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Comment by adonese | Hacker News Reader

Sublime is quite good. I have always been using sublime for quick edits, dumping notes etc. But lately I came to appreciate it more as a lightweight IDE. I use go (lsp and some plugins) and ST (sqltools) in addition to package manager and project manager. I like how fast it is, how well polished the editor is. And generally all plug-ins i use work nicely. Also claude helped a lot (eg writing some shortcuts for specific scenarios that I tend to use a lot).

Not to say anything against Zed though. But sublime with one session of claude can help you build your very own customized ide.

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I love(d) Sublime and it's still getting updates from time to time, but unfortunately its ecosystem died five ish years ago, its package repository is a lot of "last updated 10 years ago". It's still a viable editor, but without community support it's not going to be good enough long term.

That said, ST (and its predecessor, forgot the name) set the standard for "lightweight" (lighter than IDEs) editors - Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.

> Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.

True, but Zed is the only spiritual successor IMO, Atom and VSCode do not care about speed or snappiness, which is the nicest thing about Sublime Text (for me.)

> and its predecessor, forgot the name

TextMate? It's been surprisingly influential for an editor I've never seen anyone use; maybe in the US, where people actually buy Mac, it was different.

I didn’t notice that it hasn’t been updated since ‘21 (TM2), but I still use it every day. Just a reliable, minimal, fully native (no electron, etc) editor that is flexible enough to keep adding new bundles to. I’m sad it’s not in development, but happy it’s an oasis from AI coding.

I was a big TM user who ended up on ST because I needed more of the community integrations and so on... which are now turning into a weakness of ST.

I'm still on SublimeText because I can't deal with the sluggishness of VS Code, and I'll pay for the latest version, but I am starting to worry about the future of what is still a great editor. Rust coding in particular is a bit of a nightmare.

The sad thing is that both of these were the products of business models I enthusiastically support and want to see more of: the solo dev (TM) and the small business (ST), or maybe it's solo dev pretending to be small business, I can't really tell.

> or maybe it's solo dev pretending to be small business, I can't really tell.

Certainly small business :)

> last updated 10 years ago

Only a problem if the software has broken in that time period

I still love notepad++. Basically one of only a handful of apps I miss from when I used Windows. First release about a year before textmate, so for me it's the real og.

Eh, I don't think it's really a problem. The much-vaunted VSCode ecosystem isn't actually all that useful imo, so it doesn't bother me that people aren't making lots of Sublime plugins. There's an LSP plugin which is basically all one needs.

I don’t think people realize how easy it is to make Sublime plugins. They can be as simple as a single .py file. No dependencies install step, no meta files, no rituals to go through. Just drop the .py file in the right directory. I’ve used Gemini to build about 3-4 plugins of various complexity and they all work great

> Just drop the .py file in the right directory.

Can I drop it in the 'wrong' directory and have ST pick it up from there? I like apps that are as flexible as possible when it comes to file organization.

I believe if you are using a project workspace (working in a directory with a .sublime-project file) then you can also write plugins right there in the project. But, if you wanted, you can use symlinks. Sublime will follow symlinks. I use this to sync my settings to Dropbox so I can have the same setup on any computer

Same, I'm still using Sublime with SublimeLSP, and it works for 95% of my use cases because I tend to rely on the terminal for everything else. Although I do hope to switch to Zed eventually because of it's built-in debugger and ability to select-copy text in popups (I can't believe Sublime still doesn't allow this in 2026) -- Zed still had some rough edges last time I tried it, and Sublime still seemed to perform better.

I do love how Sublime Text doesn't even blink after getting huge file, where most other editors struggle. And overall speed and responsiveness is unbelievable. I would really like to see any other editor trying to overtake Sublime Text on those metrics.

VSCode is actually one of the best for large files. Not as good as Sublime Text, but it can happily edit million line files, and you'd be surprised how many other editors can't do that. Zed couldn't until recently (not sure if it can now; I haven't checked recently).

Once you get into the GB range there are very very few editors that can edit those files unfortunately.

Vim, neovim, and helix all handle multiple-GB files fine!

> neovim

I have to turn off my config (-u NONE) for large files (e.g., multi-GB JSON files), or everything slows to a crawl. I never profiled it to know what's causing the slowdown. It might be treesitter.

syntax hi-lighting is the usual culprit in regular vim when pasting or piping a big blob of json i’ve found

Yeah but then you have to use Vim-style editing which I hate.

You can compare speed of ST with CudaText.

Can you share the plugins name/configuration for Go in Sublime. There are so many options and configurations published so its hard to find a configuration that works as good as Vscode.

I use emacs as my "lightweight" IDE in the terminal and it's not light at all. Always a big install on a new server and takes ages to start up. I wish I had learned vim instead.

How do you refactor code?

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