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Comment by galfarragem | Hacker News Reader

Noob question: Is Sublime text still a good text-editor in 2021? Did it just loose momentum or not being open-source is insurmountable? I still think its speed and usability are not easy to match.

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Sublime is a perfectly fine and frankly faster editor than VSCode. The problem is the slow nature of the updates, the underwhelming API and people abandoning it in droves because they opt for VSCode makes the extension library not as comprehensive or feature packed. Half the extensions I use in VSCode don't have a parallel in Sublime

I still use it to quickly edit text or read some files quickly cause it opens really fast but it's definitely never going to be my daily driver unless something changes drastically

In my workflow, one reason I prefer VSCode over Sublime is for dealing with large (10mb+) files. Sublime takes upwards of a minute to open such files but VSCode is nearly instant.

For smaller files, Sublime is great.

My experience has been _exactly the opposite_.

I think sublime is a fantastic text editor. But it just doesn't cut it for me as a development environment. Getting productive in vscode is easy. It just works. Though Sublime hq's sublime merge git client is fantastic. I don't really care about sublime text anymore, but I'm a devoted user of sublime merge.

It’s my primary editor. It’s a better text editor than VsCode, but VsCode is a better IDE.

Open source is kinda irrelevant IMO.

The answer is, of course, it depends. How much do you value language integration? Do you have muscle memory for vim or emacs? There are many more questions here.

VSCode supports language server protocol arguably best, because LSP/VSCode/TypeScript were all developed somewhat in parallel. But some languages don't have complete language servers, or already had their own forms of IDE integration. JetBrains ReSharper has it's own csharp parser which it uses for analysis and automated refactoring.

> Open source is kinda irrelevant IMO.

Good tools become even better with time investment. I don't want to invest time into a tool that dies if the dev company loses interest/goes bankrupt/gets bought by oracle/... . Emacs is much older than me and will be around for decades to come. Sublime 2? Probably not. Sublime 3, probably several years. Sublime 4,5,6... who knows.

My problem with sublime was it was just less polished. Harder to find extensions. Extensions randomly don't work. Etc.

Vscode strikes a good balance. It's mostly got enterprise level of "polish" and stability, but still feels light-weight and flexible.

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