Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I still like Sublime Text

ohdoylerules.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 620 posts

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#371

Post by christiangenco »

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.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#372

Post by jeltz »

_cenw wrote: post #72
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #36

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.

Have you tried Zed, and if so, what's your opinion?

I tried it a few months ago and it was a buggy mess with strange defalts. Totally unusable on a couple of the projects I tried it on.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#374

Post by toastercat »

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.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#375

Post by Asraelite »

GuB-42 wrote: post #166
dominicrose wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS code has good defaults and extensions but if you have time to configure it precisely it's also possible. When configured to your needs the differences between ST and VSC aren't big. What I don't understand is why would anyone use Eclipse.

Eclipse is a full IDE. Sublime Text and VSCode are not. A competitor to Eclipse would be JetBrains IntelliJ or Visual Studio (not Code), both are often considered superior by far, but neither are free. Eclipse is also a platform for creating applications (RCP/RAP).

> Eclipse is a full IDE. Sublime Text and VSCode are not.

I don't understand what practical difference there is between Eclipse/IntelliJ and VSCode with extensions that makes one an IDE and the other not.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#376

Post by NetOpWibby »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #120

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.

Ugh, typo.

*"cannot", not "content"

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#377

Post by zaphod420 »

christiangenco wrote: post #371

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 ch…

Deep understanding and being able to reason about problems is more important than speed. Offloading too much to LLMs has a detrimental effect on our brains.

I'm not saying don't use LLMs. Use them in ways that increase your skills, and be wary of using them in ways that atrophy your skills.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#378

Post by kevinastone »

andrepd wrote: post #169
robin_reala wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sublime’s behaviour isn’t an autosave, it just never loses text in a window. You can upgrade the entire OS, start Sublime and your windows and text will be waiting for you, regardless of saved or unsaved state. I’ve got five-year-old scratchpad windows open that I’ve never saved.

Fwiw zed also has this explicit "sublime style" save all buffers since 3-4 months ago.

It doesn’t save unnamed files which is mostly how I use this feature in sublime-text (as a scratch pad): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4985

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#379

Post by bradgessler »

rollcat wrote: post #242
8fingerlouie wrote: post #225

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 feat…

I think that as software asymptotically approaches mostly-bugfix releases, it's a good sign that it's "done", and therefore just stable, reliable, and "boring". Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit. It can free up your energy to spend it on more interesting things, like actual coding.

I similarly switched from ST4 to Zed after using it for several years. I agree that good software eventually becomes "bugfixes", but if you expand the universe of ST4 out to popular plugins for specific programming languages, it starts to become really buggy. That's something I wish ST would focus on, make the most popular plugins more stable and continue doing that for the next decade.

I posted in the ST forum that achieving a stable configuration of plugins in ST4 seems more difficult than it should be, but they declined to take this on as a problem.

Meanwhile Zed made it pretty easy to achieve a stable set of plugins very quickly, particularly around language services, shell integration, etc. That's what prompted me to switch; however Zed has taken a few steps backwards in that department since they started spinning out language extensions into plugins that require more configuration and are more prone to breaking.

Post reply on HN