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I still like Sublime Text

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Re: I still like Sublime Text

#451

Post by nine_k »

munificent wrote: post #421

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'…

Funnily, my approach is somehow opposite. I run Emacs with all bells and whistles to write whatever language. With LSPs, you are now not married to a language-specific IDE. As a developer, I just start Emacs in server mode and never shut it down.

Then I use emacsclient to edit all kinds of files. It loads instantly, handles any reasonable files, can access remote files when needed, and has all the tools I want handy.

OTOH the IDE features do not clutter anything: I have no tabs, no toolbars, no file trees — not until I ask for them.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#452

Post by curvaturearth »

munificent wrote: post #421

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'…

Thanks for your books!

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#453

Post by cosmic_cheese »

sadcodemonkey wrote: post #401

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…

The way Sublime makes a strong effort to not only smooth out per-platform kinks but also better integrate into each platform it runs on is definitely a factor for my choice to use it over VS Code. macOS, Windows, Linux, whatever, it works correctly everywhere without also taking a “least common denominator” approach which I really appreciate. I wish more cross platform apps would do this.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#454

Post by LNSY »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #81

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.

First: I love your software, it is such an inspiration. I have been a fan for more than a decade at a point.

There are two pieces of software I would love you to implement, and I would buy both:

1. Spreadsheet App 2. An AI aware editor like Cursor that uses DeepSeek or equivalent. You could sell a subscription to it like Cursor also.

I think you could make both of these sing.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#457

Post by zelphirkalt »

shafyy wrote: post #149
redmandarin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sublime Text team, thank you so much for creating the best tool out there! I truly appreciate the stability and simplicity of your product. My main request is to add a tool similar to Cursor Composer and Chat. Thank you again!

Long time Sublime customer here: Please, please do not add any LLM integrations. One of the main reasons I love Sublime is that I can just focus on writing code, without 100 distracting things popping in and popping out. Also, that I support a business with my money that does not spend resources on the LLM hype.

Would be good to have it opt-in, without any sort of inpact, for users, who aren't using it.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#458

Post by jandrewrogers »

catwell wrote: post #136
ben-schaaf wrote: post #81

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.

Hey! I'm a Sublime Text user since ST2 in 2011. I love ST (my last blog post is https://blog.separateconcerns.com/2025-01-04-teal-lsp-sublim... ) and I think the main thing lacking compared to the competition is the remote development experience. I work in AI so we typically work over SSH on machines with big GPUs. Most of my colleagues use VSCode because it has a very good Remote Development extension.

This would be my top feature request. In addition to being great to have generally, there are increasingly environments where this is essentially a requirement and local copies are often verboten so you can't just use rsync/ssh.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#459

Post by htamas »

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.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#460

Post by james2doyle »

noname120 wrote: post #201
saagarjha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be rude but the article does a pretty good job laying out some reasons why I pick it.

I was interested in the value that it brings you . I'm a former Sublime Text user and I switched to VS Code some time ago. Do you also use Sublime Text as your primary IDE just like author does? ———— Mirroring the structure of the article: 1) Regarding the section about LSPs: do you also have the need to be able to “just add an LSP installed as a binary in on your usr/local/bin” even though by the author's own admiss…

On the LSP stuff, yes it did originate in VS code. I just find the experience in Sublime to be better. How ironic is that?

I didn't consider the conflict between how I said "try the OG" but then say "VS code is the OG". It is a good point.

I show an example of the block level key binding. So yeah, I needed it and used it. I only showed one example but I have a few more that are my own I just didnt write about them.

Around python vs. js for plugins, have you tried to make a VS code plugin? You need a package.json, npm, and vsce installed globally. Which language is being used is usually the least of my problems. For Sublime, you need a single .py file! Someone shared this 9 line plugin they made: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/31500c17452b0fd8c55bc9460bd9c... - I don't tthink plugin development could be more simple

I bet an LLM could spit out single file plugins very easily. VS code plugins are clearly more work to create and deploy even after taking into account my critiques of Package Control. At the end of the day you can just toss your plugin in a folder or push it to github and reference it with a URL.

I didn't say the docs were "terrible". I just said they were disjointed. They are complete and fully document the APIs. I just wish they were more like the PHP docs or the ones for VS code which are docs plus guides.

All your other points are fine critiques. I'll chalk the other complaints up as a matter of opinion

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