Sublime Forum

Sublime Text versus Visual Studio Code in 2019

#5

I think I will stay ever with ST unless there is a good enough editor which doesn’t use JS. JS is powerful, it’s just not my cup of tea.

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#6

You mean Java, yes? That’s true - editors which based on Java are heavy and so slow for me and works like :elephant: (with all respect for elephants :grin: )

By the way @randy3k you are one of couple reasons why i still use ST :slight_smile: . I mean Terminus which one works great on Windows. Thank you for that! :purple_heart:

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#7

Thank you. I meant JavaScript by the way.

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#8

Plugins are a very part of the sublime text eco system. I have installed a dozen plugins myself. I have noticed that most plugin I installed have not been updated for more than half of year. I think it is not a good signal.

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#9

Ahh the ol’ frequent updates stigma.

An old timestamp usually means “abandoned” or “no longer compatible”, but on some occasions it just means nothing has had to change yet for it to keep doing what it needs to do. That’s why I think a public piece of software should get a sub-minor version step every 6 months just to say

I’m still alive, I still remember that I made this thing, I still consider it relevant and useful and I have not added any shiny new features since the previous version.

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#10

Yes, keeping plugins up to date is important. For old packages, we do not know if it can still work with the latest version of sublime text. I think an active plugin system will also draw more potential users.

1 Like
#11

I don’t get this. Why does a plugin need constant updates? What happens if it is feature complete? Yeah, some plugins do fall behind a bit. Some of mine don’t need updates, and probably won’t for a long time. Some of mine could use some love, but I have a life, and kids, and other projects on top of plugin X, and no funding for any of my projects, so I get to them when I can.

11 Likes
#12

I think all users have a much respect for plugin developers, especially if they doing this in private free time

The problem is not the lack of frequent updates.
If everything works and does not need any update, everything it’s ok.

The problem begin when:

  • documentation is incomplete or outdated, what often mislead users
  • we are not able to determine whether the plugin still works, or just we made mistakes in the configuration
    ( I’m exactly in this situation with Xdebug plugin )
1 Like
#13

I know there was recent outage and from that @wbond wrote

Maybe a new focus on how the package system can be revamped during the process of moving it to “a more modern approach”, could resolve a lot of these issues… some of which I think are wrongly attributed to ST.

By the “package system” I mean from the community collaboration perspective not how it works.

1 Like
#14

Just crashed once again: (Sublime Text build 3184) core dump: d13e37d0-bad0-43f0-aade-9f5d27d34768.zip

image
51197929-fe01a000-18d9-11e9-87ec-05ec9729cab0.png824×174

I should revert to build 3176 and wait until they fix build 3184?

Searching on VSCode Issue tracker, we can also see crash reports: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues?utf8=✓&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+crash+

0 Likes
#15

Well, there are stable and development branches for a reason. Unless this was meant to be a release candidate, I’d say the software tipping over is probably not wholly unexpected?

6 Likes
#16

well I think ST does pretty well in comparison with other editors, in addition to being one of the fastest (or fastest ?), having a nice and clean interface, and being very customizable … recent additions to the plugin ecosystem (e.g LSP which adds IDE-like features similar to VS Code, Terminus which integrates a cross-platform terminal into ST (similar to VS Code), others are yet to be added to Package Control such as sublime_db that will add an integrated debugger which VS Code is famous by), provides a boost to the productivity of ST.
so overall ST may go head to head with VS Code in terms of features and it’s even better in terms of performance and elegance.

2 Likes
#17

A bit offtopic:

The main difference being that on VSC you just hit that install button and you’re kind of done.

On ST is a real adventure that implies a lot of fiddling around and if you’re both lucky and skilled, you might make it work.

1 Like
#18

yes, I was going to add this exact note, I guess VSC is accessible to a wider variety of users than ST. ST demands patience and a lot of work, but it can do better if it made configurations a little easier.

2 Likes
#19

Well, what some fail to understand is that they compare apples with eggs. You have a text editor and you have an IDE (JetBrains, VS Code and such).

They are completely different beasts, but some users expect the same functionality from both. I don’t expect such, the LPS thingy was just an example.

1 Like
#20

Definitely Visual Studio Professional (or Community) are an IDE, but I do not think VSCode is an IDE. It may be sounding like an IDE through its extensions additions, but the same would apply for Sublime Text.

Comparing both wiki pages, for Sublime Text and VSCode, they both state they are the some thing:

  1. Visual Studio Code is a source code editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code
  2. Sublime Text is a proprietary cross-platform source code editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_Text
  3. Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio
0 Likes
#21

Maybe I missed a point but this whole comparison is done on how easily you can write plugins on an editor and the issue is that you run on bugs on both presented choices, which is expected as there is no perfect software. But this is not using the editor but rather developing/extending it.

I would rather choose my tools based on what they already provide to me and not what I can make them to be. At the end of the day, one can even write his own editor to do that very specific functionality he wants.

For the sake on my opinion between these two editors, I find that sublime text has a very clean and concise user interface and VS Code has tried to copy bits of it but still fails. I found very confusing configuring VS Code as its settings seemed to me to be inconsistent and they remind me a mash up between what Atom tried to do and sublime text. I prefer the single .json file which makes it very clear what is going on.

2 Likes
#22

Two comments to share:

  1. I am not a developer. VS Code looks nearly impossible for a non-developer to extend. It is very intimidating. I think there are more non-developers out there that are familiar with python then the tech stack necessary to extend VS Code. I know not everyone is going to write their own extensions and even less so for non-developers, but having Sublime Text be extendable by python keeps me here. (among many other great things about Sublime Text)

  2. The developers I do work with often comment about VS Code. While the code is available on GitHub, I have heard them mention that compiling VS Code is proprietary. You can not create your own build. I guess having the source is helpful, but not being able to compile means you can’t fix any issues without MS accepting your code.

3 Likes
#23

Compiling VSCode is not proprietary - all their build scripts and documentation is online in their repository: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/How-to-Contribute#build-and-run

In terms of bundling the code into a packaged application (.app, .exe, etc) - you can use many different ways since it’s using electron. They most likely have this setup in a CI environment and so it’s not included in the main repository.
In any case, it’s extremely simple to re-package the app once you’ve built it (following the above guide).

And all of that code and setup is licensed under the MIT license: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

1 Like
#24

Why are you so pessimistic :slight_smile:

I am just curious, what criteria must a developer tool cross to fit in the IDE world :slight_smile:

1 Like