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I still like Sublime Text

by james2doyle on 1/29/25, 6:43 AM with 602 comments

• by munificent on 1/29/25, 5:52 PM

  I love Sublime Text. It's one of my favorite pieces of software. I have it running 100% of the time on every machine I work on.

  It's where I write all of my personal notes, blog posts, and it's where I wrote both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters".

  At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that's been Visual C++, Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and most recently VS Code.

  That doesn't mean to me that I want Sublime to turn into an IDE. I like that it's lighterweight than that. It's the perfect sweet spot for me of rich enough to handle piles of notes and documents and small scale code editing, but not so huge and cumbersome that it gets in my way.

• by ben-schaaf on 1/29/25, 8:24 AM

  Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.

• by scop on 1/29/25, 12:46 PM

  So glad to see this. I have been down a long road of text editors:

  - Sublime - Vim - Emacs - Atom - VSCode - Jetbrains IDE - Neovim - Zed - Cursor

  And these aren’t just little flings. I’ve spent months if not years in most of these editors. However, at the end of the day I always come back to one: Sublime.

  It is a beautiful piece of software. It feels like writing with one’s “good pen and good paper”, that high quality stationary sort of thing. It is just me and the code. There is something that just feels different or even tactile about Sublime. That actually leads me to ask as this is outside of my expertise: why does Sublime feel more tactile/real than other editors? When I look at the code in other editors it feels like I’m looking at a projector on a wall. When I look at the code in Sublime it feels like I’m looking at something painted on the wall. Anybody else have the same experience? What’s the psychological/software reason for that?

• by ch33zer on 1/29/25, 7:31 AM

  I use sublime as a copy paste buffer when I need excellent visual regex search and replace. Vscodes regex search has awkward semantics (or at least I don't know them as well as sublimes) so I usually paste things into sublime, edit them with the regexes, then go back to what I was doing. My work has some extensions that only work in vscode so I'm stuck with it but it's good enough. I also never close sublime tabs and it persists them indefinitely with minimal memory usage, so I sometimes go back to grab things I was doing a few days ago. Definitely not the intended use but it works really well for me.

• by dkdbejwi383 on 1/29/25, 10:01 AM

  I really want to like Sublime (it's so fast, I like the minimal UI), but VS Code has so much inertia, and does so much out of the box or with minimal extra effort that it's hard to not use it instead.

  At the end of the day, I have things to get done, I'm not here to tinker with tools. Same reason I never got into vim/emacs etc as a daily driver.

• by jc_811 on 1/29/25, 10:22 AM

  I. Love. Sublime

  I’ve tried all the other main editors but always come back to Sublime. The simplicity, the speed, the near instantaneous load time.

  I feel like I’m such an outlier but for my text editor I don’t want all the fancy bells and whistles that come with all the IDEs nowadays. It feels like Sublime is the only one that is so intuitive OOTB while allowing access to a plethora of features (if you need/want them). Whereas the others throw everything in your face and it feels like a battle to just get it configured for your needs.

  Granted, I mainly code for personal and side projects, and actually enjoy the coding part so I don’t want AI, or advanced features, writing code for me! Even for the productivity gains, I just find coding on my own enjoyable and solving problems as they arise.

  That being said, I can totally understand why devs who need to collaborate with large teams, under strict deadline, across multiple countries - probably absolutely need the fancy features that come with enterprise IDEs.

  I just love my Sublime editor and never plan on switching :)

• by sadcodemonkey on 1/29/25, 5:28 PM

  I went back to Sublime Text after trying VS Code for a few months.

  VS Code is very nice, when it works. My main problems had to do with the extension ecosystem. It felt very chaotic: it was hard to figure out which ones to install to get the functionality I wanted. Updates to Python extensions sometimes caused instability, crashing the editor. And I found it difficult to set extension preferences: the UI tries to be slick but in practice it ends up being clunky and awkward. On top of that, there was an annoying bug on Linux, related to Electron, that prevented the Save dialog box from appearing properly, which... kind of sucks. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/32857

  Sublime is the perfect programmer's editor for dynamic languages like Python, and for general text editing. It's lightning fast. LSP is just enough to be helpful without getting in the way. Workspaces work the way I would expect. I prefer editing JSON files for preferences over navigating a complex GUI.

  Best money I've ever spent on a license, and I'll happily renew just for maintenance updates, to be honest.

• by bigstrat2003 on 1/29/25, 7:23 AM

  Sublime is just great software. It does everything I could possibly ever want an editor to do, and it does it with half the memory usage of VS Code. I like VS Code well enough, but I can't abide resource waste like that, especially when it doesn't actually buy me anything.

  Honestly, I use Sublime because nothing else can compare. Everything else is slow, bloated, worse to use, or some combination of the above.

• by 8fingerlouie on 1/29/25, 12:15 PM

  I've used Sublime Text since it's initial release, and later on Sublime Merge, and i own licenses for every major version released.

  However, my ST4 license recently expired, and that caused me to look back at the previous 3 years to see what my money was actually buying me, and it turns out it was mostly bugfixes. There have been, rather consistently, 2 releases per year (november and august), and the last major feature was in 2022 with syntax code folding and recent files integration, and those are the only "new features" added since ST4 was released in 2021.

  Don't get me wrong, i don't mind paying for software, especially software i use every day, but ST4 more or less feels like it's on the backburner, with nothing much going on, so i let my "subscription" (ST4 licensing is more or less a subscription for 3 years) lapse.

  I've instead switched to Zed (zed.dev) as my "main and fast" editor. Yes it has some rough edges, but feature wise it's very much like Sublime Text.

  It doesn't support Windows (yet), which is not a problem for me, but i can see how that could be a dealbreaker for some.

• by abraxas on 1/29/25, 7:13 AM

  I guess your love is not unlike my long ago passion for CodeWright. It was such a flexible beast with perfect support for BRIEF bindings and an infinitely configurable user interface. Alas, the world preferred the simplicity of Visual Studio or JBuilder and the best programmer's editor for Windows slowly but surely withered away.

  I'm not planning on repeating the mistake of learning a complex environment only to see it disappear with the demise of its parent company. That's why these days I'm mostly investing time in the Emacs ecosystem while occasionally trying and failing to love mode based setups like vim and neovim.

• by NetOpWibby on 1/29/25, 9:14 AM

  I came to Sublime Text 3 from Atom because I wanted a native editor. It boggles my mind that so many people love VS Code.

  I’ve tried Zed, it’s a beautiful editor…it’s just too opinionated. For whatever reason, it doesn’t understand my Deno projects and I content get rid of the red squigglies.

  Sublime lives up to its name.

• by dividedbyzero on 1/29/25, 4:24 PM

  I don't really use it as a (lightweight) IDE or the like anymore, but as a place to keep unstructured notes and snippets and the like because SublimeText never ever loses anything unsaved. It's pretty much indispensable at this point, whenever I compose something a bit longer or have some text to do a search-replace on or just some text I need three steps later in what I'm doing, it goes in another tab in Sublime. I have at least one tab I re-use since before Covid-19, it's absolutely fantastic how stable it is. Love it for that.

• by chucky123 on 1/29/25, 8:26 AM

  Sublime rules.

  I started my career with Brackets, then Sublime, then Atom for a short while. Then switched to VS Code for a few years and just recently switched back to Sublime because of how slow VS Code became.

  Also great pricing! One time purchase for Sublime is still available in 2025!

• by eigenvalue on 1/29/25, 8:37 AM

  I use both Sublime and Vscode every day for different things. Sublime is just so fast and responsive all the time, while vscode can get annoying slow and laggy, often because of all the many plugins I have running. If I just need simple text file editing with syntax highlighting, say while editing a markdown file, Sublime is just snappier. For actual coding VScode is much better because of all the IDE features.

• by lopatin on 1/29/25, 10:21 AM

  The main feature of Sublime Text for me is that it doesn't throw away your buffers. Ever. So it's mainly a note taking app with vim key bindings for me / snappy scratch pad. All of my actual code editing happens in an IDE or actual VIM when on a server.

• by nicbou on 1/29/25, 7:17 AM

  I write everything on All About Berlin in a souped up version of Sublime Text. I made my own color scheme for Markdown files, my own linters for the content, a build system to run the static site generator etc. I love just how fast I can move across hundreds of Markdown files, finding and replacing thimgs with regular expressions. It’s a night and day improvement over editing text in a CMS.

  I chose Sublime because it was blazing fast in my wee Macbook 12”, which I used until a year ago. Sublime Merge complements it really well.

• by htamas on 1/29/25, 7:27 PM

  I used to use Sublime Text around 8-10 years ago, but once VS Code became a thing, I switched to that, then to Zed last year. Inspired by this post, I decided to give ST another try. Here's how it went:

  1. Installed ST via brew, all good so far. Let's open my hobby project written in Go.

  2. Syntax highlighting works by default, great! But uh-oh, there's no autocomplete or any LSP. Alright, let's install one.

  3. Hmm I need to install package control first - right I'm starting to remember now. I'm thinking it's strange how they are still two separate entities.

  4. Ok, PC installed. Let's install a... ok Package Control crashed...

  5. Copying the error from the debug console points me to a two-year-old forum post where the accepted solution is to either remove OpenSSL (?!) or install a beta PC version (outdated now) or try to uninstall Package Control and reinstall it.

  6. Ok, how do I uninstall Package Control? The documentation says they are just package files stored on my machine. It doesn't tell me where those files are, and I can't find a menu point to open the folder containing them...

  7. Open Zed.

• by james2doyle on 1/29/25, 6:43 AM

  I often get asked why I still use Sublime. So I wrote this article singing it's praises.

• by modernfears on 1/29/25, 9:52 AM

  Can’t not mention tonsky’s post about most important feature of Sublime: https://tonsky.me/blog/sublime/

• by fabiensanglard on 1/29/25, 7:07 AM

  I wrote all my articles and three books with it.

  I love Sublime Text :) !

• by notepad0x90 on 1/29/25, 7:03 AM

  Sublime Text is so awesome, I don't mind it's constant begging for a license purchase or whatever. It's right up there with Winrar.

• by racl101 on 1/29/25, 2:05 PM

  It's my new notepad. When I don't need the bloat of VSCode, or any JetBrains editor, etc. nor have the will to fight with Vim and, yet, still need something that supports code syntax.

• by lbrito on 1/29/25, 5:26 PM

  Sublime user since 2014.

  I tried vim and nvim. Its just more overall effort and I'm never as productive as with Sublime. I tried zed and it doesn't work with Linux. I briefly opened vscode but haven't tried it out earnestly yet.

  I think its mostly muscle memory. I'm just too used to the shortcuts, workflow etc. You can teach new tricks to an old dog; I can learn and get used to another editor, but ultimately I always ask myself -- why? I have to get shit done and unless the new thing has some other benefit that compensates for the productivity decline in the first weeks/months/years, it will always be a hard sell.

• by yonisto on 1/29/25, 8:10 AM

  I'm always up for trying new or old text editors, but they must have certain features that work out of the box for me to even consider them. A few clicks are fine, but I don't want to edit configuration files. In 2025, remote development support is a must for me.

  Sadly it seems that Sublime doesn't do that yet

• by turblety on 1/29/25, 9:05 AM

  I used to love Sublime Text and used it for my daily driver. Even bought a license.

  But just downloaded it again, and while it definitely felt snappy, after 15 minutes I still couldn't find a way to get TypeScript type checking working, or even any type of JavaScript/TypeScript autocomplete.

• by mstade on 1/29/25, 9:01 AM

  I too still like Sublime Text in 2025, largely for the same reasons.

  I have liked it very much for the past decade or so, and at this rate, I'll most likely keep liking Sublime Text for many years to come. It's an incredible tool that does its job extremely well.

  Worth every penny!

• by zevon on 1/29/25, 8:06 AM

  To echo many sentiments here: Sublime does all I want in a text editor and I use it a lot. When VSCode became all the rage, I tried it but became annoyed very quickly with the loading times and wasted resources, so I switched back to Sublime.

• by robinhood on 1/29/25, 3:27 PM

  Sublime is extraordinary. It's one of the softwares I've loved the most, by far. Even today, it's always opened and I use it for quick fixes and code browsing.

  However, despite my fondness for it, VS Code, and now Cursor, have largely taken over for me. Cursor, in particular, has literally completely transformed how I code. And yes, it's slower and more bloated, but the value-added of Cursor is worse it.

• by rayrrr on 1/29/25, 7:30 AM

  Sublime is still my top choice for opening big data files, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But, since VS Code is becoming the new lingua franca code editor, I made the switch so as to play nice with others going forward.

• by Cthulhu_ on 1/29/25, 8:56 AM

  I've reinstalled ST a while ago, for years I've tried VS Code and I do my main work in IntelliJ but I never got that feeling of productivity and an editor that isn't in the way back after stopping to use Sublime back in the day.

  Mind you, at the time the world had moved on as well; my main ST days were developing a JS application in the days before Typescript / Flow and the like, so all my work relied on my own memory, consistent naming, global search and cmd+p to open files. There was a "gap" in between editors like IntelliJ having better / smarter support for JS and the rise of LSPs, making those features available for all editors again. IntelliJ had a competitive advantage for a while.

  Likewise, VS Code had a competitive advantage along with Atom for having all its code written in web language / JS, which millions of developers learned or pivoted to in the 2010's. I still can't fully grasp how huge it was, but the last few jobs I had interviews with all used JS for back-end, migrating from PHP.

• by soheil on 2/5/25, 1:41 AM

  I avoid VS Code like the plague, been resisting it for years now, I still have the scars of ie6 to know no MS product can be trusted. Not to mention how bloated it already is, uses Electron to function, I can already imagine its core engineers sitting somewhere similar to an XP background sipping on ice tea and saying to themselves "who needs to optimize code editors, devs have millions of cores anyway" the phrase "compile to native" was never uttered in their blue and green background life. So no I'm not going to use a freaking browser to write code in no matter how much the hn hivemind really wants me to.

  Sublime has been sublime for over a decade that I've been using it, I prefer version 3 and still have all the old packages/themes compatible with it. I have my favorite theme Afterglow. I've made so many changes to it, there is a command on save in every project folder I have for things like quick deploying apps be it a quick npm build + rsync or more complex capistrano prod deploy command, or sending a ctrl signal to a sock file to have chatgpt's response appear after asking it anything and pressing cmd+s in any open .md file. It's glorious seeing its response stream right there and then.

  Screw people making bloated IDEs and feel sorry for people who use them because they don't know any better.

  Sublime is pure, extremely quick to search or load massive files, I often have over 20 folders/windows open each with hundreds of dual column tabs. Never have to close it because it's running out of memory or bogging down my system, never. It's written well, the person who made it cares for writing good code and making good software. That's all you really need to know.

  Sublime is the way to go and will most likely will be for the next 10 years at least for me.

• by ckunte on 1/29/25, 12:50 PM

  Long time Sublime Text and Sublime Merge fan, and a paying user since 2011. It's very good; I use all three OSes (Windows at work, MacOS on occasion, Linux is primary driver, and I've now switched to Pi 5. Zed does not even load on this, whereas ST just flies. (The only real competition is Neovim.)

  That reminds me, I wonder if Sublime Text still has room to improve in some areas. Here's an example, in Vim generating a date stamp is a one liner incl. text expansion[0], whereas in Sublime Text, one has to write a multi line plugin and a separate keyboard shortcut[1] to get the same functionality as that of Vim.

  [0]: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/2d7a750e6cf8b96f98f028e90c8ab...

  [1]: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/31500c17452b0fd8c55bc9460bd9c...

• by n0id34 on 1/29/25, 7:13 AM

  I'm lazy, I don't want to leave the terminal.

• by ziml77 on 1/29/25, 8:16 PM

  I love it too, though I never use it for working with entire projects but rather for smaller text editing tasks because it's so snappy. It's my scratchpad for notes and stuff, I will investigate and edit single files, and I use it for find-and-replace within a directory.

  Though for the single file operations, it really depends on how I'm currently interacting with the system. If I'm browsing the files in a GUI then I'll use ST. If I'm in a terminal I'll use neovim.

  One enhancement I would love to see to ST is better large file support. If I open a 330MB CSV in Notepad++ it displays instantly and uses 350MB of RAM. If I open the same file in ST it takes a few seconds to show and uses 1.5GB of RAM. (This is with both editors using no plugins beyond whatever is default)

• by Duke64 on 1/29/25, 9:16 AM

  I bought a "double license" for Text and Merge three years ago and spent money on Sublime for the first time. I will definitely be renewing it in February.

• by dmi3 on 1/29/25, 7:54 AM

  Using Sublime Text since version 2, one of my relatively recent discoveries has been the Markdown Images Plugin[1], which renders images inline (rather than in a separate preview, as other editors do).

  I find it extremely convenient to include images alongside text, such as diagrams and schematics for work, photos of goods in a shopping list, and inspiration collections for hobby projects, etc.

  When combined with a simple web clipper script[2], it has been a game changer for me.

  [1]: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Markdown%20Images

  [2]: https://github.com/dmi3/bin/blob/master/url-preview-md.py

• by kergonath on 1/29/25, 11:03 AM

  Hell, I still like TextMate in 2025 :)

  (Though I use Sublime more, and I like it as well)

• by submeta on 1/29/25, 7:14 AM

  I can totally understand that. Why only one? I still use BBEdit on my Mac for all kinds of text editing (search/replace across files is excellent in it), even though I mainly use VS Code as IDE and Emacs for orgmode and automation via Elisp.

• by factsaresacred on 1/29/25, 9:04 AM

  Reluctant VScode user here. Sublime's speed make it the best editor to work with by far, but its package manager is in a sorry state. A good 70%+ of packages are outdated or don't work.

  Fix this and I'd be back in a flash.

• by timmfin on 1/29/25, 12:09 PM

  I'm another "use Sublime text for all kinds of scratch and random needs, but vscode daily driver". But this was a good reminder for me of the value I still get out of Sublime and that I should upgrade my license.

  One small pet peeve, I do wish more of the functionality in the menu bar (mac?) was available in the command menu (cmd+shift+p). I still fairly frequently try cmd+shift+p "Spel..." to try and turn on Spell check mode, but then realize I need to hit my mac shortcut to search the menu bar (cmd+shift+/) and then type "Spel..."

• by dmi3 on 1/29/25, 8:33 AM

  In the argument of Sublime Text vs. VS Code, the deal breaker for me has always been VS Code telemetry. Of course, you can disable it in the settings or firewall, but then you have to constantly monitor it to ensure that some "bug" or "update" does not re-enable it back. Alternatively, you can choose not to care about potentially sharing everything with Microsoft and their 829+ partners. However, I prefer to pay for Sublime rather than participate in some manager's brilliant idea to extract revenue from a "free" user base.

• by thecrumb on 1/29/25, 2:12 PM

  I'd probably move back if the sidebar could move to the right LOL. I still see people ask on the forum post and I'm always amazed this simple feature hasn't been added yet.

• by knighthack on 1/29/25, 7:16 AM

  Sublime Text is _the_ Swiss knife of all text editors:

  - Loads up fast, supports tons of very useful packages (e.g. TextPastry, SQLTools), extremely customisable.

  - Multi-cursors, multi-panes (e.g. with Origami), spellcheckers, extremely fast filesystem integration/browsing/preview (whether with/without projects and workspaces), color/UI schemes, syntax highlighting, search browsers, Git support (particularly when used with Sublime Merge), etc.

  Sure I love my Jetbrains IDEs and Vim, but nothing comes close; Sublime Text is in its own league.

• by monokai_nl on 1/29/25, 7:18 AM

  This is the one app I use every day. I practically live in it. Most editors are slower and more visually cluttered, or pack so much functionality that I often get lost. Sublime strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality. Probably Emacs or Vim are even more expressive, but I've never bothered to learn those, Sublime just packs enough power for me. The LSP plugins are a good addition to give Sublime the same code completion / AI functionality of other editors.

• by silverwind on 1/29/25, 5:13 PM

  Using Sublime since 2008. Never liked the bloated and telemetry-infested mess that VSCode is.

• by OutsmartDan on 1/29/25, 2:23 PM

  Love Sublime and have used it since its inception long ago, however as the times changes with different built-in convenience tooling (such as AI), Zed has overtaken Sublime IMO. It's fast, has VIM mode, extensions, and takes away some of the hassle that you have to go through with ST.

  I still use ST for basic editing, but for day-to-day, Zed is the go to, simply because it just helps me get my work done slightly faster.

  PS I still pay for a ST License every 3 years <3

• by infinitifall on 1/29/25, 11:08 AM

  Sublime Text used to be my go-to editor when I didn't need a full fledged IDE. A rare gem in an arena of slow mammoths. I've since switched over to Lite XL, which is FOSS, just as fast (if not faster), and the plugins cover nearly all my niche use cases.

  While I respect the effort that goes into creating quality software and am not averse to spending money, I'd rather not live in a world where the best softwares are closed source.

• by nneonneo on 1/29/25, 12:15 PM

  I don't use ST3 as my daily driver (I use BBEdit instead - still not on the VSCode train), but I do use it for lots of random editing and scratch needs.

  Shameless plug - I wrote a plugin ages ago which makes it possible to replace and sort text using Python code (https://nneonneo.github.io/sublime-replace-with-python/). This little plugin has been incredibly useful for certain tasks, and serves both as a useful prototyping tool (playing with text modifications before implementing a full-blown script) as well as a general-purpose text wrangling utility. Basically, you can select some text (or find it with regex), then activate the plugin and type a line of Python code; it will then run the code for each selection region and produce the replacement. Sorting works similarly - select some regions, enter an expression as a sort key, and the selections will be rearranged according to the key.

  I love how a plugin I wrote nearly a decade ago is still working with essentially no changes needed since 2017. Stable software is reliable software!

• by unnamedd on 1/29/25, 10:02 AM

  I have always loved Sublime Text, but in 2023, Zed captured my heart, and now I have neither Sublime Text nor VS Code installed on my machine anymore.

• by kapitanluffy on 1/30/25, 2:07 AM

  If you (or anyone here) feel Sublime Text is dead, the community is super active at discord. You can actively engage with ST devs and package developers there.

  Just head over to the unofficial discord server: https://discord.sublimetext.io/

• by js2 on 1/29/25, 7:13 AM

  Maybe it's time I migrated off TextMate.

• by mxwsn on 1/29/25, 7:14 AM

  I used sublime from 2013 to 2021. It was great. Since, I've switched to VS Code and haven't looked back.

• by apocalyptic0n3 on 1/31/25, 2:44 PM

  I don't often use Sublime for coding nowadays (I'm generally using PhpStorm) but I have it open at almost all times as a scratchpad. It's so dang quick that opening it to jot something down or examine JSON is instant. And so performant that if I forget to close it, my system is never bothered by it. And it retains unsaved files forever – a must for a scratchpad in my opinion, and something many others fail to do. Long term notes get converted to Obsidian, but Sublime is just so easy to get something quick going that I love it and happily pay for a license.

  Same goes for Sublime Merge, which is the best Git GUI I've ever used.

• by DaveMcMartin on 1/29/25, 11:18 AM

  This brings back good old memories. Sublime was my editor from 2010 until 2016, when I switched to VS Code. Eventually, I got hooked on Neovim, and I still use it to this day since I can't live without Vim motions anymore.

  But I built dozens of websites using Sublime, so in a way, it helped me earn $300k.

• by bambax on 1/29/25, 7:14 AM

  My files are on a NAS using Samba, and Sublime Text constantly does something (maybe it tries to poll the directory?) that makes it hang for around 10 seconds every minute, making it unusable.

  VS Code does nothing of the sort, it has plugins for any language imaginable; it's much faster and much better IMHO.

• by wkirby on 1/29/25, 2:24 PM

  Sublime is still great. I wish it had a tighter LSP integration — the plugin is decent, but individual language implementations are hit or miss. I sincerely appreciate that it has an old school fallback for languages that don’t have robust LSP support (looking at you Ruby).

• by keb_ on 1/29/25, 4:35 PM

  Sublime Text is my primary editor. I had a brief 2 years where I used VSCode and got addicted to plugins, until I realized I was spending too much time configuring plugins and went back to Sublime Text with the release of ST4. It was mind-boggling to me after those 2 years how much faster ST was than VSCode. The LSP plugin was icing on the cake. Even in instances where I lack LSP, Sublime Text 4's context-aware autocomplete/finder works surprisingly well. The only thing I really find myself missing is a visual debugger.

  I've tried Neovim and Zed -- Sublime Text is still faster and more polished in my experience. It embodies the "do one thing well" philosophy perfectly. Also, Sublime Merge is awesome.

• by singhrac on 1/29/25, 1:57 PM

  I was a longtime user of Sublime Text and switched to VSCode because of Remote Development and Pylance. Everything else is pretty much fine and Sublime has always had better performance, though these days having support for AI integration (a la Copilot) is also necessary for me.

  I tried Zed recently because it has remote support and AI integration, but the Python integration is limited to Pyright so I gave up temporarily (I guess I can recreate Pylance using this doc: https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/blob/main/USING...).

• by brachkow on 1/29/25, 4:56 PM

  Few years ago I wrote a guide about turning Sublime Text into IDE which will be on-par with IDE features of VSCode while retaining performance benefits of ST — https://www.brachkow.com/notes/sublime-text/.

  Sadly, I almost stopped using Sublime Text around a half year ago. Development of AI coding tools made flexible UI plugins support a must. Right now when I'm using ST as main editor I feel like 0.5x developer compared to myself and my colleagues with Cursor, because of being limited to very lazy and limited Copilot suggestions passed via LSP.

• by kigiri on 1/29/25, 4:50 PM

  What I love most is how well "out of the box" sublime work for me. Even on a fresh install it's very usable without doing anything, I usually install about 3 extensions (not counting specific language syntax support).

  Integrated LSP would be nice to have, but most of the time I don't use it and I like to be able to turn it of and have the simple autocomplete that is very predictable and unintrusive.

  And performance, I know Zed showed some benchmarks on how fast it is, I still had some hang up from time to time with it and some crash, I can't suffer jankiness in my editor, it stress me out.

  Thanks for the work done on Sublime.

• by WhereIsTheTruth on 1/29/25, 8:18 AM

  They need to enhance their plugin API asap, i remember wanting to make a small assistant panel, the only choice was to use a pseudo mini-HTML api, it's not good for anything dynamic.. a shame

  I'd love an Immediate Mode API, give me full control, or give me access to your OpenGL context, i'll write my own UI

  They also need to improve the layout system for their panels, Origami is good, but sometimes using your mouse is better

  And i agree about getting stuff to Package Control, it's unnecessary painful

  Other than that, it's the perfect editor, but that plugin API holds it back, lots of missed opportunity, specially with the advent of AI stuff

• by geerlingguy on 1/29/25, 4:15 PM

  Been using it and upgrading each new version. One of the best software applications I've ever used that's both multi platform and actually-good on every platform, not just a skinned web app like Photoshop

• by dataengineer56 on 1/29/25, 2:18 PM

  I use Sublime as my notepad alternative. I use no plugins and don't know any keyboard shortcuts but I love it. It's quick, the tabs work well, you don't have to save files for it to remember them...

• by christiangenco on 1/29/25, 4:28 PM

  I freakin' love Sublime Text but the AI chat features of Cursor make all of the benefits in this post irrelevant.

  It's fast? Not as fast as an LLM.

  LSP code completion? Not as good as LLM completions aware of your entire codebase at once.

  Snippets? These don't matter if an LLM can just make them up on the fly.

  We've entered a new paradigm of what it means to be a good code editor. I'd love if Sublime added the LLM chat and code diff from Cursor but I think the new way to edit code is going to look a lot more like having a conversation (text or voice) with an LLM that's making the changes for you.

• by amatecha on 1/29/25, 8:57 AM

  I've used Sublime since 2012 or 2013 or so. It's really legit. Lightweight, "it just works", and has generally stayed the same while adding some nice features along the way. Thank you!! <3

• by mmustapic on 1/29/25, 12:12 PM

  Besides Sublime Text, the same company makes Sublime Merge, a great git UI.

• by McUsr on 1/30/25, 12:05 AM

  I'm glad you're fond of Sublime Text.

  Personally I'm totally sold on 'Vim' I have lsp through 'YouCompleteMe', which works great for C-languages, and I have Automatic update of tags with 'GutenTagsPlus', And I also use 'c-scope', 'Git' and 'Id-utils', and I have 'ulti-snips' which I probably use too little. So yeah, this and the GCC toolchain, is pretty much the ultimate for me, and I have tried a lot of Editors through the years.

• by ubermonkey on 1/29/25, 2:41 PM

  I definitely still use Sublime. It's not my go-to for everything now, but my job has drifted in a way that means I don't DO those kinds of tasks that often anymore. For writing I've gravitated towards tools with better innate outlining and/or Markdown support (Obsidian); my work notes are still mostly in emacs/orgmode.

  But if I need to open a big-ass text file, or process something in a pure text environment without anything helping me or trying to preserve formatting... yeah, it's probably still Sublime.

• by grougnax on 1/29/25, 9:04 AM

  I love Sublime Text, it is so snappy and lightweight. Great software!

• by erdaniels on 1/29/25, 7:09 PM

  I love it. I had to drop it temporarily recently for a go project using bazel that simply just doesn't work well in many editors other than Intellij. But I got back to it recently on another go project and god damn it's so fast. I'm so much more productive using it. Global symbol search is always amazing and everything is always so damn snappy. If I could buy a lifetime license I would. I hope it doesn't go away for as long as I want to write code

• by sneak on 1/29/25, 11:49 AM

  Kernel, compiler, text editor: all must be free software, with full source code and permissive licenses.

  I will die on this hill.

  Closed source editors (including VS Code) are simply nonstarters for me.

  This is my toolchain, my job, my life, my hobby, my passion. The legal prohibition on modifying it is against every single thing I sit down at a computer to do.

  It might sound snobbish, but if you can’t (or don’t) modify your #1 tool (your editor), are you really a hacker? What are you hacking on, and why, then?

• by codeslord on 1/29/25, 3:06 PM

  I appreciate all of them— VS Code, Vi, Emacs, Sublime, JetBrains, Cursor. At the end of the day, they’re all text editors, and each has its own strengths.

• by ponsfrilus on 1/30/25, 5:58 AM

  Nobody mentionned *Pulsar* (https://pulsar-edit.dev/) which is the community maintained Atom since its sunsetting (Dec 2022). Atom was created by Nathan Sobo, who is now working on Zed (https://zed.dev/).

• by pshirshov on 1/29/25, 10:44 AM

  vscode keybindings are insane. There are couple of thousands of them turned on by default with multiple duplications and no abstrations. So you have to negate them all first (that takes around 5000 lines of json) and then carefully go over around 500-700 definitions which might be important for you. So, my custom keymap in intellij has 44 definition, the vscode equivalent takes 675 and 2000 lines of json.

• by nroize on 1/29/25, 1:45 PM

  Switched to it last year for working on a large C codebase, huge fan. Visual Studio Code was always way too slow at indexing, Sublime is fast.

• by DigitalSea on 1/30/25, 3:24 AM

  I love Sublime Text editor. Have been using it for 15 years now and despite the fact most of my development is done inside of VSCode or other editors, I still use ST for large files and notes. I can confidently open up a 1gb SQL dump in ST and it won't break a sweat, try that in VSCode and you can see it freeze up for a bit and that's on a decent machine too.

• by dazzaji on 1/29/25, 5:56 PM

  I’ve been using Sublime Text many times a day since around 2010 for my daily and weekly logs. My Mac is set to use it as the default for .py, .md, and .txt files, so I find myself in Sublime all the time—and I absolutely love it! Sure, I develop in VS Code, but I live in sublime. It’s fast, clean, and dependable. Thanks to the team for building such a fantastic editor!

• by nzd on 1/30/25, 4:45 PM

  I'm sort of married to Sublime Text. I install all my plugins via "git clone" and never Package Control. Then I study their details, customize them in the source, modify keybindings etc. If you are this attached to a tool, it becomes an extension to your body.

  P.S. No need to say that I update my plugins through code review!

• by pupppet on 1/29/25, 1:11 PM

  I find ST and the SFTP plugin (paid) a killer workflow combo, super useful for updating WordPress sites.

  Update your file locally, hit the shortcut to upload, done. I find this experience superior to editing directly on the external file as I may want to save but not necessarily commit that change. And for smaller projects you are the only developer on, git can be overkill.

• by geenat on 1/29/25, 3:05 PM

  Sublimes' skeleton is excellent- Python extensions are a pleasure to write compared to VS Code.

  HOWEVER it desperately needs a UI/UX polish pass to stay competitive:

  * Drag and drop in the sidebar folder list.

  * Drag and drop tab to create 2+ column view.

  * Focus the open tab if a file is already open in any Sublime window.. Please stop opening duplicates- one mistake and you've overwritten your work.

• by BiteCode_dev on 1/29/25, 7:06 AM

  Same. I tried zed but it doesn't come close.

• by alfredxing on 1/29/25, 7:06 PM

  I love Sublime and am probably the only one at work still using it. LSP support is nice but there doesn't seem to be great support for a TypeScript LSP server that works reliably with large projects. VSCode is slow here, too, but there are some specific optimizations they do I think that help a bit.

• by kopirgan on 1/29/25, 1:16 PM

  I hard a hard time getting LSP to work with Neovim, had to give up. Didn't want to install yet another plug-in manager like Mason etc some of which go out of circulation or could be risky. Maybe I am below average. As it is free, I just use it without any extras although that is less productive of course.

• by kristianp on 1/29/25, 10:48 AM

  I've bought a license recently. I found the LSP-clangd plugin to be useful for the linting features of clangd and clangd-tidy for a C++ project recently. Having the lint highlighting helped me clean up some possible problems, (after reducing the number of types of lint to a shortish whtielist)

• by readingnews on 1/29/25, 3:26 PM

  Used to use sublime, and wanted to purchase a license, but it is only good for the version you are on. Since I use gentoo and it upgrades frequently, my license would require me to hold it back, and eventually it will break. How do others deal with this? Just keep purchasing a license?

• by antfarm on 1/29/25, 3:13 PM

  I still like TextMate.

• by eknkc on 1/29/25, 7:19 AM

  Sublime was going great at some point and I guess the dev burned out churning new releases every week. So it got abandoned for a good amount of time.

  Something like 2 years. At the same time Atom and VsCode came in with all the good ideas from Sublime.

  I hope they made tens of millions during the height of its popularity.

• by hit8run on 1/29/25, 3:00 PM

  I use Sublime everyday and pay for it for more than 10 years. It’s hands down the best piece of proprietary software I ever bought. I heavily customize Sublime and supercharge it with a few high quality plugins. I also contribute to the ecosystem. To another 10 sublime years.

• by dsego on 1/29/25, 10:15 AM

  Not sure how projects and workspaces are a feature, it's the most convoluted thing ever. I just use `subl .` to open my project directory. I think it would be saner to just have a dot file in the directory if you want to tweak settings for that project/directory.

• by nbenitezl on 1/29/25, 10:07 AM

  Another happy customer of Sublime Text here, but still not dare to take the step to buy SublimeMerge, I'm pretty well served in console for my git use, except for 'git blame' that I prefer to do in a UI tool, but SublimeMerge blame support is awful.

• by sabhiram on 1/31/25, 7:32 AM

  Between vi(m) and VSCode - sublime has grown increasingly less useful in my day to day life. Used to use it exclusively, but it has lately been squeezed on both ends due to increasing server side development needs.

• by ElectronBadger on 1/29/25, 9:13 AM

  Sublime Text user here, it's been my go to editor for the last few years. The best. A keeper.

• by wnevets on 1/29/25, 6:58 PM

  I love sublime text but it has been feeling like its falling behind other editors. Whenever see someone showing off a tip or trick in VSCode I am disappointment to learn it doesn't exist in sublime text and there isn't a package for it.

• by sharkjacobs on 1/29/25, 7:14 AM

  Sublime does everything that I want to do with it.

  What I do with it is throw arbitrary text files at it, and do quick text manipulations, especially multi cursor edits. I’m sure I could do this stuff just as well with something else, but I’d have to relearn my muscle memory.

• by bayindirh on 1/29/25, 7:07 AM

  I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. I personally use Eclipse, BBEdit and KATE in 2025, and love them.

  Sublime is one of the tools which really grown and aged well, so it deserves the love it gets.

  I personally don't let anybody to tell me which tool to use. It's rude to mock and belittle the tools people use.

• by rglynn on 1/31/25, 1:57 AM

  IMO the main thing going for Sublime was performance, since VScode lacks in that area. Unfortunately, Zed now exists and I see no reason to use Sublime other than habit/specific use cases.

• by ChrisMarshallNY on 1/29/25, 10:06 PM

  I still like BBEdit, and I've been using it for over 30 years.

  https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

• by Minor49er on 1/29/25, 4:45 PM

  I had been considering switching to VS Code because of its plugin support, but decided against it because it couldn't regex-grep a codebase anywhere nearly as fast as Sublime Text, or with extended regex features

• by mezod on 1/29/25, 2:59 PM

  Yesterday, I got laughed at for "still" using ST. Today, HN delivers.

• by winrid on 1/30/25, 2:39 AM

  I still use the Sublime shortcuts in my IDE to this day. Sublime had a big impact on me when I got my first job as it introduced me to multiple cursors. It's still the best tool for many tasks.

• by nijuashi on 1/29/25, 1:22 PM

  The only gripe I have is I have like 100 project windows open and I need to look for it (ctrl+P only works within the project window). Otherwise, it’s pretty much a perfect editor. Maybe I’m missing a plugin.

• by sigmonsays on 1/29/25, 8:35 PM

  I use sublime text to edit all my notes for both work and personal. It runs on every computer and laptop I have.

  I love sublime text. I'm on version 3, i think there is a 4 out but nothing is drawing me to use it.

• by zaphod420 on 1/29/25, 4:39 PM

  I use neovim, but I also pay for sublime text because it's just good.

• by mcflubbins on 1/29/25, 2:41 PM

  Sublime text is the best. I change _one_ setting (disable word wrap by default) and I have an entirely usable editor, I then install syntax packages as needed. Its beautiful, simple, and performant.

• by fifticon on 1/29/25, 1:47 PM

  I use a mix of sublime and vscode. I often pick sublime, because I want peace of mind. I trust it to not try to make me 'do something else'. It (mostly) doesn't pester me with things to update or that are out-of-date, it doesn't run or fail with weird things in the background I didn't ask it to do. It sticks to a minimal layout. I had a similar love relationship with early versions of paintshop-pro - it contained the right balance of 'enough to do what you need, but not too much to overwhelm you'. Whenever I ran into a too-new version of paintshop-pro, I closed it again because I didn't want to deal with their lost-sense-of-balance. Sublime for me is like that, it is a hammer where the head won't suddenly fall off.

  I had an eye-opening experience with VSCode recently: I had brought one of my laptops on a car drive, where I had a few hours before the people (family) I chauffeured would come back, and I had a coding project I wanted to update some stuff on. The kicker: I didn't have internet in the car, but for local vscode editing, that shouldn't be a problem, right(?) At least, I had not thought it would be.

  Well, for some reason, VSCode suddenly became stupid. It could not longer figure out where my methods and classes were defined, so I had to navigate my code-base by hand (god forbid). It also flashed something about not being able to connect to "dot net" / ".NET" or something similar. I am not quite sure what was going on, maybe copilot..? Whatever, my VSCode was in a mode where it seemed to rely on some online resource to operate, and suddenly had become braindead by severing the cord..??

  This reminds me why I like sublime.

• by helloguillecl on 1/29/25, 8:42 AM

  I used Sublime for coding before switching to VS Code for coding, but I could never leave Sublime text for some use cases. For example:

  The possibility to edit large SQL dump files, which I cannot even open in VS Code.

• by muzani on 1/29/25, 7:09 AM

  I'm happy with just fast, multiple cursors, plugins -> syntax highlighting. Sometimes I paste a JSON dump in there to prettify it.

  I refer to a lot of tools as knives, but Sublime Text is the chopping block.

• by akullpp on 1/31/25, 4:39 PM

  Sublime has a place in my heart, it was my first editor as IDE when I started 15 years ago. Such a great piece of software, thanks for all the work!

• by andreyazimov on 1/30/25, 1:10 PM

  I'm also still using Sublime with ChatGPT. I've tried Cursor for a week and went back to Sublime. I wonder if Sublime will ever have AI integration like Cursor

• by kasperset on 1/29/25, 2:21 PM

  Just a shout out to Sublime Text. My first text editor that I have used for serious work. Even though I have moved to Vscode, it is my go to open text files in GUI. It rarely fails me.

• by ghiculescu on 1/29/25, 9:10 AM

  Very relatable piece, the intro felt like I could have written it (I like the URL too).

  “It fast” is enough for me, many of the “features” in editors are noise, and Sublime is the simplest and least noisy.

• by TheKyleAmbert on 1/29/25, 4:24 PM

  I'm a professional data scientist and still use TextMate, AMA

• by t_sea on 2/3/25, 2:01 AM

  TIL my daily text editor is ancient enough to warrant a post about how old it is. Thanks for that.

• by legend11 on 1/29/25, 3:01 PM

  It's what i started programming with . Used it until i fell into the neovim rabbit hole . Still use it sometimes to write my notes and to make simple changes to code

• by didip on 1/29/25, 5:01 PM

  I tried really hard to stay on Sublime Text.

  But one fateful day, the Go plugin made itself hard to install so I downloaded VSCode, installed all the useful plugins, and never look back.

• by ciaovietnam on 1/29/25, 9:15 AM

  I also use ST and use browser if I need some AI assisted coding. What about you guys? Is using IDEs with native AI coding plugin a good reason to switch away from ST?

• by kennydude on 1/29/25, 8:33 AM

  Sublime Text has always been great and reliable.

  But like with everything, having a great choice of fantastic text editors is always good so everyone finds something they enjoy using.

• by mgaunard on 1/29/25, 9:39 PM

  I also prefer Sublime Text to all of the clones.

  I'm more of less forced to use VS Code at present and it's an overengineered slow mess.

• by markus_zhang on 1/29/25, 1:18 PM

  Thank you. Sublime text is my goto text editor. I code in VSCode but whenever I need to edit a text file I switch to Sublime text.

• by wvlia5 on 1/29/25, 2:51 PM

  I implemented the Python Debugger plugin for ST

• by BorisMelnik on 1/29/25, 7:18 PM

  I am gen x and stuck in my ways. I still love Notepad++ What are people using now instead of this that is supposedly better?

• by pavelevst on 1/29/25, 9:17 AM

  I still like textmate and use it daily, together with heavy IDEs, imo best multiline editing and search in large codebase

• by brainzap on 1/29/25, 12:21 PM

  Sometimes when the OS built in search does not work I Open the directory in Sublime and use it as search tool.

• by fersarr on 1/29/25, 8:40 AM

  +1 love sublime

• by anonymous344 on 1/29/25, 5:31 PM

  vscode would be better than sublime, but I hate so much every notification and dialogs every time popping up when i just trying to focus on my work. for this reason i still use sublime 3, yes not the 4 because the 3 was supposed to have lifetime licesense.

• by 4k93n2 on 1/31/25, 3:43 PM

  my favourite feature that i havnt seen in any other editors that ive tried is being able to ctrl + click on a tab to create a temporary split, then you just have to click any tab again to remove any splits

• by ototot on 1/29/25, 11:01 AM

  Sublime is my default editor on Windows since 2012. I really enjoy its lightweight and cleanness.

• by EmileSonneveld on 1/30/25, 10:41 PM

  Even non coders enjoy it. I got 2 people hooked up that now use it as a notes app.

• by jd3 on 1/29/25, 8:47 PM

  sublime still has the lowest latency compared to any other major text editor i've tried

• by emigre on 1/29/25, 4:33 PM

  I love Sublime Text and would use it and pay for a license regularly if it were open source.

• by sr3d on 1/29/25, 8:47 PM

  I love using Sublime for Python. It's still my go-to IDE for development.

• by 0n0n0m0uz on 1/30/25, 10:17 PM

  I use it too. What do most people consider as a better alternative?

• by supplemental on 1/29/25, 8:00 AM

  You can use whatever editor you like .. some weirdos even use vim.

• by robblbobbl on 1/29/25, 12:15 PM

  Recommended due to the good property of a file system search.

• by mcflubbins on 1/29/25, 2:40 PM

  Long live Sublime Text!

  also pretty please give us a native FreeBSD port...

• by ad-astra on 1/29/25, 7:07 AM

  Love how lightweight and fast it is. Use it every day!

• by eviks on 1/29/25, 8:04 AM

  > If you thought Sublime was dead, well you couldn't be more wrong! The latest build of Sublime as of this post is "4192" and was released 20th January 2025.

  Since a huge chunk of value here is in the plugins (hello, there isn't even a built-in plugin manager, it's 3rd party and still haven't fully transitioned to 3.8 - and this isn’t a nitpick, the fact that it’s not part of the core, and the author went MIA is part of the problem), the release date of the editor itself doesn't determine the state of Schrödinger

  > I think the thing to consider is how Sublime is basically "done" software.

  Or, you know, take a look at the issue tracker, pick up a couple of dozen issues that impact you (directly or via the plugins that are blocked by these), and realize how far from reality this statement is. Or just look at your own wishlist…

  > Sublime is fast. It starts instantly.

  But it’s not usable instantly because a lot of functionality is in the slower loading Python plugins, so if you have some shortcut that depends on a plugin, you can’t use it right away…

  > But I prefer authoring snippets in XML rather than JSON. > Obviously, I'm twisted.

  Obviously

  > have tried Helix and I think it is a lot closer to what I would want from a modern editor

  Indeed, operation after selection is much more intuitive, especially when limited to the viewport, but then unfortunately Sublime doesn’t have great modal editing support, and none that would mimic Helix visual-first paradigm

  > The key and mouse bindings are what you would expect from a modern editor.

  That’s what you’d expect from a pre-modern editor, a modern one should have much more sophisticated keybinding support, for example, you’d be able to pick that great modal Helix or Spacemacs keybinding scheme. And have great searchable help for that instead of having to look into the void trying to understand where exactly that `` contextual javascript keybinding was set and how to disable it.

• by curvaturearth on 1/29/25, 7:12 PM

  Sublime Text is a great piece of software

• by kunley on 1/29/25, 5:29 PM

  Also: great API for creating own plugins.

• by unwind on 1/29/25, 9:07 AM

  So, uh, the author mentions the "command palette" as being a killer feature, and links to an article about them, that has zero images of this GUI feature. I can't even ... what?

  I found [1] which at least shows what it looks like, for those of us who haven't had the pleasure to test Sublime Text. I gather that the search that is integrated in the palette is an important aspect of their use, so perhaps it's hard to show actual UX in a still image.

  [1]: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sublime_text/sublime_text_com...

• by jchook on 1/30/25, 6:44 AM

  ELI5 Why use Sublime over NeoVim?

• by nsonha on 2/1/25, 2:29 AM

  pretty elaborated way to say "because it's fast"

• by aerb on 1/29/25, 10:32 PM

  You should fix your atom feed

• by ddingus on 1/29/25, 5:28 PM

  So do I. Thank you devs.

• by jonwinstanley on 1/29/25, 9:49 AM

  I'm a Sublime fanboy, but have been using VSCode for years as I like the Github Copilot integration

  :-(

• by jokoon on 1/29/25, 1:14 PM

  They finally fixed some syntax highlighting issues.

  But yeah, it's the best editor out there, I still uses it.

  I wish I could have more tab rows.

  Still a bit expensive, in my view.

  I tried sublime text projects/workspace once, but they are not that great.

• by gamedever on 1/29/25, 10:52 PM

  I'm going to comment on sublime merge since I see others have.

  (I'm a paid user and paid again for the latest year or whatever the term of support is).

  To be honest, I'm not sure what this product does or does better than all the other similar apps. VSCode has git tools. There's gitlens add on. There's also github's git UI app and some other ones. https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis

  In all of them I see diffs. I can stash/stage/commit. I'm not sure what "amazing" features one has over the other.

  What I can't do

  * I can't copy text from anywhere in the UI. I might be looking at a diff, a path appears, I want to open that path in my editor, so, I want to be able to copy the path from Sublime Merge and paste the path into my editor or shell. Sorry, S.O.L.

  * It puts headings on diff sections. I want to copy text that from Sublime Merge and search for the identifier in my editor. Sorry, S.O.L.

  * I want to search for things across changes - sorry, S.O.L. - "someIdenifier" doesn't exist in the current code. When was it deleted? Let me search.

  Also a minor nit. I hate that it doesn't respect platform conventions. The default folder to open should not be root, it should be my user folder (or something) but definitely not root. No other app on my Mac does this. If you want yours to be root find, add a pref, but by default it should do what other apps do.

  ---

  As for Sublime Text - Of course you can use whatever you want. I used SlickEdit since ~1994 through ~2015 (forgot when I switched to VSCode). The thing is, you should at least know what you're missing.

  In VSCode I use it's SSH remote feature to connect to my linux machine. This is not simple SSH file sharing (Slickedit had that and FTP even). VSCode starts a custom server on the remote machine and uses it to coordinate. Examples:

  * open remote /usr/my/project1

  VSCode loads that project remotely. It edits the files locally (meaning when you open a file, it copies it from my linux box back to the mac in the local editor. IIUC, it proxies the language server stuff so it launches language server support on linux remotely. This means all the TS/C++/Rust etc intellisense stuff is being indexed on Linux in that project's environment.

  VSCode opens a terminal to /usr/my/project1 in VSCode. I can start running shell commands. I used to use separate terminals, external to VSCode, and I still do. But the nice thing about the VS code ones is they're per project. If I switch over the a different project (multiple projects at once), each one has it's own terminal, relevant to that project

  VSCode monitors and forwards servers from that terminal. If I type `python3 -m http.server 9000` in the VSCode terminal, it will launch python3 and then VSCode will automatically forward that port to my mac. I can open http://locahost:9000 on my mac and access the server running on linux (yes I can do that manually. It's nice that it's zero effort)

  VSCode debugs remotely. If I launch the debugger it will debugger (gdb/llvm) on linux but the UI will be local (mac). I can set breakpoints in VSCode in mac, it will set them remotely on linux. I can view data etc.

  VScode opens local UIs remotely. If, in the terminal for /usr/me/project1 I `cd ../project2 && code .` or `code ../project2` (so these commands are running on linux), it spawns a new window on Mac connected via SSH automatically to /usr/me/project2

  VSCode's terminal is using an editor window and keeping it synchronized with the remote shell. This means it's more responsive than SSH from a normal terminal. In a normal terminal IIUC. I type 'x' on my keyboard. It's sent to the remote server over SSH. The shell over there emits an 'x' which is sent back to my local machine. In VSCode. I type 'x', the 'x' is put in the editor control that's shadowing the terminal. It's assumed the remote machine will return 'x' but it doesn't wait for it. Rather, you're typing locally, and it's catching up. So, even and a slow connection you can type faster in VSCode's terminal than you could in a standard SSH terminal. I'm sure there are places where this is not perfect but the general experience is it's way more responsive .

  This is a short list of some of the things that VSCode is doing that AFAIK, most other editors are not (yet?). There's lot of other features though.

  I have lots of issues with VSCode. I wish it had keyboard macros. I wish it it's undo system didn't suck. I wish it did auto backups like Slickedit did. I wish it had search and replace across a folder tree with undo like Slickedit did. I wish it had column select (different than multi-cursor as a column can go into virtual space and multi-cursor can't)

  All that said, the pluses outweigh the minuses and I can't go back.

• by brine on 1/29/25, 1:14 PM

  I was 100% with you... until 3 days ago I tried [Zed](https://zed.dev) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• by mediumsmart on 1/29/25, 7:15 AM

  there can only be one true editor

• by hatmanstack on 1/30/25, 4:43 AM

  How dare you.

• by GenericDev on 1/29/25, 8:18 AM

  There's dozens of us. Dozens! Seriously though, having a lightweight text editor like Sublime that I use is an interesting comparison when I see people immediately reach for tools like VS Code. Especially my juniors.

  The thing about VS Code is not that it's bad, it's just, like everything and the kitchen sink? Sublime Text just feels like a really nice tool bench that your craft for yourself.

  I'm really happy to hear there are others out there.

  (And yes, I totally bought the license, but never enter it in)

• by braggerxyz on 1/29/25, 11:26 AM

  Maybe Sublime Text is good, but I refuse to pay for something as profane as a text editor. A decent editor (syntax highlighting, LSP, regex search, keybindings for the 21st century etc) needs to be part of every operarting system.

  For me nowadays, Lapce is quickly growing on me.