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Sublime Text 4

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Re: Sublime Text 4

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t use sublime in my day to day, but always keep it on hand because it’s the only IDE that quickly opens for viewing very large csv or similar files without a hitch. PyCharm, VSCode, Aton all barf under these conditions.

For these instances I just use vim or sed/awk/etc.

Sublime easily handles files that make my Vim slow to a crawl. Agreed on using sed/awk/(rip)grep/other pipeline tools where it makes sense.

Re: Sublime Text 4

#542
post #534
post #300

It's software like Sublime that sustains my faith in the software industry and why I'm still a developer. It's beautiful, efficient software that single-handedly proves that desktop software in 2021 doesn't have to be a shit, low quality side show to SaaS "apps" and mobile. Heaven knows what their code looks like. Perhaps it's best it never goes open source so we can sustain the Opera-esque magic of a <10MB binary th…

Desktop software is superior to web in virtually every way except: (1) Collaborative features and syncing are easier to build when all the data lives in the cloud. There are currently no easy ways to build collaborative decentralized apps that scale and perform well and don't lose data. The best compromise solution today is probably cloud syncing, which is the Apple approach and keeps most of the brains local while u…

I don't think that (1) is true at all - you have the same problems in building a collaborative application using a web app as you would desktop software (e.g. let's say that you want to do multi-user real-time collaboration - you're going to need to use CRDTs no matter if you're writing C++ or JavaScript).

(2), (3), and (4) are true (they're why I've stopped making my tools available to others), although from a business sense, which is separate from a pure quality sense.

(5) can be addressed with some basic tooling and meta-tooling. I don't think that these are that hard - and, more importantly, the web has a complementary problem, which is that you have to do a lot of engineering to get things you get for free on desktop (most notably, persistence - compare the ease of setting up a database service for your cloud app with just writing to a file on desktop).

Re: Sublime Text 4

#543
post #300

It's software like Sublime that sustains my faith in the software industry and why I'm still a developer. It's beautiful, efficient software that single-handedly proves that desktop software in 2021 doesn't have to be a shit, low quality side show to SaaS "apps" and mobile. Heaven knows what their code looks like. Perhaps it's best it never goes open source so we can sustain the Opera-esque magic of a <10MB binary th…

I love me my Sublime. I like an editor that's fast enough, isn't bloated and isn't Vim. Don't always need the IDE. And although I can use Vim, I'm just not as efficient with it to use it 100% of the time. I learned a little to be able to work on remote servers but that's all I need. I can use a GUI editor like Sublime for the rest. Sublime is versatile.

Before I switched entirely to Vim I used a remote editor plugin for Sublime that let me edit files over SSH. Didn't work for every case but was handy for editing webpages live on my dev server before the age of Vagrant and Docker.

Re: Sublime Text 4

#544
post #300

It's software like Sublime that sustains my faith in the software industry and why I'm still a developer. It's beautiful, efficient software that single-handedly proves that desktop software in 2021 doesn't have to be a shit, low quality side show to SaaS "apps" and mobile. Heaven knows what their code looks like. Perhaps it's best it never goes open source so we can sustain the Opera-esque magic of a <10MB binary th…

Craig Mod puts Sublime Text in the “fast software” category: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/ > (…) Sublime Text has — in my experience — only gotten faster. I love software that does this: Software that unbloats over time. This should be the goal of all software. The longer it’s around, the more elegant it should become. Smooth over like a river stone. I have full trust in the engineering of Sublime Text b…

This is a great essay! Completely agree with all of his points and really wish well-crafted software got more respect.

Re: Sublime Text 4

#545
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't usually close VS Code, so this isn't an issue for me.

I don't think I've ever manually closed my text editor outside of reboots.

There's very rarely a good reason to do so. The vast majority of times when I find people saying that they use a tool for its startup time, it's not because they actually have a good reason for not keeping their editor running (e.g. memory usage), but instead because they just don't want to.

Re: Sublime Text 4

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's that? It depends how frequently a major release happens. If it stays at "4.x" for 5 years, I'd way rather have the "tied to a single major version" license :)

If it stays 4.x for 5 years, it is effectively tied to a single major version. You get all the updates for that major version.

That's not what OP quoted though -- the new licensing model says you get all updates for 3 years (regardless of version number).

So with the new license model, let's say v4.7 gets released at 3 years and 1 day, you won't get the v4.7 update. Whereas if the license was tied to major version, you would get 4.7 and onward, until the dev decides to call it 5.x

Re: Sublime Text 4

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is VSCode still fast after you add enough plugins to make it reach feature parity with IntelliJ? I've tried VSCode a few times through the years, but it always seemed like I needed at least a dozen plugins to get all the features I have out-of-the-box with PhpStorm. I guess it's a philosophical difference between modular components and a big ol' monolith (though, beneath the hood, IntelliJ IS modular... most of their…

you're comparing a text/code editor with a full fledge IDE. VSCode is _not_ an IDE, it is a glorified text editor with an amazing plugin system. if you need an IDE for what you do, use PHPStorm. I myself still use Visual Studio for a lot of the stuff that I do in .Net as I find I need the features it has.

I mean, let's be honest, the difference is getting blurrier and blurrier as "text editors" gain more features over time. And workflows, too, aren't that clear-cut... is it wrong for a "text editor" to include built-in autocomplete or git support? What about project-wide regexp search, or is that a better tool for grep? Etc.

At the end of the day, I don't care what a program is classified as, only if it can do what I need it to do. Like many here, I've used Sublime for its speed on simple edits and other editors/IDEs for more complex dev work. That's fine. But VSCode occupies that in-between space, offering a mix of performance and features.

The holy grail for me would be something like PHPStorm but with better performance. I wonder if Java has something to do with it, vs it being built as a native OS app? I don't remember Visual Studio (the full IDE, not VSCode) being this slow, ever, even on old Windows 95 machines. And even back then it was pretty feature-complete too, especially compared to VSCode if not IntelliJ.

I guess my underlying question is whether it's really impossible for an IDE to be both fast and featureful.

Re: Sublime Text 4

#548

I feel bad using VSCode after years of supporting Sublime (by purchasing a license). However the one case where I do use sublime repeatedly? When I need to open an editor QUICKLY. It boots faster than VSCode, and frankly, it finally broke me of my constant habit of VIMming now that I have it on my mac, win and linux boxes. I am eager to try V4, but I'm so deep in VSCode now, I don't know if I can find my way out! I c…

> When I need to open an editor QUICKLY

Do you actually ever need to open a new editor? Why not just start whatever editor you want when you boot up, and then open files in it?

You probably don't shut down and start up your web browser every time you want to open a new site, so why would you do the analogue with your text editor?

Re: Sublime Text 4

#549
post #535
post #300

It's software like Sublime that sustains my faith in the software industry and why I'm still a developer. It's beautiful, efficient software that single-handedly proves that desktop software in 2021 doesn't have to be a shit, low quality side show to SaaS "apps" and mobile. Heaven knows what their code looks like. Perhaps it's best it never goes open source so we can sustain the Opera-esque magic of a <10MB binary th…

Their Git client (Sublime Merge) is the first graphical git tool I've felt happy with.

I took a bet on Sublime Merge with some amount of skepticism and boy it has paid off. After two years of using it, git sort of makes sense now.
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