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Comment by knodi123 | Hacker News Reader

what does VSCode do that sublime3 doesn't? I ask as a sublime user who took vscode for a brief spin and then put it down when I wasn't quickly wowed.

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VSCode has out of the box debugger, git integration, higher quality of extensions, etc... Overall it feels more polished and professional.

But the most important thing is alive ecosystem - a lot of Sublime plugins are either dead or in maintenance mode, developers lost interest and moved to open source alternatives like Atom and VSCode.

P.S. Even though I moved to VSCode, I still love and respect Sublime.

Frequent high-quality updates, lots of communication, great plugin ecosystem, open source.

This. The frequent updates for vscode. I used both Sublime and vscode for a while. I switched to vscode overnight when it got hot exit support.

Glad to see I am not the only person who finally went full in with VSCode once it got hot exit :)

> Frequent high-quality updates, lots of communication

Genuine question: does this really make a difference in your day to day usage? I feel like once I've learnt the ~20% of features that are useful to me on a regular basis everything on top is marginal gains. Im really not that bothered by loads of new features.

Yup I can relate. I would change the "high-quality updates" to "lots of integration taken care by the community".

I really really do not want to spend time to figure out on my own how to integrate this or do that (unless I need to) and the myriad of plugins/packages available to Emacs and Atom is something that is insanely helpful if you need to do something quickly.

> Frequent high-quality updates

I don't really need any updates from sublime. It does everything I need it to, and I've never felt a lack of a feature. I'm looking at the new and highly touted "hot exit" feature, and I'm thinking "but sublime prompts you to save when closing the app, and honestly I haven't lost work due to forgetting to save in several years."

> lots of communication

Again, I'm not sure why I'd want communication from the creators of sublime.

> great plugin ecosystem

Any plugin I've wanted (linters, syntax files, git integration...) has been installable from a dropdown menu in sublime. Maybe if my plugin needs were more esoteric, I'd appreciate vscode more?

> open source

I dig that, philosophically. Although if that was a priority for me, I'd go with Atom, instead of something published by microsoft.

Again, I'm open to the idea that vscode could be better than sublime - but maybe it's only better to people who need more obscure plugins, or who really care about open source?

Language server integration is a big one,

but even if it didn't do anything more than Sublime, it's free.

This does not really affect one's day-to-day use of VSCode, but their comprehensive release notes (down to crediting contributors for key issues) gives me great confidence in the team.

I frequently point to VSCode as an example of a well-run open source project.

Debugging, Git integration, tasks

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