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Comment by bigyikes | Hacker News Reader

I was a Sublime user, then Atom, and now I’m a VS Code user. In 2021, what reasons are there to use Sublime over VS Code? Performance is the only one that comes to mind, but there are surely others... right?

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I tried VSCode and Sublime each for a month earlier this year.

I was surprised to find myself deciding on Sublime at the end of it.

It came down to performance but also clutter. Sublime is fast. But also, VSCode just had too many panels and bells and whistles.

And VSCode's defaults were just all wrong. Like trying to autocomplete every other word when I'm typing text in a .txt file -- it's not even code! I couldn't believe how many random options I had to hunt down just to make typing usable and not trying to insert a million things.

Typing in Sublime seems to operate... just how I expect it to.

Now that you say it, I also feel that VSCode defaults are wrong. It’s a bunch of small things that feel off.

Yeah, I use VS Code daily but it took me a very long time to set it up in the way I liked. Everything from colors, text/menu sizes, fonts, toolbars to shortcuts and more. I'd say ridiculous customizability is a big benefit of VS Code in that regard.

The defaults are there to onboard people, or to work for people who are light users. Any tool, not just VSCode, you use for hours with every day is worth spending some time configuring to the way you want and work well in. Learning it, configuring it, and even extending it with your own plugins, can pay huge dividends for your productivity.

Teams is also full of "doing too much" in the GUI too for what its worth. Seems to be modern Microsoft's thing.

I think Atom also does that. I need to escape a lot during typing text files. Notepad++ also does that. But I do understand getting auto complete comfortable is difficult.

I don't like the super flat UI of VScode. I can see where things start and end.

I prefer the performance, design, configuration management and plugin ecosystem of Sublime to VSCode. I also found Sublime Merge growing on me despite not intending to use it, so I think it's something about how the developers think, not just the one tool I've gotten used to.

I don't know how to describe it, but there are a lot of little aggravations Sublime avoids.

What Sublime doesn't have anymore is the community zeitgeist. I definitely feel more like I'm sticking to tried-and-true as a user these days, than something innovative, even though it's still innovative.

I've tried to make the switch from Sublime to VS Code a few times, and a few things consistently hang me up:

* Performance, like you mentioned. I've very used to opening hundreds of megabytes of line-delimited data in my editor; anything that can't keep up with that immediately ruins my "tempo."

* I don't really understand how to customize VS Code's UI. It has a lot of little toolbars and widget panels that I don't want (I have everything except for the edit buffer on Sublime removed), but I can't find any obvious way to permanently remove them. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

* This one is largely my fault: 10+ years of Sublime Text have broken my brain, and VS Code's default bindings are just different enough to cause me significant annoyance. I'm sure I could spend a couple of hours fixing them, but I'll admit that the thought gives me pause.

On the other hand, I really like VS Code's session sharing feature (other than the shared undo/redo buffer). I'd love to see a version of that for Sublime!

> VS Code's default bindings are just different enough

FWIW, there's a ST keymap extension for VSCode: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

That's the first thing I installed when I switched (years ago now) and it made the process surprisingly seamless.

FWIW, VS Code has a "zen mode" view which hides everything other than the editor window, which kinda makes it comfortable for people coming from vim, sublime and the like. Try it out sometime.

Thanks. Wasn't aware of this. I'm probably never going back to the default view.

> I don't really understand how to customize VS Code's UI.

I don't think you've tried :)

View => Appearance has options for toggling all the "bars" ("status" bar, "activity" bar, "side"bar).

Also zen mode is a very nice way to toggle to a mode without any toolbars (you can customize which show up in zen mode; just open the settings UI (Preferences => Settings) and type "zen".

I've tried VSCode a few times hearing it was better for Elixir. I have a strong dislike, bordering on hatred, for IDE's. I don't want a bloated environment that gets in my way with features I don't want but seemingly can't turn off. VSCode feels like an IDE to me. Back in the day I moved away from Eclipse to Sublime and built command line tools to do what I needed with building releases (Ant - does that still exist? LOL I don't do java anymore).

When you realize you want VSCode to look and feel like Sublime, and spend hours trying to tweak settings, turn things off, use Sublime keybindings, etc. why bother? Just use Sublime. Also, I like paying indie devs for their work.

I switched to sublime text because VSCode makes you write

  /**
   * Block comments like this
   */

where as I wanted to write

  /**
    Block comments like this
  */

Seems like a trivial thing but it irritated the hell out of me. I didn't want the editor to put little asterisks in. I didn't ask it to. But it did.

Sublime Text just does what I ask.

https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/4320

Ironically, version 4 broke this.

With Sublime Text, I enjoy not having to turn off data collection and thinking about if updates enable them again.

Try VSCodium

I've tried using VS Code after years of coding in Sublime Text but quickly returned to ST - VSC just felt so slow, bloated, sluggish and overall unpleasent that all other features didn't matter because it simply made writing code irritating, it felt like the IDE is more important than the actual code you write and the editor is less important than all the bells and whistles.

Right now the majority of development I'm doing is Python/JS/TS. I've been really liking the Pylance extension by the MSFT team for VSC, it is so much faster than Mypy etc.

Then for JS/TS, the out-of-the-box support is what won me over from being a ST user for nearly 10 years.

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