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Comment by kendallpark | Hacker News Reader

I can't find a text editor superior to Sublime. Maybe one day I'll buck up and learn vim then join the superiority-complex crowd, but until then Sublime all the way.

I was hoping that Atom would be better or comparable, but just doesn't feel as solid as Sublime. So laggy.

Has anyone read this book? Good reviews?

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I've used Vim for 19+ years. I've used it on Sun OS, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows (Cygwin and native), Linux and OS X.

I use Sublime Text now.

Why? It's hella fast. It has a great plugin infrastructure and community. It has lots of 21st century niceties with regards to its GUI, retina support, etc. It stays out of my way. Even the ST3-dev versions have been rock solid for me (on OS X, other OSs may vary).

But most of it it's this: the things VIM does, and they are nice, are not that interesting to me. I know how to split and recombine text in 200 different ways, move in all directions by various amounts, do stuff with selections, play with buffers, etc etc.

Those are not the problems I have when I write code. For an admin, or a text monkey this kind of stuff might be more useful. For me they're more like circus acts useful in rare ocassions. In most cases I'm writing like 10 words per minute -- because I'm thing, debugging, designing APIs, and whatever we programmers do.

(I still use Vim whenever I SSH into some server, and as the EDITOR set in the shell).

> Maybe one day I'll buck up and learn vim then join the superiority-complex crowd

Is that the sole reason for learning vim? I mean I am all for investing in productivity, but vim seems to be a tool for geeks to boast about and surprise a lay-person how fast they can work. Is it worth the time you invest to get used to it when you compare it to Sublime Text?

Don't listen to those people. Vim was very much worth the initial learning curve, for me at least. I never really used Sublime that much, so I can't speak for it. Maybe it gives you 80% of vim's productivity for 1/4th of the effort, but make no mistake, vim is an absurdly powerful tool which I'm 99% sure beats Sublime out of the water (though, again, I never got deep into Sublime, so take this with a grain of salt).

Oh and the learning curve thing is greatly exaggerated, often by vim users themselves, seeking to brag to everyone about how they mastered the "fearsome learning curve of vim".

Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong [1]

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[1]: -- http://yehudakatz.com/2010/07/29/everyone-who-tried-to-convi...

I used vim for 10 years; now I prefer Sublime Text. I have a need to use a text editor a lot in Windows and never liked the experience that vim for Windows gave me so I gave Sublime Text a try. I quickly fell in love with the multi-cursor editing and ability to auto-recover unsaved files when I close and reopen the program. From there I discovered new awesome features including vim mode which lets me use vim commands within ST if I so choose. I am really happy to know vim because it's installed on every linux/unix distro ever and when I'm sshing into servers that's what I use, but for the bulk of my coding, ST all the way.

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