Sublime Forum

And the winner is -- Sublime Text 3!

#1

I’ve been using vim and emacs for decades. I was interested in a more modern editor, and I’ve been evaluating Atom, ST3, and others. I just licensed ST3, and in my opinion Sublime Text is the clear winner! A couple of deal breakers with Atom was that it is SLOW. Files open almost instantaneously in ST3! Then there is the issue on Windows 10 regarding focus – If I right click on a file and select Open in Atom, Atom does not get focus. Rather, the Atom icon flashes in the task bar, and I have to click it. Bummer. I don’t have that problem with it on my Mac at work, but I’ve been migrating to Windows 10 at home.

ST3 is highly customizable, feature rich, extensible with Python, and FAST! I’ll still use vim because I administer Linux servers at work, and it is available. But all of my desktops now have ST3 installed.

I thought that instead of posting a problem or complaint, ST3 deserves some accolades!

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#2

Yes. Everything you said. Sublime is fantastic, Atom never will be fast enough.

Sublime could be improved with some API flexibility and the occasional new infrastructure feature, but, yeah, Python is a great language for doing plugins, and it is one awesome piece of engineering. When I first bought it, I did it just to express my appreciation for an awesome piece of programming. But now I actually use Sublime after 30+ years of Emacs.

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#3

You won’t get much dissent from that view on this forum. :+1:

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#4

Who says you can’t teach us old dogs some new tricks! :slightly_smiling:

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#5

Yes, Sublime is great, but is not perfect. BTW there is one piece of s*** that developers can’t (or want not) fix: the key mapping issues with non US keyboards. Whilst using on my notebook with US keyboard everything was fine. I was evaluating Sublime Text 3 and everything was good. Then I installed on my Workstation with BR ABNT2 keyboard and most of keyboard shortcuts doesn’t work as expected.

These issues were widely discussed in the forums but no dev answered nor gived an alternative fix. So I stick to Notepad++ in Windows and in Linux with Wine, and for me, the winner is Notepad++.

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#6

That is a strong guess :slightly_smiling: Atom will definitely get faster and faster. Both with new hardware and internal optimizations. They are doing a great job and the big user and developer community will speed up things. I believe Sublime Text has a only fraction of development effort compared to Atom. So it might eventually fall behind with this development model.

(Disclaimer, I use Sublime Text, not Atom.)

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#7

I agree Atom will get faster. However, if you look at how it’s implemented, you will have to conclude that it will never be as fast as Sublime.

And then all that’s left is to decide if you care.

Having written code on a 16-bit PDP11/70, I find that I do care about outrageous waste of CPU cycles. It’s cool that Atom exists, is open source, and uses HTML/CSS/JS at its core to do its job. But, it will always be slow, and some things continue to be unbearably slow (trying searching for Space in a large document - it still doesn’t seem to recover from that apparent ordeal until you quit and restart). Yes hardware will eventually sort this out, but really, is it worth it?

Maybe will say yes, it’s worth it. For now, I say no.

(And I think webkit is one of the modern marvels of computer programming in action … amazing platform)

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