Sublime Forum

A little bit of honesty

#1

I love many aspects of Sublime, with speed being the number one reason.

But when I do long coding sessions, I must admit I always fall back to an IDE. I really do need the precise intellisense of IDEA, pycharm and VS.NET to be productive. The small things like Javadoc popups, clever refactorings, code metrics, and so on really matters.

I’m wondering… do people really use Sublime for writing tons of source code? How do you manage to be productive without the above-mentioned features?

So I’m just curios. I do use Sublime for quick xml editing and maybe some property-file editing, but for coding, I really think a simple editor is inferior. Am I missing something? Should Sublime become more of an IDE? Probably not, but maybe become extensible enough for packages to add IDE features?

It’s 36 degrees celsius in my office, so maybe it’s just me boiling over.

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#2

Personally, I prefer the lack of Intellisense, it’s always gotten in my way. Go To Anything provides me with a reminder of the method name as and when I need it. I don’t use SublimeCodeIntel or SublimeLinter either, they slow me down.

I’ve spent 20 whole-hours writing code in Sublime before, it’s bliss for me. But we’re all different :smile:

Once you learn about Sublime’s text manipulation, multi-cursors etc you’ll soon feel the need to switch.

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#3

It’s been my daily driver for a few years now. I moved to ST from IntelliJ, IntelliJ is nice, especially if you’re wanting a full blown IDE but I feel more at home in a text editor.

I must admit it was difficult at first giving up the intellisense that the IntelliJ products provide, but, once I got over that hurdle I found I just started remembering the API of frameworks I used often off the top of my head and started remembering new APIs more easily. Having said that, I do tend to use TernJS at times when I’m learning a new API or codebase and I’ve written some plugins to provide minimal code completion as well but nothing super robust. Just enough to allow you to jump into a project and get completion help when needed.

So, yeah, it can be a hurdle to get over if you want robust intellisense, but, for me the command palette and the new project indexing in ST 3 provides all the power I want from an editor.

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#4

I have always preferred a good text editor to an IDE. Usually this is because IDE’s are often bloated, slower, and I haven’t found one where I like the editor portion as well.

As subhaze said, I have found that I start to learn my code base and API’s much better doing things this way. Everyone is different though, and some people require an IDE; I don’t.

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#5

I tend to switch between both quite a bit. I probably use the IDE more but if there’s anything where Sublime’s features make a task easier (multi-selects is a big one here) then I switch over, make the edits, and then switch back and let it auto-reload the file. I think most IDEs have an “External Tool” feature (or it’s available as a plugin). I setup Sublime as an external editor so opening my current file is just one click. In some cases you can even get Sublime to open the file at the current line the IDE is on. Very handy.

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#6

For Java, recently, I’ve been using intellij, mostly because my Java-fu is pretty rusty. For Python, Sublime is my daily driver (and that’s a large portion of my coding each day). Anaconda does a great job of providing most of the intellisense features in IDE’s for Python.

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#7

To be fair, intellij supports all this now, but of course, it’s all pretty jvm centric. If sublime had better understanding of language semantics, i’d probably use it as my ide.

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#8

I work in a system with hundreds of thousands of files and simply can’t wrap my projects in IDEs. On top of that, I was originally a vim user in college so IDEs seem like slow mouse centered monsters that scare children. Although if anyone wants to actually get intellisense for C++ working in sublime, would be willing to trade my soul and body for it.

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