is good enough for my stuff.

I've used Sublime for 7 years and moved to vscode 1 year ago. I'd recommend it to everyone.

Would be curious to know what "fans" are you talking about.

Disjoint sets of...everyone that use text editors with IDE-like features?

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