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Fast, reliable, and efficient general-purpose text editor
January 12, 2020

Fast, reliable, and efficient general-purpose text editor

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Sublime Text

We use Sublime Text as our code editor of choice for our dynamically typed language. ST comes with great syntax highlighting and other tools that make writing code much easier out of the box. Whenever we have to write Javascript, HTML, CSS, or Python, we use ST. Some engineers also use ST with some extra plugins for quick text manipulation, such as when they need to format strips, strip out lots of whitespaces, or prefix an unnumbered list with numbers.
  • Low memory usage.
  • Cross platform support for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
  • Development has slowed down a lot recently.
  • Many plugin developers moved their plugins onto VSCode and stopped maintaining the ST versions.
  • I can work on my laptop without a charger for much longer using ST3 than VSCode.
  • ST3's multi-cursor feature helps me do repetitive coding tasks very efficiently.
For users who care a lot about performance (and also battery usage), ST3 is going to win almost every time because its natively built on whatever OS you are running on whereas VSCode is built on top of Electron, which is widely known to have poor performance. As an anecdote, on ST3, it currently takes me 10 seconds to open up my work project with its 600 classes and has symbol indexed and ready to search. On VSCode, it takes about 45 seconds to open the project and have every symbol indexed. This is all on a 2019 i9 Macbook.

For users who want to have the cutting edge on features and plugins, I recommend VSCode. Many of the developers of major plugins/themes that I use in ST3 migrated to VSCode within the past 2 years and let their ST3 plugins stagnate. Examples include Vim, Kakoune, Material Theme, and Text Pastry. Finally, I believe Atom to be the worst of both worlds: less performant than ST3 and plugin community weaker than VSCode.








ST3 has an active forum where you can ask technical questions. Occasionally, the authors will pop in to answer a few questions here and there, but most of the time it's other helpful users who will assist you. Though they aren't the most knowledgeable, they are at least timely. I don't know of any direct way to contact the authors.
As for plugin support, that differs with each plugin but as I mentioned before, many plugins are no longer maintained.

Do you think Sublime Text delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Sublime Text's feature set?

Yes

Did Sublime Text live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Sublime Text go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Sublime Text again?

No

Sublime Text is a great text editor with a great intuitive UI and many features to support coding. But, it is not an IDE. What I mean by not an IDE is that it doesn't have features whereby it analyzes the code deeply. That means no autocomplete, ability to jump to the exact definition of a symbol or function, show compile errors, or built-in debugger. That's all fine for dynamically typed languages such as Python, Javascript, Ruby, as dynamically typed languages are too hard to analyze by an IDE anyway. However, for statically typed languages such as Java, Go, Scala, most programmers wisely pick an IDE as the autocomplete, etc. work great and reliably.

Besides writing code in dynamically typed languages, ST3 is also great for general web development (HTML CSS) and text manipulation. Sure, there's vim and many other text editors out there, but in my opinion, ST3's interface is just so clean, beautiful, intuitive, feature-filled yet not bloated. General-purpose functions ST3 has that are really useful for text editing, in general, include multiple selections, select next instance of the variable, line sorting, line joining, and mass indentation.