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Comment by robinhood | Hacker News Reader

Sublime is just such a great editor. I came from Vim and was so pleased to find out about it. My languages of choices are PHP and HTML/CSS/Js with VueJS, and I've tried all the major editors out there. Nothing beats Sublime performance. Moreover, while VSCode has nice enhancements, for the languages I'm working on, I don't feel it has anything to bring that would beat Sublime. Sublime is just so damn fast and has great plugins. The killer feature is the lack of battery consumption - I work mostly on battery and VSCode/Atom are just CPU drainers.

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Sublime is weirdly frustrating to me. I keep wanting to switch to VSCode (and occasionally Atom), but then I keep returning to Sublime. The main reason is that on my 4+ year old laptop, the difference in memory use and speed matters enough.

I had the same experience with Firefox. I switched to it about two weeks ago and really tried, but it just 'feels' clunkier than Chrome. What frustrates me is that I can't tell if that's actually the case, or if it's just that I'm used to Chrome.

At least with Sublime the difference in performance is clear enough.

What are the reasons for wanting to switch if Sublime's performance is better for your case?

VSCode has a ton of features that I like, so if not for performance I'd probably use that for most of my day to day work.

Is that actually true that VS Code and Atom are "CPU drainers" and are there any numbers out there proving that?

It's probably so obvious that it does not merit a formal test. Atom and Vscode run on Electron, an entire instance of the chromium browser that renders the UI in HTML and CSS and uses JS for logic. Sublime Text is a native application with a much more efficient system for rendering the UI that does not involve web technologies. Open any of these editors for yourself and note the CPU usage: it's a disparity representative of a web browser (which atom and vscode are!) versus a simple text editor.

I'd also add that VSCode and Atom don't support the conventions used in text editors on the native OS. There are several keyboard shortcuts that "just work" in Sublime Text – which I'm used to from Mac OS in general – that don't work at all in the Electron-based applications.

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