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Comment by ammon | Hacker News Reader

Another interesting angle on this is that VS Code is free (and open source), while Sublime is proprietary and (nominally) costs $80. I wonder how many people don't use Sublime because of the price? Atom is free too and never surpassed Sublime.

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Expressedly, this is my opinion solely, with that said:

I stopped using Sublime and stopped recommending it not because of price (I actually prefer to pay for things when I can) but because the community plugins for my development workflow (PHP + Frontend) is...not great. I also found the distinct lack of API documentation to be frustrating (I'm not above making my own extensions and I very much like Python)

Visual Studio code at least has good front end tooling (The PHP extensions can't handle my large PHP projects, though I am tempted to try the a paid extension on this that I heard works well in Visual Studio proper, also, Twig support plain sucks. I'm not 100% certain if this is a limitation of VS Code or the Extension but it can't find my variables from the PHP files)

I've since moved to a combo of PHPStorm (my daily driver) and Visual Studio Code for Git Merges (I prefer the way you can handle it in VS Code) and doing other misc tasks that I don't want to fire up a PHPStorm instance for.

Same reason I never liked Atom. Tooling always seemed off somehow.

Side note? If you are going to pay for an editor, I recommend any JetBrains product offering.

PhpStorm is by far the best editor. The slowness is a huge issue.

For frontend sublime offers a nicer experience. VCode feels slightly off but I do want to move over because it's free.

For quick development vim is perfect. If you need to make single page changes on multiple remote sites nothing is faster than dreamweaver 8. The designer/code split was always great no editor ever implemented anything to match.

Be careful that's it's only open-source if you build it yourself or if you use VS-Codium (https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium).

The VS-Code that everyone uses is under a Microsoft License and includes close source Microsoft telemetry (spyware?) and user data collection :

https://code.visualstudio.com/License/

I recently contributed VSCodium windows support, and IMO it's not too big of a different from the binaries that MS provides. The only few differences are the telemetry endpoints that are in the normal binary, that can be disabled through the setting, and some other MS specific branding

They state in the license that :

"You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation."

So it seems that not everything can be disabled in the settings ?

Maybe in practice they're not collecting too much sensitive data, but they could just distribute the FLOSS binary with a "Do you want to send telemetry data to Microsoft -Yes ? -No ?" at 1st lunch and if we say no then we have the guarantee nothing will be ever sent to them.

As far as I now this is what is done in Atom and I find it more clear and honest than a special license where "you can opt out but we still send data anyway".

I'm sure there no necessarily evil intentions, but still there this feeling that for once Microsoft is doing a great & successful Open Source software, they must find a way to put their own terms on it and collect user data.

Not sure why you're downvoted. This is a concern. In my company, I downloaded VS Code to use it with F# for a toy project. But when I saw you cannot disable all data collection, I pretty much uninstalled it.

Most likely there is no IP risk, but I did not want to go through the trouble of finding out precisely what data is collected, and/or cross check with our legal department.

Plenty of people at the company do use VSCode, so I'm sure eventually IT will simply provide it to us through their own software repository (as they do for Visual Studio).

I work on VS Code. You can disable VS Code telemetry and even disable all built-in online services if you like. This is documented on the website [1]

However VS Code cannot block the extensions that you install from collecting their own telemetry. Even if use a version of VS Code built from source, an extension that you install could still collect telemetry of its own. Same applies to most software that allows third party plugins (unless they do some serious sandboxing/capability restriction, or only allow installing specifically vetted plugins)

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di...

It would be nicer if they made it clearer when they inform you during the installation. All I saw was that they collect, and I can turn the setting off, but it wouldn't turn off all collections.

Anyway, thanks for the info.

I've paid for Sublime, but I abandoned it for VS Code. For instance, the default Python setup - in particular its handling of virtualenvs, linters, and formatters - works pretty much out of the box. I was constantly fighting against the Sublime plugins to make them work halfway reasonably. Sublime is faster, but the lower mental overheard required to make VS Code work properly makes a much bigger difference to me than the price does.

What's the point investing time in learning a proprietary tool when the developers could take it away from you at any moment?

A lot of people I know who use Sublime never paid. In fact, I don't know anyone who paid for it IRL except myself.

If you don't pay, you only get a nag screen from time to time as you save. And cracks most likely exist if you want to get rid of it without paying.

BTW, I still use Sublime Text. I gave a try to VS Code and it is really great. It has most of the things that made me switch to Sublime (from Emacs), plus some more. The issue I had was performance. Sublime is generally more responsive for me, with less subsecond but still noticeable pauses.

Funny tho, that purchasing prompt is the only "feature" I'd missed from Sublime after switching to VS Code.

So I made one for it [1].

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cottonh....

Edit: Disregard, I don't know wtf I'm talking about.

It's right there on the home page:

"Sublime Text is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses.

Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform."

Are we talking about some other sublime?

Shows me for not actually double-checking, I was pretty convinced. Is that a recent addition or is there another editor I'm thinking of?

Wat?

No, it isn't. From the website:

  Sublime Text is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses.

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