Hacker News Reader

Comment by anbotero | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com