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Comment by ivandenysov | Hacker News Reader

What are some reasons to pick Sublime Text over Zed for someone not familiar with either?

For me? I already have Sublime Text installed, it works great, and has never not worked great.

Ditto

Sublime text is what notepad++ wished to be. There are many tasks that do not require a full IDE, not even vscode and sublime just works. Always, consistently, reliably works, is fast and a joy to use.

If you're using AI to write code, IDE features don't really seem that important anymore.

cool. and if you're not?

Otherwise, jumping back and forth while you're reading the code is a real pain.

Also, LSP can turn Sublime Text into almost an IDE (but much more performant).

Sublime Text's implementation of LSP is the buggiest and clunkiest I have used in a text editor

Sublime is an editor I trust to leave open at all times, no matter what.

But, Helix lsp integration and shortcuts is really excellent, and much better than anything else IMO.

>Sublime text is what notepad++ wished to be.

Nonsense statement, Notepad++ has always been superior in every metric

Objectively, Notepad++ is inferior at cross-platform support. Subjectively, I don't like that the creator of Notepad++ uses the software itself as a platform for his politics. In either case, I prefer Sublime.

Notepad++ is like if Word 98 and IrfanView had a baby, a baby who updates twice a week. No disrespect to any of them, but having a clean interface and killer performance was never their claim to fame.

Are you kidding me!? You can have hundreds, even thousands of tabs of files of any size open in Np++, close without saving, and yet get back instantly on the same session when you start it up next time. Notepad++ is literally faster than Microsoft's own native Notepad, let alone Sublime Text. Even 50GB csv files open instantly in Np++.

Zed pretty much copied everything over from Sublime, so it's pretty much on par. Sublime was one of the first editors to have an uncluttered UI without toolbars, but with advanced features, like multi-cursor editing and the command palette. As a long time sublime users, it still feels superior as it gets lots of small details right, like for example when I do Cmd+P to search for files and scroll through the files it will show a preview, Zed doesn't show a preview until you actually select the file.

cough textmate

Technically correct. However, for the majority of humans, their first encounter with these features and behaviors could never be TextMate, and instead would be Sublime Text. TextMate never growing to be cross-platform is a major reason for Sublime Text's early growth.

no, their first exposure was bbedit

Yup, I used TextMate a lot back in the early 2000s, and Sublime from around 2010 and bought a license maybe a year later.

To this day I always install Sublime on my new machines, it's the perfect text editor for my needs: fast and snappy, buffers are persistent so I can use as a scratch pad without having to save files, can customise with plugins if needed, the command palette gives quite a bit of power user features.

I mostly use it as a scratch pad nowadays, like if I'm debugging something, collecting a bunch of text from different places to reference quickly, nothing too advanced (nor directly related to coding) and is still one of the most satisfying programs to use on my day-to-day. It's basically always open, just waiting for a new buffer.

I use Sublime mostly these days but I still have a soft spot for TextMate. Sublime is the closest that exists to its spiritual successor, but it’s missing the “macness” that TextMate brought back in the day, which is the cost of being a cross-platform app I suppose.

Sublime was an evolution from TextMate. They even used the TM file formats for snippets and language syntax iirc.

I’m using Zed, but I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone yet. They claim 1.0 but in reality it’s still beta software. It is fundamentally broken in how it deals with the file system so the project panel and git panel can easily miss changes, and it’s still not clear if they’ll even address it.

At least it seems the next release might fix the bug where the git panel will jump to a different repo when you click on a file in it. They should seriously have fixed basic stuff like that before releasing 1.0. But they got in lots of cosmetic changes to the markdown viewer.. they really need to consider their priorities

Don't have any metrics or anything, but I use both, and anecdotally, I feel like Sublime is snappier and gives me better battery life.

Flipside, sublime's memory management leaves much to be desired.

We put a fair amount of effort into reducing our resource footprint, so I'm curious what you find lacking in our memory management. From a quick test we use a similar amount of memory to Zed.

How long did you leave your test running?

Was it sustained use with files open over days / weeks?

(I've been a sublime user for well over a decade, across multiple platforms. Thanks for the downvote.)

Hard to compare the two programs over a week of uptime. ST memory usage does get larger as caches get filled over time, but I've had uptimes of months without issue. I'd expect similar results from other editors.

Do you have a specific memory issue where it keeps using more over time?

General issue, have observed it on multiple systems. On a long enough timescale, will grow to farcical amounts of memory usage.

Unfortunately, while this is something I've observed through major point releases and on different platforms, there have always been some plugins in use.

UnUnfortunately not enough commonality in configuration or hours in the day to track down if this would happen on a totally clean install...

I'm sure your roadmap is quite extensive, but it would be great if sublime itself could graph or warn when memory usage increased by some specified percentage, or if any particular plugin spikes resource usage.

Plugins are a frequent culprit of issues like this. Depending on how you're tracking memory usage you may already be able to at least narrow down the culprit by looking at which process is using too much; plugins run on a separate process and may launch additional processes from there.

Unfortunately tracking individual plugin memory usage is not possible without invasive (and slow) tracing. If the plugins are causing big memory usage in the main process it can be hard to nail down due to that state being shared between all plugins.

Sublime Text is measured "snappier" and use less memory than Zed.

https://koieditor.com/benchmarks/

Zed has no real plugins, and its core isn't as advanced enough as to not require them (though given the infinity of workflow variety, unlikely to ever be), it's bloated in comparison, and has a few more broken basics (like not properly tracking externally changed files)

Sublime Text is not aligned with an 'any minute now' pivot to enshittification.

And whatever it does, it does better than Zed, debatably.

I started using Zed daily about 6 months ago after 10 years of VS Code. VS Code was having idiotic regressions (like randomly inserting a copy of the final line of a file on save) while they were busy pumping out AI features.

Turns out, Zed is also busy pumping out AI features and the code editing experience is degrading. I'm actively shopping for a replacement.

If you're on Mac: https://koieditor.com/compare/zed/

Sublime Text doesn't automatically download and run language servers without your consent. Zed does, and last I looked there's no way to turn that behavior off (the devs said it's an intentional decision to make things easier for users). I am personally of the opinion that it isn't acceptable for software to start pulling in other software without my consent, so I avoid Zed like the plague. The Gram fork of Zed is pretty good, though.

> it isn't acceptable for software to start pulling in other software without my consent

Yes. That is a bit shady.

If you need to ask this question, that means there is no difference for you. Just choose one and commit.

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