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Comment by sonaltr | Hacker News Reader

As someone who moved from Linux and is moving between VS Code and Sublime - how is Textmate better?

Sublime is kind of an ideological child of TextMate, so it's not, really. Lots of folks switched to Sublime when TM development stalled out some time ago. It's a very similar experience, and is similarly powerful.

Some key advantages:

1. Fast and responsive 2. If you write a plugin, you know TextMate is Unix (forked child process, communicate through shared fd, you invoke a command named dialog2 to let TextMate popup any dialogs or completion menu...). You can add editor commands in any language -- you can even make TextMate display complex UI dialog with bash. 3. File browser is nearly a finder (drag and drop like finder, and most finder shortcuts work) 4. Search (there are some hidden shortcuts, but when you master it you feel very fluent)

There are weakness too: TextMate is losing the market, many bundle developers switched to other editors. You can't find many new bundles nowadays. It still doesn't support vim-like keyboard operation... etc

Compared to VS Code: Speed. Textmate opens files instantly, VS Code takes forever to open a new window.

Compared to Sublime: Better Find interface. I really hate the sublime multi-file search result list, it seems like a hack, not a real interface... I just don't get why they would do it like that.

One thing that is nice about the way sublime does it is that you can search the search results. Since it shows the found search items contextualized, it can be useful to search the contextualized parts.

You can copy the search results in TextMate, then paste and continue your second search.

> Compared to VS Code: Speed. Textmate opens files instantly, VS Code takes forever to open a new window.

I just timed it. Opening a new window on the PC I'm using right now takes between 70 and 72 frames, or between 1.16 and 1.25 seconds. On the rare occasion that I do it.

I understand that everyone is a leet uberhacker who is thrown off their flow by a butterfly farting on the breeze, but this is princess-and-the-pea stuff.

If you are used to those two, and happy with them, you probably don't have any reason to switch.

As for me, I've been using TextMate since it's first release more than a decade ago, and I'm simply used to it. I'm more productive in TextMate since I know where everything is without thinking about it.

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