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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Text 3 is still one of my favorite editors. I use VSCode lately because of its excellent "Remote SSH" integration - but when it comes to latency sublime has it beat.

Zed does not feel fast on my machine, which is a 13900K/128gb ram. It is running in xwayland though, so that could be part of the problem. It feels identical to vscode.

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Sublime Text gang, raise up.

I was always a fan of Sublime Text and I moved away from it once because VSC felt more "hassle-free". The extensions just worked, I didn't need to go through endless JSON files to configure things, I even uncluttered its interface but at the end of the day I returned to good old Sublime Text. Now with LSPs it requires way less tinkering with plugins. I only wish it had just a little bit more UI customizability for plugins to use (different panes etc). Maybe with Sublime Text 5 if that ever comes.

Also about the speed: VSC is fast but in comparison... Sublime Text is just insta-fast.

I'm all for Sublime Text and Merge, my daily drivers for all kinds of writing..

I feel the same way about Notepad++

notepad++ is a respectable editor but sublime defeats it at everything except price.

ST4 is my go-to for quickly viewing and editing individual files. It really is instant compared to VSC.

I don't really run ST with any complex plugins though and leave cases where I want those for VSC. The ones I have installed right now are just extra syntax highlighting and Filter Lines (which I find very handy for progressively filtering down logs)

I still use ST for opening huge files. 9 times out of 10 if a huge file cannot be opened in any other editor, I will open it in subl and it will be just fine.

I have used Sublime Text my entire pro programming career. Before that I used emacs for a while.

I love it and will not switch it for anything. It is maybe one of the best pieces of software ever made. A lot of the things such as multiple cursors, command palette etc where first popularized by ST.

Today, I use it to write Rust, Go, web stuff and with LSP I get all the autocomplete I need. I also use Kitty as a separate terminal (never liked the terminal in editor thing).

Things like Cmd-R and Cmd-Shift-R to show symbols in file and symbols in project work better, faster and more reliably than many LSP symbol completions.

It is hard, when so many in our industry are cheapstakes and don't want to pay for their tools, like in every other profession.

They rather suffer with VSCode than pay a couple of dollars for Sublime Text.

I paid for Sublime, but moved to VSCode because at least at the time it had better hassle free support for more languages. Including linters, auto formatting and just generally convenient stuff.

I‘m not sure where it stands now. My guess is that Sublime has caught up for mainstream languages, but the support for languages that are a bit more niche like Clojure or Zig is nowhere near as good.

I miss the speed and editing experience of Sublime though.

I was the same as you but in the end I returned to Sublime. Nowadays with LSP plugin you don't need much, just LSP + extension to support your language and that's about it.

They changed the licenses to 3 year from lifetime though, so it's a bit of a bummer but at the same time I get it.

Sublime's focused/minimalist UI is nice. VS Code sometimes feels like it tries to do too much.

My ideal editor would probably be something like a variation on Sublime Text that's modeled more closely after TextMate while keeping the bits that make Sublime better (like the command palette).

Sublime is the better Textmate. What would you do to subl to make it more like mate? I used textmate for years and years before switching to ST and it was a drop-in replacement.

The two are pretty close, but between the two TextMate feels more like a golden era OS X desktop app thanks to several small differences and tiny Mac-isms, and I'd like Sublime to have that feel too.

I also feel TextMate had the nicer overall UX. When I first tried Sublime, TextMate had the better text rendering (IMO). Sublime has more features but still doesn’t feel as slick somehow.

I’ve recently returned to Sublime from VSC. I prefer VSC’s UI for following links to definitons/references, but in most other ways I prefer Sublime’s nimbleness.

Not that this was necessarily better in terms of capabilities, but TextMate had a very pleasing Unix-style extension model where there was no mandated language and extension commands used scripts/executables written in any language. There was even a nice graphical editor for fine-tuning exactly what input they would be given and how their output would be acted upon.

TextMate was very much "Mac OS X UI sensibilities combined with Unix power", whereas ST pretty much has its own self-contained philosophy that's then brought to Mac/Windows/Linux in a slick way.

I'm begrudgingly stuck with VSCode because of language support in the smaller-community languages I work with, but any time it starts being a dog (and it doesn't take much, think a 20MiB test data file) I switch back for that purpose.

I'm also never letting it anywhere near a merge again, after the worst merge in my years of using git. Sublime Merge doesn't give me the same warm feelings as Sublime Text, but it works, and it won't choke on a big patch and apply a huge deletion without showing it to me first.

| It is running in xwayland though

It definitely isn't on my system, and I did not touch the configs at all; are you sure about that?

Fairly positive due to blurry cursors, but I have no way to verify.

If you run xeyes and the eyes follow your cursor when it's above the application you want to test, it's running under xwayland. If they don't follow your cursor, the application is running under native Wayland.

finally a use for xeyes?

I don't use vanilla xeyes but I use the Window Maker dockapp version (https://bstern.org/wmeyes/) to make it easier to find my cursor on the screen.

Ha. KDE 6 has something like if you jiggle the cursor a certain way, it temporarily grows larger.

Better than Windows's function of "hide all my windows"...

I think every OS has this feature. Sometimes it is hidden in an accessibility menu and needs to be turned on.

Pressing some key a few times in Windows highlights your cursor. I just can't remember what it was (Ctrl I think)

Yup, Ctrl twice.

Once works. It's an option you have to turn on: Settings > Mouse > Additional mouse options > Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key.

Oh thank you thank you. I moved to Windows 11 and the feature disappeared - it is right where your path points to.

I always run xeyes in any net-enabled gui. iykyk.

Welp, looks like it is running native wayland yet the cursors are blurry. The only time I have ever experienced that is when an app is running under xwayland.

If you run xlsclients it will list all applications running through xwayland.

[0] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xorg-xlsclients/

Oooh, thank you this is very convenient. Confirmed zed is not listed here.

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