Comparison after using VSCode for 4months everyday

[ferahl]

I’ve had to use VSCode in my latest contract due to permission issues with using Sublime plugins (I’ll try and get around them at some point).

Even after trying to improve VSCode shortcuts and settings to be a bit more like Sublime and installing a “Rebound Delete” plugin (yeah by default you can’t remove a whole line), I can still say that Sublime is superior in nearly every way.

The most noticeable thing is performance. Folks who came from Atom think VSCode is fast but it feels like quicksand compared to Sublime (on a 32GB RAM super computer). And that’s without searching or fuzzy searching node_modules (which is annoying). I also love that you can develop a plugin in Sublime, for Sublime, seeing changes live, and you can install many plugins or change settings without a restart (can’t do any of that in VSCode and it’s a much newer project :/).

So what does it do better? I don’t really care about super smart intellisense, sometimes it even gets in the way: for example it sometimes pops up and blocks you clicking on something, or it won’t suggest a code word because you’re typing it in a string and it’s trying to be smart. But the best feature it has is “Go to definition” which is bound to a shortcut key and works a million times better than Sublime’s (it actually works). The only other minor thing is suggestions as you’re typing import paths.

If Sublime had a proper Go to definition it would be amazing.

The only other thing I’ve been waiting for Sublime to do for years is a shortcut on find results to go to the location without using the mouse.

Another minor niggle is the file explorer could use some love, it shouldn’t be necessary to install SidebarEnhancements plugin to get some basic human rights features like copy & paste, delete, open in explorer, run etc.

[deathaxe]

The only other thing I’ve been waiting for Sublime to do for years is a shortcut on find results to go to the location without using the mouse.

If pressing F4 or Shift+F4 within the Find Result panel is not enough to jump around the find results, you could try https://packagecontrol.io/packages/FindResultsBufferUtils to add some more.

If Sublime had a proper Go to definition it would be amazing.

The quality of this feature depends on code analysis and may not be a feature of a text editor itself. VS Code uses its language-server-protocol to ask some backend server to do code-analysis and return the location.

You could try the LSP package, which intends to add a common client interface for such langage-servers. I use it for python and don’t want to miss it anymore. The whole technology is still in beta state but does a pretty well job already. Maybe you find a well working language-server for the syntaxes of your choice?

[qgates]

Agree with @deathaxe on Goto Definition… It actually works very well for me, certainly on client-side development with js/node/vue etc. and server side development with PHP. With some tweaking Sublime can be made to ignore node_modules for goto def / search in files. Goto def with jump back / jump forward really speeds workflow in bigger projects.

It’s not perfect however - eg. I’d like goto def to be expanded to included objects, variables, classes etc. as well as methods/functions. So I can go to the definition of a variable or a class.

[FHTheron]

If pressing F4 or Shift+F4 within the Find Result panel is not enough to jump around the find results, you could try https://packagecontrol.io/packages/FindResultsBufferUtils to add some more.

Thanks for the reminder. I’ve looked for plugins a few times, but every time somehow kept missing the obvious ones that do exactly what I want. I now found https://packagecontrol.io/packages/BetterFindBuffer which does let you press Enter on a line to go to it, perfect. It overrode my colour scheme for the Find Buffer it seems, but that’s probably easy to fix.

edit: Wow someone even made a theme designer