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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

I remember a few years ago when Sublime was all the rage. The people I know personally that used it have all moved on to VSCode by now. Does Sublime still have a significant following?

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Yes.

Sublime is unbeatable when it is used as a smart notepad - with frequent starts/closes. It loads instantly.

VSCode is more like IDE (once opened, rarely closed) and is actually moving into Visual Studio direction in respect of its weight and associated problems with that.

Exactly how I see them. One of my favorite use cases of Sublime is the 'FilterPipes' command. You can use it to transform the text in numerous ways (such as converting case). You can even write your own text transformation logic in Python. But my favorite use case is the 'Send Text to Command'. I just invoke gnu utilities, like sed or awk (my most common one is 'grep -i filtertext' to only display lines which match a certain pattern), which are accessible from Sublime because they're on my %PATH% on Windows. So I'm basically doing things in Sublime that Vim users think are only possible to vimmers in a unixy world. I'm filtering/transforming text very effectively, all without having to retain in memory some very arcane commands.

I remember years ago when VS Code was all the rage. Now I have to sit through 10+ seconds of top-corner update status bar windows and x.x.2x 'Welcome' screens full of animated GIFs everytime I just want to open a file.

Wtf are you talking about?

I use Sublime Text and VSCode depending on what my needs are. I'm happy with both, but both have different strengths.

Sublime Text is great for quick jobs. Looking at a large log file, pretty-printing a JSON snippet, URLdecoding a bunch of URLEncoded text, writing a one-off shell script, etc, is all quick and easy with Sublime Text. One of my favourite things is to use the multiple cursors feature to quickly construct a shell script - think of taking a list of a dozen IDs and constructing a series of 'grep' commands to look at a log file.

VSCode is great for longer-lived jobs. Currently I'm working on a bigish Python script to sync data from a handful of source systems to a cloud service. Using VSCode for this sort of development works decently for me, though I'm sure I'm not using it to its full potential at all.

I use vscode for heavy lifting and sublime text as the notepad replacement.

Having to work with large SQL files, the CTRL+Alt combos Sublime offers are unbeatable for lightning fast insertion and formatting.

https://sublime-text-unofficial-documentation.readthedocs.io...

For small projects, large files, or one-off files, it's Sublime for me. For work on my existing/massive project at work, it's phpStorm. For everything else it's usually VSCode.

I don't think sublime has a large userbase anymore but definitely a vocal one.

Nothing wrong with that, just pointing out that anecdata from HN will be somewhat screwed.

I'm a very, very low level user, I mostly use it as text editor with syntax highlighting, so I'm not the target audience of your question, but what I love to bits is that it starts up instantly, and keeps unsaved files open in as many editor windows as you want. I'm somewhat of a fan just because of that. If you use the exit menu option rather than closing a window, when you start ST again, all windows open again as they were, minus undo history, but hey. That's both pleasing on a slick software level, as well as super useful.

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