Sublime Text 4 Build 4142 | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Text 4 Build 4142

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108 pointsjoeyespo61 comments

No specific comments about this release, just want to express my admiration and gratitude for the developers. Sublime has been my daily driver for 10 years and I love it. It's the scalpel to VS Code's swiss army knife.

Thank you, Sublime devs, for making/maintaining performant, unobtrusive software in 2022! Sublime is a role model.

Maybe a project-oriented IDE next? Want to ditch JetBrains for project-editing since it's a pig.

> Want to ditch JetBrains for project-editing since it's a pig.

Ah found the guy they're making intellijs version of vscode for. I should let them know he's not interested

Yea - Fleet also seems like a worst-of-both-worlds thing. I want PyCharm/IJRust functionality and interface, but fast.

I downloaded the public preview of Fleet right after they announced its availability and somehow they've managed to make a thing that both consumes MORE CPU and is SLOWER than InteliJ and I was left wondering how.

Like it was just sitting there idling using 10% of my CPU, with the so-called "Smart Mode" disabled.

I had a similar experience.

What do you like about it better than VS Code?

Speed

> * Syntax-based Code Folding

Not anymore ;)

Built in keyboard macros that don't suck. Speed too.

Also lighter on the memory.

VS Code is not fast. It's not bad but it's also not good in terms of performance.

Sublime is probably the best performing application I'm using. Instant startup times, zero lag when typing. That does make a difference.

I'm using it as my scratch buffer. I can't be bothered to click No to not save all the bazillion tabs I have opened, so the thing is always started. Can't feel it.

ctrl d

Same. I'm just so flipping happy for Sublime's ongoing success. I'm so glad they proved the early doubters wrong.

There are so many fantastic editors these days. A real embarrassment of riches. Something for everyone.

I hope Sublime is a motivating role model for other indie devs. If you create a great product, and pace yourself for the long-term, you too could become a "working artist" style dev (solo or team).

I'm not sure what I'm missing out on by not using VSCode. LSP support in Sublime is quite good now and there are still tons of extensions.

A built-in debugger is probably the biggest thing I'm missing out on -- but I don't personally want that in my editor anyway.

VSCode's mediocre performance kind of grinds you down over a long period of time. It's hard to notice in any particular moment.

Sublime's extensions take a bit more research but they are an upfront cost rather than an ongoing irritation.

That said, taste is a factor. It's possible VSCode simply fits you in a way that it does not others.

I sadly gave up and switched to vscode for typescript. The language server and debugger integrations are too good to pass up, there are some really nice extensions and a much nicer way to manage them, and GitHub Copilot is pretty darn cool. Every time it hangs for hundreds of milliseconds while I'm typing I wish I could go back.

Sublime bet on its own code indexing engine and it seems like that was a mistake. I think it predates LSP, but now that LSP is a success they should embrace it with native support.

VsCode seems like a worst of both worlds. Poor performance, and not suitable for editing multi-file projects. Maybe as a compromise between a full IDE and a text editor?

Of note, I recently switched from VsCode to Sublime for editing individual files.

> not suitable for editing multi-file projects

What does this mean?

Neither Sublime nor VsCode have the deep introspection and refactoring capability of an IDE like JetBrains. Or concepts of projects that each have their own files, windows etc.

> concepts of projects that each have their own files, windows etc.

Both Sublime and VSCode definitely have a concept of projects with their own files and windows. Is your complaint that the projects are folder-based instead of taking the form of a "project file" containing a list of files in the project? Because I really see the latter as an anti-feature.

> Is your complaint that the projects are folder-based instead of taking the form of a "project file" containing a list of files in the project

as an aside, you can totally do this with do this with sublime-project files if you want.

Let's use sublime as an example. File. Open Folder. Select folder. It now shows a tree on the left. Now I want to change a variable, struct or enum name project-wide; there's no obvious way.

That's your first complaint, about refactoring. It has nothing to do with your second complaint about the project structure.

Also, Sublime doesn't do refactoring but VSCode totally does, given appropriate language server support which does exist for e.g. typescript. I have no problem believing that IntelliJ has more and fancier refactorings and code navigation features, but honestly I have never had a lot of use for anything more than rename, goto definition, find all references, and most importantly function/variable name completion, which all work great in VSCode.

Sublime does as well, for languages with LSP support

Only with a third party LSP plugin right? My experience with LSP in Sublime has been bad. I'm not planning to try it again until LSP support is built in.

yup, though it's worked pretty well with the languages I've tried it with (go & rust)

I've heard this before, but have been unable to make it work in practice, for VsCode.

Fair enough. Languages which are not typescript may not have good LSP implementations.

> Or concepts of projects that each have their own files, windows etc.

You mean like workspaces[1]? Or Multi-Root Workspaces[2]?

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/workspaces [2] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/multi-root-workspa...

I find that VSCode's performance is not really poor, most of the time. VSCode is actually faster to open large files. Yes, it's true, compare it yourself! I have definitely experienced performance issues in Sublime with long lines as well.

My performance problems with VSCode are mostly short hangs and trouble keeping up with typing. Sublime is definitely better, but I only experience those problems in VSCode sometimes. And I could probably fix it by removing some of the extensions I have installed.

I still use Sublime as a replacement for Notepad.

It opens blazing fast, I create a new tab, jot down whatever and close it without being prompted to save.

That is reason enough to keep it installed.

And the multicursor feature is fantastic for ”generating code”. For example turning long list of column names into select statement that does some processing for them.

Yep, it’s my go to text manipulation tool - it’s one of the first things I install in a new machine, it’s just fantastic really

I wish Sublime Text was opensource, I just use [Lapce](https://github.com/lapce/lapce).

I'd love it if it were even just "public source". There are some features that I want to add, for just my own personal use, that can't be done with the python plugin system.

I start VSCode whenever I need the UI debugger or an LSP plugin is too immature on Sublime. But otherwise, I daily drive Sublime Text. The speed difference vs. VSCode is night & day for me.

Would be interesting to see the code for Sublime Text at some point.

I understand it would hurt their sales but there's so few codebases showing how to make fast apps with QT.

Since when did Sublime Text use Qt?

Afaik they use their own UI toolkit.

they don't use QT; they use a custom toolkit.

The "OS Recent Files Integration" blew up my dock icon so now instead just showing open windows, it's filled with random files I happened to touch. How is this useful? I'll edit 20 files in a sitting regularly. Also, it made looking at open app windows a complete mess - giant icons of text files, and the minimized window I'm looking for just sorta shoved into a corner...

So I turned it off in the settings, cleared the recent files in the menu, but now there's a bunch of files just sorta stuck in the OS recents... Anyone know how to manually clear recent files from an app in macOS?

The main selling point for Sublime for me was its speed.

Whenever I wanted a quick edit, or to open a big file that VS Code and others will struggle with - I used Sublime.

But now I moved to Lapce[1] which is even faster (I didn't think it'd be possible) and open source, which is a huge bonus. It's not feature complete yet, but it got good enough and they improve fast.

1: https://github.com/lapce/lapce

Love sublime, I work on python/django based project code base which is huge. Add to that the strain of multitudes of docker containers. And Chrome tabs. All of these eat up my RAM. I can easily use pycharm, but the speed and raw code feel of sublime is unbeatable.

Search and replace in multiple files.

Multiple cursors.

Ability to have N number of unsaved tabs

chef's kiss

I want to be a Sublime Text user. I want to give them my money. I want the performance of a native macOS app, but…

I’m a full-time Go developer. Last time I tried Sublime Text, I couldn’t get close to what I have in vscode with an all-in-one Go extension to handle `gopls` for function lookups/refactoring/etc and `golangci-lint` for linting, for example. I am even willing to live without integrated debugging if everything else is near perfect. Sublime gets so close with several extensions, but it didn’t feel coherent. Before I try again, is it worth the effort or is Go support still spread across several disparate extensions from different developers?

Last time I tried Sublime to code in Go I had success with LSP extension and gopls, actually.

I tried to use vscode but sublime keeps pulling me back. I love the performance and the ui doesn't distract me like some other editors do.

For many years ST is my daily driver for writing notes, research papers (in Markdown), zsh scripts and coding in Julia. ST (plus Sublime Merge) is just.. sublime :) I've tried vim, nvim, been a hardcore emacs user for half a year and I always return to ST.

The single piece of software I attached to in my entire life. It was a really hard decision to leave it behind.

Why'd you stop using it?

At the time I made the change, vscode had a better plugin ecossystem to my needs. Still use it when I need for specific stuff, but it isn't my main text editor anymore.

Same. I always have both open, but use VSCode 98% of the time

Genuine question: Sublime seems to make only 1 new update/release per year … is having at least 1 release per year needed in order sell new licenses in an attempt to make their software like an annual subscription?

fwiw they release about monthly in the dev channel

Interesting. Didn’t know that. Thanks

I rolled back the update because TSX files kept beachballing on me.

I've mostly moved on to vscode. Still use sublime for quick edits though. It is an awesome product.

I really like sublime merge though! Can't work without it.

On macOS, how is sublime text better than Nova and perhaps Textmate?

Can't answer that question, but I use Mac and Linux, and Sublime being cross platform is a huge win for me. If you're all in on Mac, you should look at Nova, as it is beautifully designed, and you often can't beat apps that are designed specifically for a single OS.

Last I checked, Nova doesn't do keyboard macros and I do a lot of text munging and need them because I refuse to type the same sequence multiple times.

I still use ed. Because Ed is the standard text editor.

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