What recommendations do you all have for alternatives?
It seemed to me that there would always be an endless cycle of boom and bust with editors. It was a cycle with more in common with fashion than craft, and I wondered if I might end up wasting an inordinate amount of time switching editors throughout my career without any upside. So rather than switch to Atom, only to switch again a few years later, I set about with adopting Vim.
The choice seems to have been correct as there will always be a new editor (that's more or less the same as the old editor) that catches hold, but I wanted stability. Vim gives me stability, and the only other editor I'd consider would be Emacs for similar reasons.
If you are coding: Unless you are using IntelliJ (which a ton of of my colleagues do, and love) - it's a vscode world. Everyone at every company I've seen bangs away using that. It's kind of amazing how much inertia it's picked up (currently).
If you are working with text: 90% of the time if I have a couple gigabytes of text I need to do a lot of work with - it's Sublime Text. Actively Developed. A really solid text plugin architecture. The other 10% of the time I still use vim - mostly because it's in my finger DNA. Emacs is the obvious alternative which lots of smart people I know use.
I'd be interested in knowing if there are people who have used all five of these for > 100 hours that would recommend something else - (I haven't used Emacs that much - but I have well over a couple hundred hours on each of intelliJ/vscode/vim/Sublime. Probably close to 1000+ hours on the last three). (okay, small fib - close to 5,000+ hours on Sublime. I spend almost as much time in that tool as I do bash).
vim -> Sublime -> Emacs -> VSCode -> Emacs
^^^^^ I am here.Now I just need to install keymapper and convert all my M-w and C-y inputs to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.
There are three nice things about it: it flips vim's <verb><motion> into a <motion><verb> (like kakoune); it's got tree-sitter support out of the box (including for navigation); it's got LSP support out of the box.
Its keybinding is perhaps in "uncanny valley" of vim's. Overall, it still feels well thought out.
And the reason I went back to Emacs is because of elisp and M-x. Those are the true killer features of that editor, still unrivaled.
Sublime -> Atom -> Vim -> Emacs -> Emacs -> Emacs -> Emacs
vim -> Sublime -> vim -> Emacs -> vim -> VSCode -> vim
^^^ I am here.But realistically? A significant majority of developers use Visual Studio Code; Atom is still only being used by absolute diehards. Visual Studio Code's complete supplantation of Atom (with which it competes for resources in the same organization) is why we're having this discussion.
Also totally subject for discussion: I suspect VS Code will see more innovation in years to come.
But I do think Emacs will be fine. I don't think VSCode is an existential threat to Emacs in the same way Toyota is not a threat to Lamborghini. VSCode boasts impressive numbers, but it does so by consolidating in a target demography that was never a stronghold for Emacs to begin with - partly due to some level of indifference on its part. On the other hand, there are things Emacs is uniquely suited for, and for that reason it will continue to attract a particular type. I think in terms of absolute numbers Emacs userbase is still increasing, and I think falling numbers in terms of total percentage doesn't mean much for its survival.
I think I’ll try it again after seeing the news about Atom.
[1]: https://nova.app/
"Atom community involvement has declined significantly"
Probably because it works well enough, some tools don't need endless enhancing
Just found this. It’s a shame. I donno why but I just liked brackets interface.
I used Brackets too back then and tried Atom a few times but it was always too slow and laggy. I was so glad when VSCode came out and that it was actually good. I was in the midst of switching to VIM but it was just too much of a bother.
Every time I try to go back to Sublime, this annoys me right off the bat and I'm back in VSCode by the end of the day.
Or through the Gui - "Preferences --> Package Control"
In VSCode, I can browse info about packages without having to remember a thing aside from "one of the six big icons on the left is 'Extensions'". One mouse click, start typing, click anything that looks like it might be good, get a ton of info and an "install" button. There are filters! So I can simply sort by "most popular" if I want, or by name, or a bunch of other things, all without having to remember anything for this somewhat-infrequent operation, because it's in the GUI.
It's mainly the integrated package exploration that's missing. And the auto-suggestion for plugins—in fact, I rarely have to do any of the above, and just click "OK" to whatever VSCode suggests, and everything's fine.
Sublime has (I just checked) a "package discovery" command, which... opens a web browser, to the exact same page you'd have ended on if you'd started by just googling it (which is what I do). So you have to find what you want on there, then go back to Sublime and find it again.
The result is that in the best case it takes me 1% as long to install what I need on VSCode (just click OK), and worst case it takes me perhaps 50% as long, compared with Sublime. I'm also way less likely to go poke around and see if there's anything that might be useful, in Sublime.
[EDIT] "Why aren't you way more familiar with the command palette?" ephemeral shells as anything more than dead-simple launchers make me really uncomfortable. I hate using them. Apple spotlight? I use it extensively—only for launching programs, period, nothing else. I'd much rather have a persistent shell environment I could attach from any terminal and leave open.
I do love the fact that, with Sublime, that 75%+ of the time when I want to do something, say, pretty-print a JSON text document, it's just:
Ctl-Shift-P, "json" (Don't see anything obvious)
[hit backspace to clear json] "Install Package", "json"
See the "Pretty Print" option, install it in 2 seconds, and on my way.The entire editor being easily tweakble is the killer feature of web-tech based editors.
Sublime may have opened up more customizability since then...
It's amazing how much a minor annoyance can drive someone to a completely different solution.
If you use your text editor professionally, they more than worth the investment.
And if you want to build a text editor for your own needs, Emacs and Neovim are your friends.
It was only adderal driven developer crowd making mountain out of a mole because they felt uneasy their frigging text editor hadn't been updated every other week.