HACKER Q&A
📣 recvonline

People using Sublime Text instead of VSCode, why?


I found Sublime Text 4 surprisingly pleasant to use. A friend of mine recommended me the editor, which I used up until VSCode came out. I switched back and found it somehow... snappier. I wonder if there are more "old timers" who are using Sublime Text and their own reason to still use this editor over others?

  👤 bradwood Accepted Answer ✓
Us old timers are still having the vim/emacs debate. But, as much as we disagree about vim vs emacs, one thing we can ALL agree on is that both VSCode and Sublime Text are two flavours of the same shit.
👤 al_borland
I was using Sublime Text up until very recently. It worked well and I knew all the key bindings (that I cared about).

Once I started getting the nag message in the corner of the screen telling me to buy another license I started questioning if it was worth it. I went to VS Code briefly, it was fine, but it choked on large files which I sometimes need to work with. These files would crash VS Code, but Sublime was able to handle them, even if it took a few minutes. Native apps will always have better performance. These aren’t code files, I often just need to manipulate large amounts of text, and with the tools of a good text editor, it’s fairly quick and easy to just do it there. These are one-off things that will never be done the same again.

Recently, during a sale, I bought and migrated over to Nova. The git integration with the company’s on-prem system worked instantly, which isn’t something I can’t say for VS Code. It does have its quirks though… when doing a copy/paste of a block of code it always gets the indentation wrong, which is prettying annoying.

👤 mikece
I keep it around -- and even paid for it! -- because of it's performance on very large log files (100MB and larger).
👤 __warlord__
I mainly work with VSCode both professionally and for personal projects, mainly for:

  * Copilot (personal projects only)
  * Debugger
  * Remote sessions
  * Workspaces
  * GitLens
  * Postgres client
  * Rest client
But I do use Sublime Text 4 as a buffer for temporary files. (ST4 keeps them even after restarting it) AND because sublime text works at 144hz refresh rate.
👤 ThePhysicist
I just want my editor to be fast. VSCode had noticeable lag even on medium-sized projects when opening files, scrolling or entering text. Not much, but enough to really annoy me. Sublime Text always felt much snappier and reactive to me.
👤 a_lifters_life
Depends what im doing.

If im writing a big application i typically use vscode.

Otherwise if its just text/code wrangling I use sublimetext.

👤 Shadonototra
nothing about being "old timers" for liking efficient software that are not a web browser