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Comment by s4vi0r | Hacker News Reader

...why not sublime?

I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all. With all due respect to the people working on them (because it really isn't their fault for the most part), they're bloated slow pieces of shit. I don't like electron in general, but its an especially bad choice for a text editor intended for developers.

If you don't like vim or emacs, sublime does what the electron editors do but better. Its probably the most performant of all the text editors I've used; vim and emacs both don't like gigantic logfiles, but sublime handles them without issue. The only bad things I can say about it are lacking vim emulation and worse dev experience than Emacs. But then again, I've never used an editor anywhere near as nice as Emacs in terms of language integration for a lot of the languages I work with.

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As someone who uses both Sublime and VS Code, I find that Sublime is my preferred editor for anything other than working on large projects. But VSC shines when it comes to code insight or specifically: IntelliSense/Code Suggest (or whatever they call it nowadays). Getting intelligent suggestions to methods, parameter help, type hints for popular libs, etc. as well as an integrated Javascript debugger is just a huge time saver. VSC is just 'fast enough' for it to be bearable to me. It's clear that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into making it a professional IDE - it's not just a sloppy hobby project.

> I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all.

IMHO it's the future of IDE's. After years of using vi and Intellij IDEA, I've switched to VS code (which is electron based) and never looked back. I find it as snappy as vi or sublime. I feel more productive because of all the plugins. For e.g. the fantastic https://github.com/eamodio/vscode-gitlens

Extending it is really easy using the language server protocol http://langserver.org/ . Our team spent very little effort to build a plugin for our open source project https://github.com/getgauge/gauge-vscode

Electron editors are successful because it's hackable and cross-platform allowing the community to extend and add an impressive list of plugins.

> I don't understand why these electron editors are popular at all.

I would like to understand this better too. I'm guessing vim and emacs take too much time to learn, since they drag the whole unix ecosystem with them. Sublime might be a decent easier to learn editor, but it's a non-free product that could disappear one day, you have to go through the hassle of buying it and it's expensive one too. So sublime is not even a choice for most people. This leaves us with electron based editors as an acceptable choice. But obviously bloat, performance still matter and people will choose something better if available.

> it's expensive one too

It's $80. If you work in text all day, then that's practically nothing.

It's kind of disheartening to see how little value people place on excellent software.

That's easy for you to say, as a (presumably) rich American developer. It's a different story in, say, India or Africa, or students or poor folks. $80 can be several days or weeks of sustenance.

True. Most of the world cannot afford to pay $80 for a text editor.

We're lucky that there are lots of excellent text editors available for free. People that can't afford $80 for a text editor aren't really disadvantaged.

Tools generally cost money. Most people can't afford welding equipment but if you want to be a welder, you need it.

Agree. Baffling how many developers spend 1/4 of their life programming yet are too cheap to spend money on tools...

All the compilers I bought during the 90's, using student discounts, would allow me to buy several copies of Sublime Text in today's money.

It is that mentality that killed the market of nice tools for developers.

Now everyone that wants to live from software tools has to target the enterprise market, where the tool won't cost $80 but a few hundred if not thousands.

That mentality is created by capitalism. Corporations need to push people into software engineering and attract software engineers, which in turn creates an incentive for free and open tooling for developers.

> I'm guessing vim and emacs take too much time to learn

I used vim for about 7 years and had a highly customised config with plugins tailored to my workflow. Got to my new job and spent a day trying to get YouCompleteMe installed properly, when I eventually failed I downloaded VSCode and never looked back. Everything's just so much easier to deal with than when I was using vim and I don't notice any performance difference.

The free trial for Sublime Text lasts as long as one wants -- you only have to put up with an occasional reminder.

Sublime Text 3 is a commercial text editor. Atom is free; but I don't want to pay for Sublime Text 3, I had already paid for 2, and I don't like not using the latest...

Two things I feel compelled to mention: You can evaluate it for free, forever, just dismiss the nag screen. The other is, it's easily worth the $80 in my opinion.

Again baffling. yeah I bought it but I feel entitled to version 3 because I had version 2. Development costs money...why not pay for it to support people creating great tools.

have you tried visual code? also electron based, but works for me, i do golang development mostly.

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