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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Text (https://www.sublimetext.com/) is fantastic. Startup time is instant. RAM usage is low. It'll do syntax highlighting out of the box. And with a few extensions (optional) it'll do almost everything that VS Code does (sublime-lsp is key for IDE-like functionality). It's also great for large files so long as they'll fit in RAM.

Bonus: it works cross platform (windows/mac/linux).

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+1 for Sublime Text. Additional lesser known capability - it is possibly the best editor for gigantic text files. I have used it to open and edit files with 5.5 million lines, and it was reasonably fast. Afaik not many editors can even open very big files.

This is my use case for Sublime Text, if I get stuck with a massive file I go straight to Sublime.

but why is it your backup option? Any reason you don't use it as a first option?

Sublime Text has a small, maybe old, number of plug-ins.

Gotta throw my vote in for this, too. I have been a paying user since the first version, after leaving Textmate. I daily drive VS Code now for the remote experience, but Sublime blows it away in performance. Even on the nicest hardware imaginable there is noticeable input latency on virtually all tasks in vscode.

Note: Sublime Text is proprietary software.

Indeed it is (and it's good that you mentioned this). I should note that the pricing and license terms are very reasonable:

- $99 (USD) for a perpetual licence for the current version at the time of purchase + 3 years worth of updates.

- Per-user rather than per-machine, so you can install it on multiple machines with a single licence.

Adding to this, while the software is proprietary the community mods/plugins/packages ecosystem is very healthy and easy to use. https://packagecontrol.io/

i wouldn’t call it healthy. the packages ecosystem is slowly dying and absolutely full of outdated, abandoned projects.

It's not at its peak for sure, perhaps aging, but still healthy enough to take a jog around the block.

SublimeLinter was modified 2 weeks ago, Side Bar Enhancements 1 month ago, Bracket Highlighter 2 weeks ago, etc.

Sorting by last modified on https://packagecontrol.io/browse/updated, you need to go to page 20 to find the ones updated more than one year ago.

+1 for Sublime.

I have yet to find it's max file size limit. It can seemingly open up literally anything with no perf impact.

I tried to open a 90GB file once (on a system with 16GB RAM), which it didn't like very much. It didn't actually crash, I just gave up on it before it completed loading the file (I suspect it may actually have worked eventually, utilising swap - but I imagine it would have been unusably slow). I think for such large files you really need an editor that doesn't buffer the entire file into RAM and loads chunks in from disk on demand.

That said, if your file is more reasonably sized (I've opened 7GB files no problem) then the performance and feature set you get is impressive. You can get instant scrolling to anywhere in the file, full syntax highlighting, find and replace, multiple cursors, etc all with reasonable performance. I find it does lag a little when making edits - especially with multiple cursors - but it's still quite usable.

> I think for such large files you really need an editor that doesn't buffer the entire file into RAM and loads chunks in from disk on demand.

That's what mmap does: maps the entire file into the address space of the process while letting the kernel load the pages as they are touched. I assume that would improve performance significantly but I'm not sure if anyone's tried it.

That would be read-only though, so not an ideal solution for Sublime. Although one could mmap and then reference the original from a structure describing how the file was modified.

However mmaping files which can be modified by another process concurrently is tricky. You can just get killed by SIGBUS.

>> I think for such large files you really need an editor that doesn't buffer the entire file into RAM and loads chunks in from disk on demand

It seems that vim could work this way as you are always dealing with a small section of text at a time. However, this seems not to be how it works.

This is my goto as well. There are other Windows-exclusive options but it being cross platform makes it a no-brainer for those bouncing between OSes, since things like configs and plugins can be easily shared between machines.

It also eschews Windows’ notoriously dodgy text rendering in favor of its own which means that it doesn’t share text rendering quirks with e.g. Visual Studio (the full fat IDE, not the electron thing). When doing C# work I wish I could transplant Sublime’s editor view into Visual Studio because it’s just so much better.

Just tried to load an .EXE and it only seemed to list as binary when loaded, that's OK but is there a 'load as text' option? Forcing text mode is sometimes useful when recovering damage files (loading a PDF seems to work as text). Sorry if I've overlooked something major.

File > Reopen with Encoding > UTF-8 (or pick your encoding of choice)

OK thanks, thought it'd be in the View menu or such. Seems a little odd that it's so obscure.

You'd usually look up stuff like that with a shot in the dark into the fuzzy-searching command bar, I believe it's available with ctrl+shift+p? It's been a while since I've used sublime.

Thanks, will try it.

Just tried it - as advertised! Much more responsive than VsCode. Replacing it for editing one-off files.

Now, we need a project-editing IDE like JetBrains with better responsiveness.

Showing an OOM lower RAM and CPU use in the Task Manager.

Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use.

For USD 99 you get three years of support for an individual license.

It's free though

When you try saving a file randomly you get pop ups telling you that you need a license. Eventually it gets so irritating you give up on sublime text entirely.

or, you know, pay for the great software you use?

I just got a license because it improved my life tremendously, but I can see that 70$ is a hefty price for individuals.

+1. Great, solid editor, and the extension ecosystem is great, plugins for pretty much anything you'd need.

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