Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com