Sublime Forum

Integrate vscode extension host into Sublime Text

#1

First of all, I wanted to start by saying I love Sublime Text. It’s snappier than vscode and even when I’ve been running both side-by-side for the better part of 3 years, I normally try to come back to ST when possible due to the performance difference in some big files I work on.

Lately, I’ve seen a few instances were ST could benefit from implementing vscode extensions since there is no support or little support for certain languages due to relying mostly on the community to implement (I’ve seen that there are some text editors already doing this or planning to do so onivim extracted vscode extension host for their text editor).

As an ST lover, I want the best for this software and the developers behind the product, and feel that by adding vscode extension support, you will be able to keep a good amount of people that are moving to the “new kid on the block”.

From what I’ve researched, adding color scheme vscode extension support could be done in Phase 1 on an Alpha release, as vscode is using the same TextMate rules that Sublime Text does (you would be able to recover almost ALL of the themes that plugin developers abandoned when they moved to vscode.

Phase 2 might be focused on bringing LSP and support to Sublime Text to improve autocomplete, syntax highlighting, etc (I know this one will have performance implications, but most likely will still be faster than vscode). Users can always go to Tools > Developer > Profile Plugins to know why Sublime is slower, but I wouldn’t mind losing a bit of performance in order to gain a ton of functionality. I would not even consider bringing debugging, etc to the mix, as I believe that is better suited for a full IDE and can hugely impact performance

I would also keep package control as another source of getting plugins for people who don’t want to mess with any vscode stuff (I know there are users that would use vanilla ST and I respect that).

Even if this is not done, I’m not going anywhere, however, I think these enhancements would mean a lot to a bunch of people who just want an editor that can help them on their day-to-day.

In the meantime, I will be trying to contribute to this awesome text editor by bringing Dart reformat support to vscode (I’m not 100% sure how to do it yet. I’m not new to Python but I’m definitly new to ST plugin development.

0 Likes

#2

Just here to provide some information. Since I am not staff, no real comment here.


This has been mentioned somewhere with staff’s reply (maybe in Discord). But at this moment I only found

Iirc, staff think it’s better to be implemented in userland. But even in userland implementation, it still take much effort to get it work well. I can’t image that what if I have to wait for kind of 1 month dev build or 4 months stable build to get a tiny LSP bug fixed (and ST says itself as a text editor. Not everyone uses LSP). The userland LSP package allows it to have a fast develop/release iteration and even if it doesn’t release a new tag, I can use the latest source from the Github repo.

I think what the staff thought is given enough APIs, the community will do it.


Another for your information, the current (2020/05/10 nightly) Onivim2 win64 installer is about 80MB and after installation it’s about 300MB. It doesn’t use Electron though.

There was a feature request (or question whatever) about make minihtml support more (all) HTML tags which basically asks for embedding a browser (for a text editor) and makes ST bloated.

0 Likes