Sublime Text is my daily driver for development
January 01, 2019
Sublime Text is my daily driver for development
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sublime Text
I cannot recommend Sublime Text enough. As a user of Sublime Text 2 and 3 since its release, Sublime Text is my daily driver for software development. From simple notes and todo.txt usage to PHP and web development to Python and Lua, I use Sublime for almost all of my coding needs. The exceptions, of course, are languages like C# and whenever I'm working with libraries, like Unity or Mono.
Overall, though, I'm so satisfied with Sublime that I have convinced others to switch and stay with Sublime simply because of my satisfaction with it on the whole.
- Gets out of your way! This is probably the biggest advantage to Sublime over pseudo-IDEs like VS Code, or full-blown IDEs like PHPStorm. Sublime Text is by-and-large a text editor with bells and whistles, but that's what makes it so easy and nice to use. I'm never fighting with Sublime to do things my way.
- There is an endless supply of plugins, and building your own is simple enough that a novice Python developer could do it.
- Its code indexing is able to correlate methods and classes that programs like VS Code and Atom fail to do.
- It is, at its core, a glorified text editor. That means it doesn't provide a lot of things that IDEs do when developing code, like quality intellisense, code completion, or debugging.
- Whereas there IS an endless supply of plugins, many of them have been abandoned, forked and abandoned on GitHub, or just never quite work right. That being said, once you parse through the plugins that are out there, you can find plenty that do a fantastic job.
- Sublime has become our daily code editor. As new employees join the company, they find it easy to pick up Sublime, which means we've been able to reduce onboarding costs in terms of acclimating new members to our team's development processes.
- The fact that Sublime has a flat, one-time fee means we don't have to worry about future licensing, with the exception of major software releases.
- Notepad++
- PhpStorm
- PyCharm
- Microsoft Visual Studio Code
- Atom
Sublime gets out of your way, unlike many IDEs, and performs faster and cleaner than other featured editors, like VS Code and Atom.
The drawbacks are that you lose out on a lot of things like debugging and runtime errors with Sublime. It's a tradeoff between a lightweight application and features that you may or may not need, depending on your development needs.