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Comment by szastamasta | Hacker News Reader

It might sound controversial, but for me Atom was almost a 1 to 1 Sublime copy with worse performance and quality. It was slow and ugly. It’s only quality was that it was 0$.

It was the first editor I’ve seen to choke when opening 1M file (it even had a warning that it’s a too big file - lol). There simply was not enough RAM in the world for this memory hog.

I’m not really sad to see it go. It was another free toy of a big company that people used not to spend 60$ on real thing made by small company and waste thousands of dollars on lost productivity and time.

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As an editor day to day yes you are correct. Sublime is the goat as far as performance. VSCode has become my primary editor because I work remotely via SSH but nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl. I still run it in tandem with vscode for stuff that doesn’t require a remote conn. It’s an order of magnitude quicker than VSCode.

> nothing can touch the lightness and latency of subl

There's this editor called vim. You should have a look.

For some people (like me), re-teaching muscle memory is a huge battle that takes years. Switching to an editor where you can't use the mouse as a crutch until you learn it is a non-starter.

vim has both terminal and gui builds. The latter supports the mouse.

Even the terminal build supports the mouse. `set mouse=a`

I use vim as my daily driver. Just want to make it clear to people that even vim with mouse support is not going to be a drop in replacement for vscode/atom/sublime. You're still going to have a hare time being productive in it for a good while until you learn the keybinds and train your muscle-memory

Next time you're on an airplane and have nothing to do, but have access to a laptop, consider firing up `vimtutor`. I think you might underestimate how much time it takes to build up muscle memory in a new system. Not saying you'll be a wizard by the time you get off the flight, but it might surprise you how far you get!

You need a good machine, but on an M2 SSD with a recent CPU and enough RAM, VSCode takes one second to start, much less to open a new tab. Not sure Sublime Text's speed will still be a big selling point in the future.

> t was the first editor I’ve seen to choke when opening 1M file

I recall trying Atom before VSCode had been released. I loaded up a 1MB XML file and it ground to a halt.

After some searching I found a bug tracker issue reflecting this, where one of the devs said something to the effect of "a 1MB XML file is extremely large, I don't think we'll support that".

At that point I uninstalled Atom.

On a related note, not long ago I accidentally dragged a 450MB SQL script into VSCode. I fully expected it to cave like Atom had on the 1MB XML. However to my pleasant surprise it worked just fine. Editing it was as quick as a regular file, and the memory usage was not excessive (around 2.5G total). I admit I was a bit impressed by that.

I had a gig which required opening ridiculously large XML files (metadata for music albums). Some classical music compilations (think "6 CD bargain bin" boxsets) would end up with 1-2GB XML files.

Sublime didn't even flinch when opening and navigating around the file. Truly impressive text editor and absolutely worth the license cost.

2.5G is definitely excessive.

Not optimized, perhaps, but not unreasonable given the metadata over a nearly-500MB file I would think?

Not sure how it represents text, but if it's using UTF-16 (I'm on Windows), then that's 900MB just there given the ASCII input file.

Not gonna say it's lightweight, but not excessive in my book.

Sublime Text is a fantastic editor. In my opinion it deserves more popularity.

Sublime Text definitely had it's moment in the spotlight, at one point (around 2012-2014) it was basically the only editor I saw people using, besides emacs/vim which has its diehard fans (including myself).

Most of those people are using Visual Studio Code today instead, although in comparison, VS Code is very bloated and slow.

For fun and giggles, here is a comparison of the Google popularity between Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, TextMate, Vim and Emacs: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

I also like emacs, Vim and NeoVim a lot… I guess I probably prefer them over Sublime Text. I like the fact that Sublime Text is performant, written in C++, and the product of the work of a guy, not a corporation. I’m happy to pay for stuff I like. It’s a pity that it’s closed-source, though…

And here I am still using TextMate...

(95% of my coding is in Xcode, the rest gets funneled through TextMate).

Atom being free was surely the main factor. But Sublime was also in a bit of a development rut back then. So Atom filled a bit of a void there.

Yeah, same. I have that disorder where I reflexively try new editors, and Atom lasted about 20 minutes on my computer.

My daily driver editors for the last 20 years, in rough order, were:

* BBEdit

* TextMate

* Sublime

* emacs

I still fire up Sublime, but the longer I use org the better I am at general editing in emacs. It's a gateway drug. ;)

It's unfortunate because all I want is a notepad with syntax highlighting and Atom with most packages disabled offered that.

I don't need code complete, or a terminal, or extensions, or anything else VScode offers. I suppose now is a good time to write my own notepad :/

I think you should get just that with Notepad++ on Windows or TextWrangler (BBedit) on Mac. On Linux I think that all stock editors have it (GEdit, etc…). All that for free and without Electron madness. You should be much better with any of them.

TextWrangler was my goto before Atom and I do prefer the look of the latter.

SciTE is pretty good in that role.

https://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

If you use windows, notepad++ is what you're looking for. It was my first love in terms of code editors, and I still haven't found an editor (besides vim, and probably emacs) that handles on-the-fly macro recording and playback like NPP has for decades.

Both Sublime Text and Merge are great and well worth the price for me :)

I do not really see the point of Sublime Merge. Tried it a few times, but it just seems unnecessary.

Is it just for people who want to avoid the CLI?

When you're dealing with multiple repos, projects, tasks, contributors etc, version control quickly becomes a very multi-dimensional thing. I generally prefer CLI software where possible, and will happily use vanilla git for personal projects, but once a certain threshold of complexity is passed, a good git GUI seems to add a lot of value.

Line-by-line commits in Sublime Merge are much easier to do. Also the timeline view if you're pressured into "gitflow" and such things.

I own a Sublime Merge license and I've been using it as my only Git client for the past year, at least.

It is faster and exposes what I want to do better than any other Git client I've tried. It's easier than the CLI to use, and so far I've found minimal things it cannot do.

I would recommend it to anyone (unless they're obsessed with all-CLI tools for efficiency, then I guess not)

I'm a heavy git user, but I've never used anything else except Sublime Merge.

Because of that, I am also comfortable now with the CLI: Sublime Merge uses git terminology and made me understand a lot of details about git that I can transfer to the CLI. Things like using stash, cherry picking, tagging or rebasing are all very easily doable in Sublime Merge and if you choose to use one of those features, you automatically get familar with the CLI commands you'd need to use. Brilliant.

I'm not familiar with the whole feature set of the CLI, but I'm not missing much during day-to-day work in Sublime Merge.

PS: Clearly when it comes to more specific issues to fix, there is still the option to use the CLI for that.

Same for me and my whole Team. I'm loving it. They're cheap, reliable, fast, flexible, beautiful - just awesome enabler that don't stand in the way. Huge Kudos to the creators! <3

The first and last time I tried Sublime Text, it turned out to be impossible to properly have a file open in two editors (or tabs or whatever Sublime's term is): any changes made in one editor were only synchronized to the other editor upon saving the file. I really tried to like Sublime, but the lack of such a basic feature was a total no-go. That was several years ago, has the situation changed?

Multiple views into a single file have been supported for a long time; I believe as far back as ST2. Currently it's easily accessible by right-clicking on a tab and selecting "Split View".

Yes, but are modifications in one view immediately reflected in the other view, without having to save the file?

Yes

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