~10 years ago I was a Sublime 2 user surrounded by sad TextMate users—sad because TextMate had stagnated and was clearly on its way out and "everyone" had jumped to Sublime. When Atom was released, Sublime became the editor in decline.
It seemed to me that there would always be an endless cycle of boom and bust with editors. It was a cycle with more in common with fashion than craft, and I wondered if I might end up wasting an inordinate amount of time switching editors throughout my career without any upside. So rather than switch to Atom, only to switch again a few years later, I set about with adopting Vim.
The choice seems to have been correct as there will always be a new editor (that's more or less the same as the old editor) that catches hold, but I wanted stability. Vim gives me stability, and the only other editor I'd consider would be Emacs for similar reasons.
There are a couple credible alternatives that get a lot of maintenance (I use them both for 3+ hours a day):
If you are coding: Unless you are using IntelliJ (which a ton of of my colleagues do, and love) - it's a vscode world. Everyone at every company I've seen bangs away using that. It's kind of amazing how much inertia it's picked up (currently).
If you are working with text: 90% of the time if I have a couple gigabytes of text I need to do a lot of work with - it's Sublime Text. Actively Developed. A really solid text plugin architecture. The other 10% of the time I still use vim - mostly because it's in my finger DNA. Emacs is the obvious alternative which lots of smart people I know use.
I'd be interested in knowing if there are people who have used all five of these for > 100 hours that would recommend something else - (I haven't used Emacs that much - but I have well over a couple hundred hours on each of intelliJ/vscode/vim/Sublime. Probably close to 1000+ hours on the last three). (okay, small fib - close to 5,000+ hours on Sublime. I spend almost as much time in that tool as I do bash).
If you're retaining vim on your workstation for quick editing of files, I'd encourage you to keep an eye on the Helix editor. https://helix-editor.com/
There are three nice things about it: it flips vim's <verb><motion> into a <motion><verb> (like kakoune); it's got tree-sitter support out of the box (including for navigation); it's got LSP support out of the box.
Its keybinding is perhaps in "uncanny valley" of vim's. Overall, it still feels well thought out.
Yep. I am waiting for its plugin support to come out to start really using it but I have it installed and I use it from time to time. It is pretty nice!
I end up with vim bindings in VSCode at the present. It doesn't do everything but it does most things I want. There is neovim integration, but last time I tried it there were a bunch of glitchy things that didn't work right (I remember selection being buggy but I can't remember the specifics). Maybe I'll have to give it another whirl.
Honestly? Emacs. Gonna be around for at least as long as RMS is still alive. I'd accept Vim as a runner-up; I'm conversant in it and can see where people might prefer it (though honestly, those people should probably enable evil-mode in emacs).
But realistically? A significant majority of developers use Visual Studio Code; Atom is still only being used by absolute diehards. Visual Studio Code's complete supplantation of Atom (with which it competes for resources in the same organization) is why we're having this discussion.
RMS hadn't been involved with any technical contribution or project level decision making for a while. I would say people like Eli Zaretskii are far more important. While there is no shortage of people willing to hack on elisp, I get the feeling that people who can hack on the C core, and possessing deep knowledge of core subsystems is slowly dwindling.
But I do think Emacs will be fine. I don't think VSCode is an existential threat to Emacs in the same way Toyota is not a threat to Lamborghini. VSCode boasts impressive numbers, but it does so by consolidating in a target demography that was never a stronghold for Emacs to begin with - partly due to some level of indifference on its part. On the other hand, there are things Emacs is uniquely suited for, and for that reason it will continue to attract a particular type. I think in terms of absolute numbers Emacs userbase is still increasing, and I think falling numbers in terms of total percentage doesn't mean much for its survival.
I used to say that investing some time in becoming proficient with Emacs (the One True Editor!) or vim will deliver returns over a lifetime-spanning career. But Visual Studio Code has already joined them and it is a pretty sensible editor platform to learn.
Also totally subject for discussion: I suspect VS Code will see more innovation in years to come.
Isn't this for MacOS only? Sorry, [I just left Windows](https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...) recently for it's anti-customer changes in Windows 11, Apple is way worse than Microsoft regarding its anti-choice position on all its products.
It's a very dumb reason to stick with an editor, but I have trouble going back to Sublime after VSCode despite preferring most things about Sublime, because I always forget how to manage packages using Sublime's command prompt and have to screw around with it for a while each time, while VSCode has a GUI for that so the memorization required is zero, and can easily browse available packages without bouncing out to a browser, and it often prompts me to install relevant plugins so it's just a matter of clicking "OK".
Every time I try to go back to Sublime, this annoys me right off the bat and I'm back in VSCode by the end of the day.
A minor annoyance that happens often is actually a huge problem. I think we as engineers understate how important these little, often UX related issues really are because we understate how important UX is overall.
Sure, I find that every time I google for how to do it :-)
In VSCode, I can browse info about packages without having to remember a thing aside from "one of the six big icons on the left is 'Extensions'". One mouse click, start typing, click anything that looks like it might be good, get a ton of info and an "install" button. There are filters! So I can simply sort by "most popular" if I want, or by name, or a bunch of other things, all without having to remember anything for this somewhat-infrequent operation, because it's in the GUI.
It's mainly the integrated package exploration that's missing. And the auto-suggestion for plugins—in fact, I rarely have to do any of the above, and just click "OK" to whatever VSCode suggests, and everything's fine.
Sublime has (I just checked) a "package discovery" command, which... opens a web browser, to the exact same page you'd have ended on if you'd started by just googling it (which is what I do). So you have to find what you want on there, then go back to Sublime and find it again.
The result is that in the best case it takes me 1% as long to install what I need on VSCode (just click OK), and worst case it takes me perhaps 50% as long, compared with Sublime. I'm also way less likely to go poke around and see if there's anything that might be useful, in Sublime.
[EDIT] "Why aren't you way more familiar with the command palette?" ephemeral shells as anything more than dead-simple launchers make me really uncomfortable. I hate using them. Apple spotlight? I use it extensively—only for launching programs, period, nothing else. I'd much rather have a persistent shell environment I could attach from any terminal and leave open.
That's super fair. I'll admit I'm entirely in the same boat - if nothing happens on a new tool when I type Ctrl-Shift-P, I usually just shrug and go back to using all the other tools I have that do that.
I do love the fact that, with Sublime, that 75%+ of the time when I want to do something, say, pretty-print a JSON text document, it's just:
Ctl-Shift-P, "json" (Don't see anything obvious)
[hit backspace to clear json] "Install Package", "json"
See the "Pretty Print" option, install it in 2 seconds, and on my way.
Another Brackets user! There must be dozens of us!
I used Brackets too back then and tried Atom a few times but it was always too slow and laggy. I was so glad when VSCode came out and that it was actually good. I was in the midst of switching to VIM but it was just too much of a bother.
I've used many text editors back and forth and keep going back to Kate. It's what I use now. I'm not sure I'd say it's the best choice for everyone but it's what works for me the best it seems.
Sublime Text came pretty close to dying during the Sublime Text 2 years. I recall development slowed down substantially (it was a solo dev, IIRC), and it being pretty surprising when Sublime Text 3 came out.
It was only adderal driven developer crowd making mountain out of a mole because they felt uneasy their frigging text editor hadn't been updated every other week.
I’ve used Sublime Text for many many years now and it’s still my favorite text editor. I mainly use it for writing small reminders as well as Lua / LÖVE dev.
