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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm the exception, but I can't see why people, why programmers, bother investing their editing-skills in a closed-source editor and toolkit.

Sublime is closed source. When it croaks up and dies, all the skills you've built up will be wasted, and you'll have to rebuild them elsewhere.

Why not invest in something open instead? There's more options than ever before, and they're all good.

For me, VS Code seems to provide pretty decent Python IDE capabilities almost out of the box.

For those a little more deeply invested, Emacs with elpy and realgud gives me all I need: code-completion, docs, debugging, breakpoints, etc. And it's something I as a programmer can adapt to my needs and build on.

Sublime? None of that. So what's the appeal?

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Sublime has been around for a while. Why should it go away anytime soon? And even if it did, it's pretty stable and I bet will continue to work for years, even if the developers did stop working on it.

I guess people prefer Sublime over Atom / VS Code because of its performance. To them (including me) that matters more than what might happen in 20yrs.

Slightly related : Does anyone use Textmate since it's been open-sourced ?

I do myself. It is good to see that it is still being developed, but I wish the dev would do a paid update with new features so I would worry less about it's future.

> Sublime is closed source. When it croaks up and dies, all the skills you've built up will be wasted, and you'll have to rebuild them elsewhere.

Sublime is not Vim or Emacs, you just move on to the next CUA text editor or IDE. It's not like you need more than 20 or so extra commands to be effective in a CUA IDE:

* go to class/function/file/symbol

* build/run/debug/run tests

* debug commands (step over, step into)

And you pick those up in 15 minutes. Good editors and IDE have remapable keys or can even emulate ones from other editors and IDE.

And this is on top of the default: save is Ctrl-S, copy is Ctrl-C, cut is Ctrl-X, paste is Ctrl-V, close tab is Ctrl-W, etc., etc.

> It's not like you need more than 20 or so extra commands to be effective in a CUA IDE

... what?

That's so far removed from the truth that I really question whether or not you even use Sublime well. I mean, notepad fits those requirements

Have you read my entire comment?

Yes, and the reply is the same. I just quoted that one whopper for effect. Editors (serious ones) aren't just equivalent bags of commands, they're work paradigms people literally spend years learning and customizing.

Are we talking about CUA editors here, or are we just talking past each other? :)

I program pretty much the same regardless of editor. The main difference seems to just be how they navigate the ui and the features. I feel like the guy without a hat in this (https://xkcd.com/915/) XKCD

It boggles my mind that people like the one in the hat exist. I am aware of their existence, but find them so insufferable to interact and have a conversation with that it's easier to pretend they don't.

One wonders what leads someone to become such a snob and how to prevent it.

And before someone accuses me of being a human-snob, well, we don't really have a choice, do we?

>Sublime? None of that. So what's the appeal?

Sublime is not really an IDE imho. It's a very good text editor though, which has a lot of feature overlap with IDEs, but I wouldn't prefer to develop within Sublime.

There are diminishing returns for learning really obscure text manipulation features. It's always cool to see someone make it look easy with emacs on an i3-gaps desktop with anime wallpaper, but most of us can get by with learning some basic regex/replace, navigation commands, and editing commands. I'd rather be learning a different language than a text editor.

So that's the case for JetBrains' products then?

VSCode is Microsoft's product, and they are doing solid job with it now, but who knows what they will do with it in 5 years' time. I won't be surprised if they try to integrated it with Azure more closely and do some things which are not relevant to me. Plus it's Electron app which I won't use.

And it's not like open source solution can't fail and be abandoned.

Only two editors that I think will last forever (at least it seems so now) are emacs and vim. Everything else has similar chances of surviving test of time.

What's wrong with an Electron app? I am curious.

They are slow, unoptimised , massive memory and cpu hogs. Here is the best example https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23/cursor_devours_cpu_...

You can check out some of my previous comments on my profile. I think we have discussed & covered it extensively here on HN. :)

My opinion is that an advanced text editor or IDE should be written in a low level language to be light weight and fast. Everytime I try atom it performs so bad and slow that I need to switch back to sublime. I even have a probably unfair paranoia bias against editors written in Java because it might be slower than one written in C. Electron has a lot of great uses, but an IDE is antithetical to it's performance capabilities. BTW, I'm in the market for IDE recommendations.

Atom is known to be slow.

That doesn't make all electron-based applications slow.

Actually do you have any prime examples of fast electron apps? I'm interested in finding a DOM-free electron alternative, but if I had a good case study for a legitimately fast electron app, that would be valuable insight for me.

I think VSCode is more than responsive enough. I've had zero performance issues with it on any hardware I own.

The Spotify desktop app also feels millisecond-fast to me, but that might be Chromium Embedded Framework and not "full" Electron? I'm not sure.

Atom is slower than VS Code, sure. However, if you end up in a file of any significant size in VS Code, you're pretty much toast.

https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/editor-p...

Good link. Really appreciated.

I would be interested in seeing how that 3GB looked like though.

For instance Emacs has no issues with huge files (logs with many lines), but can completely choke when the lines are really long (like a minified JS-file without lineshifts).

I guess similar constraints may exist in other editors too.

Without knowing how those 3GBs looks, it's hard to make a decent judgement of what the "load" test actually tests.

From the link:

> huge 3 GB file (3M 1K lines)

So, somewhat long lines, but not unreasonably huge.

For me, working on a nasty legacy codebase with 10-15k LOC classes - VS Code is slow enough with syntax highlighting that I pretty much need to use something else.

Because it works and it works great. It's fast and it never crashed on me. Give me an equivalent opensource editor that works and looks like Sublime and I'll use it. No, Atom and VS Code don't cut it. They're slow, they choke on big files and eat up hundreds of megabytes of RAM. I don't need or use plugins, so I don't care if it's extensible in <insert trendy language here>.

Vim is also nice but I only use it for remote console work. It doesn't have the nice features that Subline has (PCRE, select and Ctrl+D editing) or they're clunky.

Geany hits most of these except fancy select, though there might be a plugin for that.

Well that's what was using on Linux before I installed Atom, although it's hardly a replacement for Sublime (which gets used on the Mac at the office for real work). Really, I've tried just about everything.

Why hardly? I use geany everyday for "real" work.

There are plugins to do that stuff in Vim, but you're right, they are still clunky.

Fast, beautiful, open source: pick two. (considering the ones you cited)

A different, yet very simple additional benefit of open source software dawned on me when I tried if I could use a chromebook for development tasks:

Astoundingly few text editors run on ARM CPUs.

Open source means you can compile them yourself if necessary (if they're written in a proper platform-independent fashion). That I couldn't use it on every device I own was the reason I left Sublime for good, although I quite liked it so far.

Exactly my thoughts. I'm using VS Code for Python and it's a complete pleasure. Integrated Git, IPython, scripting, everything is easily available. I do own Sublime and I haven't used it for a while.

The appeal of Sublime is that you have more than 3 hours of battery life. All Electron applications are battery killers.

I don't get these comments. I use Atom on my Chromebook (via Ubuntu/Crouton) and the other day I did a 9-hour stint switching between atom (~80% of the time) and Firefox, from full charge. At the end of the 9 hours I still had 8% left in the battery. Perhaps you are doing something very different with electron apps than me, but for bog standard coding and doc writing, my battery lasts longer than I do!

Which Chromebook do you have!?

9 hours of browser usage + wifi isn't anything to sneeze at for most laptops, not even considering Atom usage!

I don't think I was able to get realgud working when I tried.

However, I agree! I think open source has helped the industry to move forward quicker, since a lot of people get to see what the code for things that work look like.

Adobe Brackets is open sourced, and I don't see a ton of people heralding its usefulness. The same could be said of Eclipse. Just because it's open sourced doesn't make it useful or well-built.

Do you use OSX or Chrome?

Linux and Firefox. How come you ask?

Trying to catch you in a contradiction. Nice consistency!

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