Sublime Text 3.2 Released | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Text 3.2 Released

sublimetext.com

300 pointsJorgeGT201 comments

I used Sublime for over a couple years. At the time it was the greatest editor I had ever used. But to get "basic" features (that come default with VScode) required plugins.

And then plugins would conflict sometimes, but there were no answers online to why something wouldn't work because the problems were obscure and rare.

Also, there was some simple copy/paste problems (limitations?) on Linux as well.

I liked it so much that I dealt with all of these issues from nearly day one without complaint. I had tried VScode, and at the time Sublime was just faster smoother and all around more polished.

But I tried VScode about a month or two ago, and it came default with features that I had to use a few plugins (with overlapping and conflicting features) with Sublime.

I was actually sad to switch to VScode, simply out of principle. But VScode is built how I would expect an editor to work by default, where Sublime, as fast as it is, lost some zip after a few too many plugins, and actually has fewer features (that I really require/use frequently) than VScode does.

Also, vscode greatly simplified settings, snippets and other text based settings that I think Sublime could take note of.

Edit: Another note, because VScode comes default with many features, the keyboard shortcuts seem a little more consistent.

I hope Sublime steps up their game, as I think VScode is standing on their shoulders, and competition is good.

Now try and open up Sublime after some time spent in VSCode. You will see what I am talking about, yeah go and try scroll that Side bar, scroll editor, enter some text fast, scroll fast the minimap. Everything is very smooth! I mean I get it, if you want rich plugins and all that fancy stuff go down the Atom/VSCode way. Even though I was using Emacs and Vim for the biggest part of my development time, I always had Sublime somewhere in there, I use editor just as an editor. Some nice light git integration, fast file searching and fast and correct code navigation is all I need that goes out of the $EDITOR scope. I have all of that with Sublime and it works reliably and flawlessly.

I agree, for a basic editor Sublime is faster, generally speaking. (ie, open, navigate, search, etc...)

But while actually coding, I can't tell a difference, and in some cases VScode is faster than Sublime. (in my experience)

But faster doesn't help me when code complete doesn't work correctly on one file for no explainable reason. (and the myriad of other "small" bugs that wore on me...)

For me personally, VSCode doesn't compete with Sublime. Sublime is my primary text editor with some advanced features for convenience. VSCode is a replacement for all of the IDEs I don't want to install or launch right now.

If all I needed was a great text editor, I would use Sublime. It's everything I want in an editor.

But, for web development, I feel like a second or third class citizen using Sublime. Maybe that is the separating line between these two apps?

Agree with you. VSCode used to be somewhat slower about a year back but not anymore. Yes it uses more RAM than Sublime but for anyone with a decent computer, that is not a concern. The productivity boost with VSCode is much better than with Sublime. Especially for Javascript, there is not even a contest.

Also maybe worth mentioning that Sublime costs $80 as opposed to VSCode, Emacs and Vim being free... of course any working developer/shop should be able to afford that if the editor experience truly is (forgive the pun) sublime.

I tried Sublime Text a couple years ago.. and gave up with trying to get all the plugins I needed up and running, on the other hand, I really hate using Visual Studio or VSCode, I constantly run into annoying bugs, crashes, and incompatibility issues with plugins. I have to restart Visual Studio 2017 at least thrice daily to get around minor things like "build project" no longer running fully. Perhaps its just Nostalgia speaking, but I almost miss the days of Visual C++ 6 (using Visual Assist)... it may have lacked features, but at least it never crashed.

I am a lurker and don't have a account or comment on Hacker News.

Sublime is created by a small software shop and they need money to run the shop while Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company. Microsoft can afford to give away free software for some goodwill from developers.

Its kinda a unfair comparison.

I can appreciate their need to charge but the $80 for personal use is rather prohibitive. It is a bit odd they differentiate a personal and business license yet charge the same for both. I'd buy a copy for personal use if it was more reasonable since I do like how it works but I just stick to xed for simple editing and IDEs like vscode for more in-depth work instead.

$80 is a lot for personal use, but how many personal users actually pay it? It's not difficult to ignore the occasional nag message, so people who can't or don't want to pay aren't forced to.

That just looks a lot for personal use. I know people who click on a message and spend that kind of money each month for coffee during lunch break.

For me personally, that price is nothing. I would pay twice as much and each employer had to buy it if they wanted me happy in text editor regard.

Is $80 that much for something that you use oh so often?

It's roughly one week of food where I live; so not free, but something I would afford if it brought a net improvement to my work.

I think $80 is very reasonable for a great tool like Sublime (for work) if it suits your needs.

To be honest... yes, it is rather much. You are in the price range of full fledged IDEs, whole operating systems, and office suites just for a text editor, even though it is quite a good one. As the sibling comment mentioned, I'm sure many personal users just use the unregistered version to the point that they'd probably make quite a bit of extra revenue if they offered a more attractive price point for those users.

On a separate note, a friend described their backwards approach of validating licenses on every launch of their app, which creates a de facto 'telemetry' system since license hash is submitted to their servers and they obviously have access to other info such as IP.

So even though I quite like the software, I've discontinued use due to the high cost and also due to the inability to opt out of external communications that'd allow them to keep tabs on you and your usage. To be fair, I was not keen on Microsoft's telemetry in vscode but that can be disabled and even better, vscodium removes it completely.

> I've discontinued use due to the high cost […]

I’ve given away 30+ SublimeText licenses in the last 5 years, mostly to students.

If you cannot afford paying $80 for a license, ping me via email and I’ll buy one for you.

My email is 0x636978746f7264732f61742f676d61696c I’m looking forward to talk with you.

Hex encoding your email address is genius. Don't think many spammers will be picking that one up!

That is quite generous but I don't know that it'd sit well having someone else pay for me for what I consider too much to use. I suppose it's all just my principles since I could just use it in an unregistered state as many personal users likely do. I like supporting software like this... I just can't justify the cost, particularly since it's just for my own use.

I've requested a license and received one within minutes. There's nothing more honorable than keeping your word! Awesome and thanks!

I have been wanting to buy a license to get rid of the license nag pop up, but wasn’t sure if development was ongoing since it had been quite a while since the last release. Also, I figured Sublime Text 4 might be coming down the pipeline soon.

If I buy a license, does that cover potentially upgrading to the next major version? If not, is there a roadmap for version 3?

You are a Genius and Honest, Thank you man :)

I didn't believe he was serious, but he is. He actually delivered.

It's more than a monthly salary in many places.

Monthly salary of software developer?

I meant in general. Just to highlight that there are different perspectives of what that amount really means to some people.

A $5 coffee is more than a monthly salary if you pick the right places.

One of my previous employers, millioniar (in euros), was too cheap to buy a license... Myself, 1/10000 of a millionaire bought several licenses, one for myself and a few for internet coding friends

Expensive is very much subjective

It is unfair. However, unless you have a principle of ignoring freely (free as in beer and code in this case) released software from bigger companies it's a comparison that will be made.

PS - I understand what you're saying, but I thought it was funny you claimed you don't have an account on a website that requires registration for commenting. Welcome to HN!

I hope that you are aware that VSCode is not free software.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're confusing the release binaries with the source?

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#why

99% of the end users only care about the product, not how the developers are making ends meet.

If you think $80 dollars is too much for a tool that you can expect to use for 5+ years without issues (I'm at 5 years with Sublime currently), I don't know what to tell you. If you work a trade, you should expect to invest in high quality tools (a laptop, maybe a second monitor, etc.).

Granted, if I knew how to as productive as I am with Sublime Text with Vim or Emacs, I would switch over in a heart beat.

He didn't say it was too much, only that it was more than other comparable editors. If all else is equal, why wouldn't you take the cheaper option?

Vim and Emacs may work for GP's workflow, but I can't say the same for me (at this time). In that context, I would say that cheaper doesn't always mean better (I prefer to be productive than bill for learning new tools unless that is part of the project).

I tried working with Vim exclusively when I started my job ~2 years ago, and my terminal would hang quite often that I had to abandon it (I use ConEmu which is free, but hangs quite often).

I also work on a Windows machine and do not want to use the windows command line, I prefer git-bash/mingw32.

I'm currently using Windows with WSL + wsltty + tmux + terminal vim with no issues.

Things are really fast and stable. I often have 10 Vim instances open across half a dozen tmux sessions. Each one takes up about 8mb of RAM with ~40 plugins doing everything I could ever ask for in a code editor. The only time they get closed is when Windows decides to reboot but then I can automatically restore the tmux sessions with 1 hot key.

I switched to Vim last month after I found VSCode to be unusable for editing a 1mb a markdown file (it used over 50% of my i5 3.2ghz quadcore just idling with the file open). I wrote about the experience at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/vim-is-saving-me-hours-of-wor....

Haven't looked back since.

I have an i3 so I might not have as awesome experience as you may have... had to optimize for longer battery life because I was traveling a fair bit at the time of purchase.

I'm looking to change jobs, so hopefully when I end up somewhere new, I can get a new laptop and try to start with vim. After reading @frosted-flakes comment, I was messing around a bit with vim yesterday, but went back to Sublime because of familiarity with commands for navigating through files.

I'll get to vim one day, just happy with where I am at now.

Was reading through your article and noticed your comment about managing windows in Windows. Did you try using the windows key + left (or any of the other directions)?

Here's a video of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxerpQ8WK8Y

I'm on an i5 3.2ghz from around 5 years ago but most slowdown issues with WSL will be I/O bound, not CPU (unless you happen to be compiling code a lot).

Yeah I use the window key + arrow key shortcuts a lot but it's not the same as a dedicated window manager. Thanks though.

On OSX, Sublime Text 2 and 3 never felt much faster than VSCode to me. Small and medium sized files were snappy enough for me not to notice, and they both choked hard on larger (multi-GB or many millions/billions/etc. of lines) files.

Could have been a plugin not scaling, but I didn't care to experiment and find out for sure.

Sublime seems clearly faster on Windows 10 for me though.

I originally used subl, then switched for vscode for 3 years or so, and have now switched back to subl. I switched back to subl mainly because I downgraded my system from 16GB RAM to 8GB (switched from 2017 mbp to a 2015 carbon X1) and vscode had too large a memory footprint to use.

subl is notably faster, its also a very well rounded editor with a tiny memory footprint...

But I also have the issue that the plugin support is abysmal, that sane defaults are non-existent and it takes a long time to get things to work well with a very popular web techstack like React, Styled Components, eslint. Even now there are times when the syntax highlighting is wrong.

It would do subl a great service if they improved the package management and created a number of officially supported packages for popular techstacks that allow people to simply (ideally) 1 click configure the editor.

I shouldn't have to read a 15 minute Medium tutorial on how to configure eslint, IMO that is ridiculous.

I really like your idea about officially supported packages, but also to group them together for popular techstacks.

This was exactly the same problem I had. There were so many options that just didn't work well that I wasted tons of time trying out every plugin I could find to solve my problems.

And I still didn't fully solve it, I just gave up and lived with annoyances.

Edit: I perceive VScode partially solved this problem with the download count/voting on extensions.

I use Sublime Text for Vue.js projects because ESLint support was so smooth! (just installed SublimeLinter-eslint) Sorry to hear you had trouble with it.

If I may ask, what specific VSCode features are you referring to?

I'm eager to know because I'm working on an editor for Chrome OS (based on the Monaco editor from VSCode) and would love to know whether they are part of Monaco or extras that only ship with VSCode.

If anyone's interested, here's the (very recent) announcement post: https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/ax8pi3/archetype_...

Here's a few things: (without effort put into this...)

1. Package management / Extensions. Vscode comes with this right away, Sublime you have to install a package manager to manage packages...-sigh-

2. File icons. (this may seem dumb, but man it should be a simple thing to have defaults for...)

3. Git integration (though seems they may have caught up on this?)

These are just off the top of my head...

Edit: spelling

Got it! Thanks.

Some other ones are code completion, indentation stuff, etc...

> Package management / Extensions

https://packagecontrol.io/

> File icons

https://packagecontrol.io/packages/FileIcons

> Git integration

https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/git_integration.html

Yep, I found every plugin I ever needed for Sublime. But then the minor conflicts between the plugins start happening.

Of which the only support answers online are "uninstall plugin/test". So I had to choose which plugins to keep for certain features/functions. It was too messy.

Sometimes I couldn't tell if it was the base features of Sublime that were conflicting with a plugin, or two plugins conflicting...

The seemingly unfixable bugs from plugins are what pushed me towards VScode. Where even if there are plugins/extensions, I need fewer of them, so less likely to have conflicts.

Hey!

I've been playing with Archetype recently in conjunction with VS Code and I have to say, you've been doing a great job!

Keep it up my dude!

Thank you kind sir! A new release should be up soon.

fyi, we have a name collision of sort with our projects. :)

https://www.archetypewebsites.com/

Shouldn't cause any issues, just thought you'd want to know. Cheers!

Yikes! If it helps, mine is just a side-project, nothing serious. Yours looks great by the way. :)

It's not a problem at all, can't claim a name really can we. :)

I currently use Codemirror [0] as the online editor, but when editing online, I do miss a lot of the tools available in VScode.

Do you have an opinion of Monaco vs Codemirror? (I think codemirror is used internally for some Firefox dev tools...)

[0] https://codemirror.net/

Interesting, as I was thinking about going back to Sublime after being frustrated by the Python Language Server eating RAM like a Gremlin after midnight.

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2594

https://github.com/Microsoft/python-language-server/issues/4...

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/65639

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/issues/2553

I had the same experience, but from Atom to VSCode. There was an even more direct "standing on shoulders" effect there. I didn't want to switch to the huge corporation that just copied the project with the actual original idea. But VSCode is just so... designed. Everything just works, and brilliantly. I don't understand how they got an Electron app to be so fast.

Say what you will about Microsoft, they sure know how to make IDEs.

I used Atom for a while, and I recall regular instances of the entire IDE freezing for 10+ seconds for no good reason when I had a few files open. At the time (and to some extend even today), everyone just chalked this up to "Electron is terrible". But MS came along with VSCode to show how a lot of the "issues" with Electron were actually just issues surrounding bad code / software design that were bogging down apps.

Like you, I felt a bit sad to switch from Atom, but the difference in quality was massive. I guess that's the difference between having a bunch of smart people who have developed enterprise software for a while working on an Electron App, vs. younger, equally smart folks working on an app without that wealth of experience to draw on for developing a complex application.

I use webstorm and yeah this doesn’t contradict with having sublime text installed. When I want to read a large file sublime rocks, but for actual meta developing you need to spend time configuring it.

Gladly it’s not like you can’t have them both so there’s not an actual choice problem here. Just use whatever you want for the right job.

Similar story here. Used to write my python codes in subl till I finally jumped ship to PyCharm.

But I didn't stop using Sublime. I set a keyboard shortcut to launch it, and thankfully it doesn't open multiple instances if already running but pops up on foreground. And now it's my scratchpad, a temporary clipboard, a distraction free zippy screen where I compose my messages before mailing them. And its probably my most used application, lately.

I really don't understand what all these fancy features are that are so necessary. I use a stock sublime install, with a couple of syntax plugins and the material theme because I think it looks pleasing. That's it. It's super snappy, and whenever I need to jot something down I just type `subl` in a terminal and hey presto, there's a window. I have notes that I've never saved to a file, but that have been open in a sublime buffer for probably well over a year now. Sublime has crashed. My computer has crashed. I've rebooted the thing multiple times. No matter what, these buffers stick around, and it's a complete life saver. It's so good, that I just know if I've opened up a sublime window and typed something in a buffer, it's probably gonna survive longer than I will.

That's worth the price of admission alone. Several times over. I've never been this pleased with an editor, ever.

I don't need fancy refactoring tools. Find across files has done wonders for me, and when I need to get real fancy I break out the regex. Ctrl+d to duplicate my selection; multiple cursors; these two alone cover probably a good 99% of my refactoring needs. I used to like having an IDE where I could click an icon and it would build things for me, now I can't stand one. I just set up a file watcher in a terminal in the background and it rebuilds whenever some stuff changes. I use Makefiles or redo or even just a simple shell script whenever I need something fancy with dependency management. I've not missed fancy build integration since forever. Whenever I need to debug something, gdb or in-browser dev tools or whatever is suitable for the context I'm in will do more than fine, I don't need an integrated window in my editor.

I appreciate that sublime is just a bunch of tabs of text buffers, a simple file browser, can handle ridiculously large files with ease, doesn't consume much resources, and is stable as a rock. I've found I don't need anything else. It's like what I imagine my cool friends who use vim think of their editors, only I'm too stupid to really "get" them. It's ok. Sublime is my Fisher Price version of vim I guess, but I love it to bits. It's paid for itself many, many times over at this point.

Some other things I do with sublime that might be quirky:

- My font size is 22 or 24 points. Not because I'm blind, but because it forces me to not type lines too long, or files too big. It keeps my code concise and to the point. Also the font I use (Menlo) is lovely and I just like looking at it sometimes.

- My lines wrap at 76 characters. Basta.

- I'll have multiple windows of sublime open for weeks, months sometimes. Half the time I don't even know what windows or buffers I have open. I just did a "clean up" and closed about 10 of them. It was like a trip down memory lane of the last year. Most of these windows had buffers I had never saved – not even once.

- Aside from a bats syntax plugin, and the material theme, I have no plugins. Unless you count the package installer I guess.

- Sublime is my editor for git commit messages. I love it.

- Most of the time when I need to write something long form, a long email, an article, anything really, I'll do it in sublime first and then copy into a word processor for layout and other things. If I need to update things, the sublime version is the source of truth, and I'll just copy/paste into Pages or whatever I'm using at the time for layout/design.

- Not gonna lie, sometimes I think about writing a plugin for sublime to use it as my email client. I think it'd be wonderful.

- Sometimes I just open up a new sublime window and start typing random stuff; a short story, some thoughts, or just random words. It's like therapy in a way. I never save these buffers, or at least very rarely.

Sublime is the single most valuable piece of software I own, and I'm very glad to have paid the price of admission.

Major changes include:

* Git integration in the sidebar: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/git_integration.html

* Diff tracking in the gutter: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/incremental_diff.html

While there are packages that provide diff tracking (I've been using GitGutter for a long time) these changes will finally allow themes to visually customize both the git status in the sidebar tracking and the gutter marks, which is great news!

Combined with Sublime Merge which can be opened e.g. from the side bar and for open files this is pretty great indeed.

I wish they could abstract away the VCS integration as an API and others could be added.

The Incremental Diff feature is awesome. IntelliJ IDEA has this feature by default, and I find it really useful.

Can't live without. Right click to revert or show diff of that hunk is real helping.

Again, the sad state of people following the hype train with VSCode. While few have given fair examples of things better in VSCode than in Sublime, most are obviously oblivious as to what features make VSCode better than Sublime. This is: “GitHub went down for a minute, that’s why I moved to GitLab!” all over again. Truly sad.

Back on topic, I got my Sublime licensed since 2014. I have been enjoying it quite a lot since then. The not-so-subtle performance differences between the two editors make me always come back to Sublime. I’ll still be checking VSCode in the near future, though, since to me it works a bit better than Atom.

I don't deny the VSCode hype train but I have had a Sublime license for 4 years and for the past 2 years VSCode is my default code editor.

But why, if you may spare the time? It’s the reasons that made me make my initial comment about the hype. I have yet to see good enough reasons to move, but maybe my development environment varies quite a bit from other people. Still, even if it had way more features, which I doubt, the performance differences are still (just tried it) too much for me to consider it.

Thanks!

The plugin/extension ecosystem is way more active in VS Code than than Sublime, I’ve found. There is a VSC extension for just about anything you could imagine, at this point.

With that said the latency in typing with VSC drives me a little bit crazy every day...

I've also used Sublime for years, but recently I've been using VS Code. VS is miles ahead when working with modern Javascript, both in terms of linting and syntax highlighting. Have a look at these screenshots of a single-file Vue component. Both are using the most popular Vue/JS plugins.

Sublime: https://i.imgur.com/xQiYv7O.jpg

VS Code: https://i.imgur.com/UsEhfO3.jpg

The only sublime issue I see is it isn't setting the closing script tag, all the rest is just color / themes.

That's just one example of broken syntax highlighting, and it's about the simplest a .vue file can be. It becomes more apparent/annoying in larger projects when you see perfectly valid chunks of code underlined in red or all the same color.

Our support of advanced JavaScript is actually extremely good. It would appear that screenshot is using a third-party syntax definition named Vue Component that doesn't seem to be very robust.

I love Sublime Text, and purchased a license years ago. I'd love to be able to use it on JS projects. Do you have any suggestions for me to have a better experience with it?

If you find any bugs with the JavaScript syntax, definitely report them at https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/issues.

As far as I know, our syntax definition is pretty spot on with the current state of the language and I believe supports all of the stage-3 proposals in TC39 (see https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/issues/1269 for more info).

The major thing we don't support out-of-the-box right now is JSX. If you are using JSX or Flow I highly recommend https://packagecontrol.io/packages/JSCustom. It is maintained by the primary contributor to the default JavaScript syntax.

With our high-quality JavaScript syntax, things like Goto Definition and Goto References should work well.

I'm not sure what else you may be looking for in JS projects, but there are certainly tons of third-party packages for things like linting and so forth. Myself, I tend to run Sublime Text pretty vanilla as I use a full terminal emulator to run tasks like tests, linting, builds, etc.

It seems like some people just really like following the current "hot" editor. I doubt what editor you use ever really makes much productivity difference beyond a very basic level (i.e. something more advanced than Notepad).

A couple years ago it was Sublime, today it's VSCode, in a year or two I'm sure they'll all move on to something else.

Atom was the previous "hot" editor, and atom always seemed to never be as goos as Sublime. However VSCode is shaping up to be different. Despite the fact that VSCode is free and not nagware, one of the pains I'm seeing in more people moving to VSCode is that Sublime extensions are slipping in quality.

For example GoSublime now requires an out-of-band manual install (cd into some directory and git pull), and I haven't been able to get build errors to show up in the UI at all for several weeks now.

However vscode-go seems to just work and is sponsored directly by MS. I know Sublime can't do this and I don't want to switch (I've bound multiple licenses over the years). If they ever get the performance of Electron to match that of native, I won't have a reason to stay on Sublime.

I, too, have been a long-time Sublime Text user. I really liked the add-on packages. The basic Package Control installs but does not show up in the menu like before. I have found ways to install a few key packages manually. It has been my favorite editor on Mac, Win, and Linux for a long time.

I do a lot of work in Rmarkdown and I like Sublime's spell checker best. I especially like the subl command line launcher on MacOS and Linux...

In my experience it depends on the workflow. For projects that aren’t Typescript/React-oriented, I use Sublime, it being smoother and less cluttered than VSCode. Where VSCode shines is being a full-featured out-of-the-box IDE— right now, that’s only where Microsoft has dedicated its resources (ie definitely not Rails or anything Python).

The biggest thing that's better about VSCode for me is being FOSS.

I take it you're an OpenOffice user then ;)

Sublime is buggy when using poorly built (my assumption) plugins that are required to be productive.

I gave Sublime years of my fulltime attention, many, many hours of use, debugging and testing. It's not a "hype train" decision for me when VScode worked properly out of the gate, and I got no bugs (besides one syntax highlight issue recently fixed...) slowing me down.

Performance wise, Sublime opens faster, but after all the plugins I needed, it sometimes seized the entire interface up for seconds at a time, or during scrolling. This was rare, but it did happen.

Opening quickly doesn't matter if you open it's once a day. But consistent minor bugs grinds the motivation right out of you.

Edit: Sublime started an editor revolution, and it's great, but it's not perfect for everyone.

People are following the "hype train" because VSCode is actually a much better and polished editor than Sublime text. Even people who absolutely detested Microsoft have grown a liking for VSCode.

Performance difference used to be palpable 1-2 years ago, not so much now. VSCode is on par with Sublime text in terms of speed(at least for me). I still have Sublime text open all the time for quick note taking, recursive searching etc. but for any coding work, VSCode seems way more polished and gives a better development experience.

Am I the only one who finds the vscode quick file search very very poor?

Ctrl p and finding a file on a massive code base takes forever in vscode whereas its 100ms in sublime. Vscode also seems to need to recache the file names each startup.

When using sshfs or similar to mount a remote fs to work on and have the file name search play nice is also in an unusable state. Using the remote's linters, git, etc would also be great.. But non existant. Easy enough to ssh in the inline term, but that's not integrated for the plugins etc to pass thru.

The file search really sounds like it should be easy enough to self fix. (so can partial search a path, parts of a name and all that factors for a refined search return.. As well as caching those result sets more persistently.)

What might be a good way to create a nice lookup behaving like below. (rtree hashmap knearest? Just a rb tree?? Idk)

  *Eg fs contains 10k files*
  Project root =/home/user/
  *all return top 20 of returned set

  / returns 10k files
  /proj1 returns 5k
  /proj1 .js returns 100
  /proj1 ab .Js returns 4
  /proj1 abc.js returns 1
  /proj1 ab.js returns 1
  /p2/js/ab.js returns 1
  /js ab.js returns 2
  ... 
  Eg.
  Ab.js is in the subset of /proj1/js/test/
  AND /js (that looks in /p2/js + /proj1/js)

Anyone working on this or with solutions to any of these issues, I'd be keen to hear from you...

I was a Sublime diehard for the longest time, but I've recently been using VS Code simply for the Elixir Language Server add-on which is incredible and doesn't seem integrate with Sublime yet.

But then this issue[0] happened and Code caused me to lose a bunch of data... so now I'm on the fence of going back to Sublime which has always been rock solid for me.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/69972

Instantly reminded me of this:

http://archive.is/EZX1O

VSCode for Elixir is stellar. Extension-wise, I use ElixirLS (best option I've seen for debug info, dialyzer, & spec integrations), vscode-elixir-formatter (integrates Elixir 1.6 formatter), and hex.pm Intellisense (automatically loads a list of deps versions from hex.pm every time you enter a new dep in your mix file).

This bug surprised me too, but the same (or maybe that wasn't update but some weird OS restart) happened to me in Sublime couple of years ago. Fortunately both applications have backup folders and unsaved files can be retrieved.

Can we get a true "one-shot-file-edit" command line switch, that bypasses hot-exit, without disabling hot-exit?

For example I want to use sublime for git commit message. I juggle large repositories, and so I use about 3-4 different sublime windows open on folders that keep my work context.

If, while these windows are open, I call `subl -w -n filename`, sublime re-opens all already open windows, and also opens a new window. It then blocks the terminal until every sublime window is closed.

I don't want to disable hot-exit, but sometimes I want a self-contained subl window for just 1 file.

Anyone have any ideas?

You could keep an older version of sublime around just for git commits.

I had the same problem (once in a blue moon, sublime did the correct behavior, but overall it was pretty unreliable).

As a solution, I wrote a small ST package [1] which produces the desired behavior. The package listens on a socket to "open-file-requests", which can be issued from the command line.

Via bash aliasing, you can invoke something like `lsub myfile.txt` which will then do what you want.

However, I'm not too sure about whether it works for git, as it's probably not blocking (I didn't test it for this usecase). Maybe it's still useful for someone, though.

[1] https://github.com/philippotto/LocalSubl

I've been putting off buying the license for far too long, but now it really does seem like I have no reason not to!

I have a license for SublimeText for long already, but never tried SublimeMerge, because of the missing integration. But I like the release and consider supporting SublimeMerge as well. Does anyone now the current price? The site does not show the price for me.

Wondering as well. If you click "Pay by Card" you get a Stripe pop-up, also with no price.

Paying with PayPal reveals the price to be $99.

I have been tempted many times to buy a licence, but every-time I go to pay the price puts me off.

Especially since it seems to have gone up every time I look at it (now at $80), and you don't even buy it for life: at some arbitrary point a new version will come out, and you'll not only have to pay again, all your plugins will also be thrown into a hellish split like Python experienced where half of them will work only on the new one and half of them only on the old one for a couple years.

I purchased ST2 and the upgrade ST3 and I have never regretted it. I literally spend multiple hours a day using ST and couldn't get along without it. For me, it has paid for itself a thousand times over.

Sublime is my second most favorite TextEditor after VIM. However, I have to admit when it comes to plugins and community, Sublime is way behind VSCode. But if you compare anything else (ex. Performance), Sublime is definitely way better.

As they say- write in VS code, edit in vim ;)

Does it have decent Python support yet? It definitely didn't the last time I was seriously using it.

For instance, I butted heads with the maintainer of ST's Python plugin over the need to have independent per-project settings. This is critical for me as I work on several codebases that have different Python versions, virtualenvs, installed packages, testing frameworks, etc. In contrast, VSCode makes it trivial to use ~/envs/project1/bin/python3.6 for one project and ~/envs/project2/bin/python2.7 in another.

I fought long and hard to try to get ST to be usable in that scenario but eventually gave up and went back to Emacs. About a year ago I tried VSCode and found that it was my medium medium between nearly as configurable as Emacs (for my purposes) but as pretty as Sublime Text. Either way, I can't see paying for ST anymore when I have a couple of good FOSS editors that may be a bit slower but don't take nearly so much work to whip into a usable state.

I've been using Sublime to write Python for the last 4 or 5 years with the Anaconda package and it works really well, including "go to definition" key binds.

I love the performance of Sublime Text, but I had to keep going back to VSCode for its incredible Typescript support (intellisense/find all references/great goto definition/showing TS errors).

Is it possible to get Sublime Text to give the same Typescript/React experience as VSCode with some plugins? I never quite got there.

Of Course it is, to some extent. https://github.com/Microsoft/Typescript-Sublime-Plugin combined with https://github.com/Thom1729/Sublime-JS-Custom is enough for me. Though, I tend to customize them for personal use and my experiment goes to https://github.com/subpack

Thanks very much!

Didn't know about Sublime Merge. Though, I am hesitant to learn or become dependent on any GUI for Git other than gitk, and git-gui which ship with Git.

Honestly, Tcl/Tk is ugly as hell but every other GUI I've seen seem to just be re-stylings of those. There is also a blame gui which comes with Git.

I primarily use git from the cli, but bought sublime merge after hearing someone say how impressed they were.

Sublime merge then taught me about a bunch of areas of Git where I had a weak understanding or I had been timid. It's an amazing tool and I think [unless you're already an expert] it'll aid you in your use of git cli rather than replace it.

Tried it once or twice. But using VS Code (with Git lens extension) predominantly these days. Couldn't find anything VS Code can't do that Sublime can.

VS Code can't handle very large files (multi-GiB), but Sublime can.

Does anybody know of a decent benchmark on editor latency? I swear Sublime feels more responsive vs VS code but that could just be in my head.

There is a great benchmark somewhere on Github, it measures 5-ish metrics, like key->rendered latency, time to load 100MB file, and stuff like that.

Apparently, the Joe editor was the fastest, and Sublime has basically first or second place for most metrics.

Atom crashed for a few metrics :P

I don't know if I could find it for you... but it's out there somewhere, maybe someone here has it bookmarked.

https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/editor-p...

This is probably what you're looking for.

There's one from 2017, but it's probably not too accurate for things like VSCode anymore. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13933128

For pure typing latency, here's a fairly rigorous one from three years ago: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

It doesn't include VS Code, but it does describe the benchmarking process and the provided tool is simple to use.

On my current setup, VS Code 1.32.1 is ~5ms slower than Sublime Text 3.2: 16.2ms vs 10.8ms respectively.

https://cixtor.com/blog/editor-latency

Is that all? I can swear I'll never encounter such a huge text file as a programmer.

There are other ways to interact with those than open up in an editor.

As someone else’s anecdote, I have. Log files can easily grow, database exports as well.

I use sublime as a text editor for such files, but other IDEs (in my case webstorm) for everything editing project code

Either you should split the files when exporting (split database schema from data and for each table or by date etc for logs) or grep to filter out than open up GB size in an editor as you'll have problem navigating anyway. You don't want to use 'find' inside the editor for that kind of size.

Or you can use Sublime, where it's not an issue. Find works just fine on large files.

Keyboard macros are my sticking point. VS Code doesn’t go them easily.

Sublime doesn't take half a minute to start in a non-ssd hard disk.

Sublime feels more lightweight and doesn't have as much lag when typing as VS Code.

Not to mention the battery drain of VS/Atom

That's definitely a big one for me. Sublime barely uses any battery, but VS Code gobbles it.

Multiple windows... VS Code is still abhorrent on multi-display setups.

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/10121

I like the new integrations with Sublime Merge, but for now i'm going to keep using Git Gutter, which has more features for viewing information about diffs within files:

https://jisaacks.github.io/GitGutter/

You can easily view changes to individual lines or chunks, revert them, etc, without opening a separate tool. As far as I can tell this isn't possible with the new built-in integration.

You can also compare against any branch, not just `master` and `HEAD`.

Hi,

Dev from Sublime HQ here. You can revert changes straight from Sublime Text using the keybinding ctrl + k, ctrl + v or through the menu Edit > Text > Revert Modification.

Additionally you can open up the inline diff within Sublime Text by opening the context menu at the modification, and selecting Show Diff Hunk. This allows to view changes to hunks :)

Thanks! I'll try this out.

Never used Sublime, cause prefer open source. There's good example when open source (Atom & VSC) can compete and win.

CudaText looks very similar, and it is foss.

CudaText seems to like claiming to be "written in Lazarus", which as far as I can tell, is an IDE and not a language?

Lazarus is, in a nutshell, the FreePascal compiler + a lot of libraries for GUI (among other things) + a nice RAD.

So “written in Lazarus” is a shortcut for “written in Pascal with the Lazarus runtime”.

If you want an editor that is fast with large files and doesn’t require 100 plugins, check out BBEdit.

I think you meant to include "... which runs only on macOS." Still a great editor, but wish it worked on more platforms.

Another sublime release without relative line numbers...

I appreciate that Sublime now offers Git integration natively, but I'm so used to the icons in GitGutter that it'll take me some time to adjust!

I've been using Sublime Text almost every day for the last 5 years, switching to PHP Storm when I need XDebug.

I think people complaining about the cost of a text editor is ridiculous. If you do professional work it's worth it to pay for good tools.

If anyone from Sublime Text is here, I'd really appreciate it if you looked at this bug: https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/huge-load-on-system-mojave-b.... This makes it impossible for me to use the latest build :(

No idea if that helps, but they do mention Mojave support in the release notes:

> Mac: Added Mojave support

Yeah, the issue is that on my hardware this build makes the CPU go wild for some reason. I'm assuming the "Mojave support" is referring to dark mode or similar, since I've been stuck on Build 3176 for this time…

Mojave support includes ensuring that we are providing proper text rendering with the new grayscale antialiasing mode and opting in to dark mode title bars.

If you are seeing persistent issues with CPU, it is probably related to filesystem monitoring and git repository scanning. See https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublime-consumes-cpu-on-mac-... for an existing conversation.

Yup, that was it. Once I turned off GPU rendering and waited a while, CPU usage dropped back to normal. Thanks so much!

The problem seems related to OpenGL; you could try disabling OpenGL by adding this to your preferences:

    "gpu_window_buffer": "false",

Note that Sublime must be restarted for the change to take effect.

This didn't seem to help, unfortunately :(

I just wish there was a way to channel more resources into bug fixes.

https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues

1268 open vs 1428 closed issues is not a good ratio. Maybe they could offer a subscription model to finance another dev for bug fixing.

We actually fixed a whole slew of bugs in the latest dev cycle - over 100 issues were resolved on the community tracker. I've made a point of assigning issues to milestones with each build: https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/milestones?state=c....

I prefer notepad++, NPP and the main plug-ins are written in C + +, lightweight green and efficient, support Python, C #, Lua, JS write extensions.

What I don't like about sublime is that as long as the python expands a little bit more, the system slows down, and there are no toolbars.

I also don't like Atom and Vscode, a npm based editor, NPM is really crap.

Linux has high DPI fixes and moves to GTK3. Great to see my favourite text editor cares about Linux!

Still no drag_text on Linux https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/1361

man, I really miss sublime. I switched to vim for the year i was doing ruby (cause ruby "IDE"s are so horrible its just not worth it), and now im in vscode mostly because the out of the box setup for golang is so great.

This is why I switched to vscode a few months ago. The Golang support in Sublime is nowhere near the same level as it is in vscode.

Anyone have any opinions on Python 3 development is Atom, VSCode, or Sublime?

I’ve got a 5 year old Mac with 16GB of RAM, so I’m simply looking for which editor is best for developing scripts. Autocompletion, error detection as I type, etc

VSCode is fine for python development on my 8 year old MBA with 4 GB of RAM so you shouldn't have any problems at all.

I've spent years programming Python in VSCode. After years of programming Python in Sublime. It's very good. Plenty of plugins, pretty effortless to get project-wide intellisense, jump-to nav, etc. You can customize linting for certain classes of errors easily. My absolute favorite feature has been VSCode's hover tooltips that show documentation of just about everything--not just for standard lib, but all your dependencies, and all your project code. I just can't go back to not seeing the docstrings on classes and functions when I hover over them--it's effortless to review purpose, order of arguments, and whatever else has been documented.

EDIT: For fairness of comparison, while I find VSCode is superior for QoL via its impressive defaults and great extension ecosystem, SublimeText is vastly superior where navigating code is concerned--opening a file, and the instant preview of the file as Sublime fuzzy matches what you're typing is unmatched. Navigating symbols in Sublime is also light-years faster--instant, compared to VSCode making me wait every time I try to find a symbol while it loads them up--even in files that I frequently have open and expect it should just know what's there by now. Also, if I'm going to open a very large file, like an SQL dump or something similar, I won't even try that in VSCode. I reach for Sublime.

VSCode or Sublime can easily do this with a few extensions, they have fantastic Python community support.

VSCode will be easier to setup.

VSCode will use more RAM and be slower to startup but if you're just developing scripts and don't go crazy with extensions it won't be a major difference with 16GB of RAM.

Atom in my experience is dog slow.

PyCharm is overkill for scripts, but the features are very nice once things start getting big.

Eh, I'd recommend Pycharm or even Spyder over any of the 3 you mentioned for Python script development. Pycharm can have a bit of a steep learning curve since it is a very powerful IDE and things can get a bit overwhelming initially, but it has the best debugging experience you can find in Python land. The interactive debugging in (I believe) an iPython shell is fantastic, as are the variable explorers, etc.

Spyder is very rough around the edges but is fantastic if you are looking for a MATLAB like IDE experience to develop scripts in. The integration with iPython is fantastic and prototyping scripts is a breeze. Debugging though is a lot more rudimentary in comparison to Pycharm.

VSCode is making progress on the Python side of things but there are still numerous drawbacks to the current Python dev experience:

1. Python linting does not update in real-time but only on saves which isn't particularly great. You can hack around it by setting a low auto-save interval, but that is not for everyone.

2. The Python shell for interactive coding is not an iPython shell but a basic Python one, which means you don't get all the awesome things that iPython gives you like tab completion, introspection, magics, etc.

3. The debugging experience in VSCode is pretty great but the interactive console in VSCode during debugging only allows single lines of code of entry which is severely limiting.

4. It's a lot easier to setup and configure local venvs for testing in PyCharm along with different run configurations to pass command line args to your scripts, etc. VSCode can do this, but you have to edit a JSON config file and it isn't nearly as easy or polished.

I want to use VSCode for Python development since I use it all the time for most everything else including all Javascript work that I do, but I keep going back to Pycharm because it just ends up being a lot easier to use and makes me a lot more productive when coding in Python.

Searching a whole folder in Sublime shows the code in context. VSCode just shows one line. Atom is more flexible in that you can choose how many lines either way of the searched pattern to show

I use it, but I absolutely hate that I can't print from it.

Yeah, that's crazy.

I thought I was the only one.

Not only Sublime, but nearly all editors these days lack a print feature.

Right - I not only use an editor to code, I like one for notes, to draft text - write notes and letters to others. I find using WORD or similar cumbersome and unnecessary. I've written before that I love plain text as the files are compatible with everything.

Also, in fact, I write out all email in a text editor first, then copy/paste into webmail so the watching eyes don't / can't fingerprint my typing! /little paranoid!

I paid for it and I feel the same.

Print? Who does that nowadays with all these great software and large, high resolution displays? I have banned paper from most of my life years ago. It is nice to have a support but it invariably ends up in a non copy-pastable, non searchable pile of junk.

Also, printing from a text editor isn't very sexy, you'd want at least a bit of styling and page layout, and that's well outside the scope of a text editor.

Anyway, your point of view may be different but for that, I think there are packages for printing.

I suppose it wasn't included because it is a rather difficult to do it right and few people are interested. There are many things that can go wrong: OS compatibility, page layout, fonts, color or lack thereof... I implemented printing in software once and was a real PITA.

Agreed. But the ExportHtml plugin isn't an entirely horrible workaround, so at least there is a way.

So basically what feature is introduced in this latest version that is not already in VS-Code?

can you guys add HG (mercurial) support in sublime merge; I'm a paid member, and I work mainly with mercurial

currently I paid for beyondcompare which is pretty good for doing diffs, but would love to switch if sublime merge supports mercurial

Thanks for a great product

Anyone have trouble with JSON syntax highlighting after updating?

I'm having as well! Have you found any solution for that?

I miss the speed of Sublime. Not enough though.

I’m still an UltraEdit kind of person.

Is it possible to drag/drop files in the sidebar yet? Or even right click cut/paste?

Last time I tried Sublime it was impossible to move a file without going to your OS's file explorer and doing it there.

I just tested and no, it seems not possible yet.

You can use the Command Palette to rename and move files.

Right click cut/paste works for me, but that might be from SidebarEnhancements.

Those who do not understand Emacs are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. On a more serious note I could never understand why a closed source editor gained any traction among developers, especially when it lacks many, many features other more mature editors have had for years. Any Sublime users here that could provide their reasons for sticking with it?

I can't say for others, but for me, Sublime was the quickest standalone editor that I can download, run, and open big files really fast. I haven't found the same speed with Atom or VSCode.

What about vim?

I think it's safe to say vim/emacs are different things than sublime/vs code/IntelliJ.

They're ok when there are no alternatives like during SSH session but I've given up customizing after 10 years to make them act like any of the latter ones.

Why would I pay for IntelliJ if I could or someone had already made easy to use plugin to just make them act like modern editors?

We all know that's just an unfair comparison.

How so?

I mean, find the biggest file you can open with Vim, and then find the biggest file you can open with any other full-fledged editor. I doubt most full-fledged editor will be able to handle a 5GB+ log file, much less perform a search / replace within a reasonable amount of time.

Vim just has a lot less going on under the hood by default and is built for this.

In short, I guess I'm agreeing with your original post. Vim is just on another level when it comes to performance versus other editors so it's kind of unfair to pit them together.

It seems like the general opinion that Sublime Text outclasses vim when it comes to opening large files though

> It seems like the general opinion that Sublime Text outclasses vim when it comes to opening large files though

That comment is _begging_ for a source. Whose general opinion?

Just looking at the rest of the comments here is one example. And almost every time something about Sublime is posted on HN

It's fast. Very fast. It can handle very large files without any trouble. I love the features provided by other editors, but when I need performance, I usually stick to Sublime and (neo)vim. vim can't handle large files, though.

Emacs is comparable in speed and memory usage according to this: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/blob/master/editor-p... When you consider that emacs is so, so much more it's really quite impressive.

I thought vim slows down only because it starts counting the number of lines as shown in the status bar. You could Ctrl-c and file becomes responsive but if you try to save huge file, I once got it truncated to some small part maybe because I quit the editor too early or something.

Why do people open very large files with a text editor? If it's a data file, you should grep/head/tail.

You might be thinking of less.

Because most people are more concerned with what they are making, than spending time pissing about learning how to work out and set up an editor that has 40 year old UX. Things like VSCode and Sublime are clean and accessible, and allow you to start producing and coding quickly and painlessly.

A 40 year old UX is a UX that has had 40 years of refinement iteration applied to it.

"Accessible" is a fine goal, everything else being equal, but for something I spend so much time in, I look for maximum potential power in my editor.

Compare graphical desktops and the Unix command line.

Now now, I use Emacs myself but I wouldn’t call its UX “refined”. It’s loads of stuff piled on top of eachother and many built-in packages to do the same thing (since everything had to be backwards compatible).

Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. I’ve never seen a serious emacs user without a heavy customised emacs. And I’ve never seen another emacs user whose config I would be nearly able to use :D

I can totally see why people like editors with sane defaults.

Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default.

As someone who has tried to be an Emacs user off and on over the past two decades: "yes, this."

I'm reasonably comfortable in both Vim and Emacs, but the reality is that every time I try to make a move to be a Serious Full-Time (Vim|Emacs) User, I find myself spending days trying to get either editor up to the point I was previously at in Sublime Text or VS Code. And I never make it. Never, never, never. Plugins or modes conflict with one another in non-obvious (to me) ways, and Emacs in particular tends to present a "here are a half-dozen ways to solve your problem, none of which will actually work with your configuration" issue. Meanwhile, everyone and their brother has a New! Amazing! Distribution! of the editor. My last couple of attempts to get into either one led me into a nightmare of "go pure vanilla and painstakingly build things from scratch, even though you don't actually know what the pieces you need are" vs. "start with Evil Awesome Space Prelude Vundle." And then, I can finally install the Elixir plugin! Wait, you also need alchemist.el and web-mode.el and probably need to edit your .emacs, excuse me, init.el, except maybe .spacemacs?, and now choose which of the half-dozen autocompletion systems to use, but OH MY GOD NOT THAT ONE YOU FOOL NOW YOU HAVE TO START OVER

And then I go back to one of those Terrible Awful GUI editors and get work done.

Hehe, thanks for the laugh! Yeah, I can totally relate. In fact, to become effective in Emacs I had to start by reading a book (Mastering Emacs, can totally recommend if you ever decide to try again!) and then spending _a lot_ of time fighting configurations. Even now that I’m very comfortable in Emacs I occasionally spend hours to just get a package working correctly (recently it was lsp-mode, which looks like the solution to many problems with Emacs, but I could never get it to work).

So yeah, I can’t really tell you it will be worth it productivity wise to learn Emacs, but for me it has gotten to the point that configuring it is a lot of fun and sort of replaces hobby programming projects for me.

I try occasionally because I'm pretty sure that eventually I would get to a place where Emacs would be astounding. (Or Vim, lest any partisans think I haven't given it a shot.) I just so far haven't quite gotten over that hill. But someday.

(Ironically, I spend most of my professional editing time -- which involves writing documentation in Markdown, not coding -- in BBEdit, because while there are a lot of coding editors that do more than it does, it has a few features for text slicing and dicing that I just haven't seen duplicated anywhere else.)

That might be true if you're an occasional developer but if you're putting in 8 hours a day for years you're going to want to have your tools tailored to you very closely.

My tools are tailored to me closely. Anyway, typing the code out is such a small part of coding.

Just because there's one obnoxious person doesn't mean you have to unnecessarily, and in this case, wrongly, insult a great tool. I'm a vim user and obviously don't have patience for typing alt-shift+, just to go to the beginning of a file but there are things emacs does well.

Ctrl+Home also works (Windows and Linux).

You don't have to learn it, you can just use it.

I was/am an emacs users since > 15y and for ~2 years i left Emacs for sublime text. Main reason, the performance and easy to setup without hacking my .emacsrc everyday.

Sure emacs is great and it has 10000x more features than anything else but ask yourself how much of them you really need and how convenient Emacs is at the end of the day ? I asked this myself and i came to the conclusion that i was better off a more recent editor. ST has a similar philosophy like vim and emacs and thats why i choose it.

Recently im trying VS Code but the performance is still somehow not fully convincing me.

I have tried to make the jump from Emacs to Sublime a couple of times, and more recently Emacs to VScode, but I always end up going back to Emacs.

Reading the recent discussions about the need to create commercial entities around open source projects, it occurred to me that Emacs has maybe suffered from not ever being commercialised. It is clearly the best code editor (very few people who master it ever leave it), but its steep learning curve and unreconstructed GUI mean that it remains inaccessible to too many developers. Maybe if a company was created around the product its sales, marketing and documentation would improve, and more people would use it.

Emacs is great, and Sublime has many drawbacks, as well as some poorly implemented features (like, the macros are basically worthless except for a very select few operations)... But Sublime Text simply outclasses any other Text Editor in the Simplicity + speed vs complexity.

Sublime's project goto functionality is simply unbeatable, it is faster than any Vim plugin I've ever used, it starts up faster than Emacs, it requires _no_ configuration to be a great text editor, it's the text-editor embodiment of easy-to-learn, hard-to-master.

Emacs is really something you need to actively learn, while you can just pick up Sublime and use it effectively within the first minute of opening it.

I actually was an Emacs user for many years and then switched to TextMate at first, then to Sublime.

The major reason back then was TextMate's and then Sublime's far superior support for editting files containing multiple syntaxes. While mmm-mode for Emacs eased the pain a while back then, it made Emacs slow down to a crawl sometimes and TextMate/then Sublime were also a lot easier to customize with regards to embedded languages without having to write elisp code all the time....

Because Emacs/Vim are NOT good citizens in any OS. Them live in their own sub-world of the terminal. Simply things like "exit" are weird incarnations on them.

Sublime work well across the main OS, live in their world, have no funky weird crazy ways to work (ie: work as expected without retraining for that funky weird crazy sub-world).

---- P.D: I not dislike the terminal, and wish all OS have not 3 competing GUIS (Web,Native, Terminal) but just 2 (so a terminal editor is a native editor, a native paint app is a native terminal app) but that is a pipe dream because the terminal is stuck in the past.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com