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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

There have always been three text editors: Vim, Emacs, and the closed source Mac editor de jour. I used to think that if only that closed source editor would go open source, it could enter that timeless transcendance of Emacs and Vim.

But now Textmate is open source, and now there is Atom, I am not so sure any more. Neither Textmate nor Sublime Text, nor Atom seem to be able to stand up to the two old ones in term of development community and community involvement.

Maybe it is a question of novelty. Vim still has unmatched key bindings. Emacs atill has unmatched total flexibility. Textmate had snippets (which now everyone has), Sublime Text has multiple cursors (which is maybe not a big enough improvements over macros to matter). Light Table seemed interesting, but probably too narrow in scope. My hope is that Atom's openness will finally allow it to transcend its brethren. But I don't see a compelling reason for that yet.

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The true killer feature of Sublime Text is the fact that it runs flawlessly on the 3 major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux).

I know people will scream that Emacs (and vim) have windows ports, but they are utter crap compared to running them under a Unix. I can tell that from experience. Emacs on Windows is unbearably slow: it took 10 times as much to start as on the same host, same SSD, when it is run under a Linux VM! It also relies heavily on standard Unix tools (wget, grep, ...), whose ports for Windows are extremely outdated to the point that they are unusable (Emacs 24's find in file relies on features not provided by the standard non-CYGWIN grep). There only solution is to use CYGWIN, which is a mess: it's extremely slow, behaves weirdly (wrt path names, notably), and it doesn't play well if you already have a standard MSYSGit installation for your git needs. (I have tried using Emacs at least 4 times already, and I have never managed to stick to it, for these kind of reasons.)

I love ST. It boots fast, is gorgeous, modern (unlike Emacs, you can have your cursor outside the region you are viewing!), trivial to configure (with auto-reload of config files), has sane defaults and great support for most languages out of the box, it has a great community, and a nice language choice for moddability. It might have been born has an OS X éditeur du jour, but I'd say it's more of a blessing for Windows developers where good, modern editors are rare.

This is one of the many things I love about ST. I create in both Linux & OS X and ST just works wonderfully. I've never worked with a cross platform program that works as well as ST; everything from the keyboard shortcuts, to the look and feel of the GUI is a thing of beauty.

> Emacs (and vim) have windows ports, but they are utter crap compared to running them under a Unix. I can tell that from experience.

I don't think you have much experience with Vim on Windows. I use Vim on Windows every day for years (terminal and gVim) and the experience is the same or better than mac/unix, except for the lack of a good POSIX shell (which is a problem for every Windows text editor).

> you can have your cursor outside the region you are viewing!

That means you're using the scrollbar. It would be nice if Vim added a jumplist entry when the scrollbar was used though...

The notion that Sublime Text's USP is "multiple cursors" is absurd.

It is a lightning fast next-generation editor. It changed the game entirely when released, and still nothing comes close.

Do you edit very large files? The regex engine and UI update speed feels incredibly slow to me when making complex changes across thousands of lines in a 200MB file, while vim or grep/awk/etc have no such problem.

No, I don't edit 200MB files, and I suspect that that is not what Sublime Text was optimized for. I would use another tool for that.

What else does Sublime Text do that is new? I guess you could count the minimap. The command palette, code navigation, configuration files, package management, speed, plugins, snippets, all have been implemented and widely used in both Emacs and Vim for years.

I would be pleased to be proven wrong here, but how exactly did it "change the game entirely", and how exactly is it a "next-generation editor"?

Also what makes Vim and Emacs timeless is that they run everywhere. Command Line and Windowed, over SSH or on your machine. This is something no other 'modern' text editor even tries to match.

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