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I often get asked why I still use Sublime. So I wrote this article singing it's praises.


I never get asked. It’s obvious. Just open a 4Gb log file as a developer.

All my developers have it.


I only keep sublime text around for opening +500mb dumps, everything else was moved to vscode years ago.

Anything more than 500mb and I switch to less for instant reading/searching and sed for instant find/replace.


Absolutely. I actually just made my own syntax for highlighting the log files in Laravel (Monolog): https://github.com/james2doyle/sublime-log-syntax


VSCode is just as fast for opening 4 GB log files


It is not just about the opening, it is about the searching. Vim is fantastique, although VSCode got faster over time too. Grep is fantastic too (I am not trying to out-hardcore here ... I mean specifically for log file searching not actual coding!). Splunk is better though, but sometimes you are local, and sometimes you don't have a few mill to burn.


Vim is not slower!


I agree and I do use Vim for all quick edits I need. Just wanted to challenge the idea that Sublime Text was better than alternatives in the space of GUI text editors


As a Sublime user I mostly agree, except for the project stuff. I can never bring myself to set that up. What are you using multiple LSP servers per file for?


If you have any in-lined code, SQL/HTML. I can see that being a great feature.

My eyes widened at that part of the article, as I have to betray syntax highlighting when I in-line something, which makes me want to break it into it's own file to get the highlighting back. But for simple things (like one-liners); breaking it into its own file makes things even more messy.


Hmm, so while it's not LSP I do have a Markdown plugin that highlights code blocks. But I don't rely on autocomplete there.


I got a perfect example: an Astro site. I currently have the Astro LSP, Tailwind LSP, and the Biome LSP, all running on the same file. I even have Typos LSP too. Having them all going at the sam time and being able to tweak their settings on a per-project basis is ideal for my workflow.


I'm curious though- as somebody who is reasonably technical I get why you would prefer Sublime to something like VSCode, but why not Emacs?


I can answer the opposite of that question. Why Emacs?

For me, Emacs is valuable not for the things it can or cannot do, it's valuable because it gives me the perception of complete control over the things on my computer.

The other day, I was watching my teammate showing me some stuff over Zoom, and I didn't want to derail his thoughts by constantly stopping him: "hey, wait, don't scroll away, I'm still reading that," "wait a second, what was that URL again?" etc. So, the only thing I could do was take screenshots.

During the lunch break, I decided to solve this thing for myself. I wrote a command that checks ~/Desktop - it's where I drop my screenshots, then finds any .png file that was created no longer than 2 minutes ago, sends it to tesseract for OCR, and opens the text in a buffer. Took me less than 20 minutes.

Sure, there are many ways to get something like that done, but after trying so many different options, I was never able to extract the same feeling of control from any other alternative.

I have a command that inserts the url of my active tab in the browser, with description, in the correct format (e.g., markdown). I wrote that myself, because at some point it bothered me that I had to do that manually. There are many examples such that, where if I weren't using Emacs, I probably wouldn't even bother to acknowledge the existence of such small annoyances.

What makes Emacs truly exceptional isn't its vast feature set, but rather its ability to foster a problem-solving mentality - the "Emacs brain" - where no obstacle, regardless of size, goes unaddressed or unresolved.


I’m a long-time Sublime user who also uses Emacs for single files/at the command line (I also have Emacs key bindings set up in ST), I have found over the years that I am prone to configuration rabbit holes with Emacs and that Sublime strikes a nice balance of good defaults, simplicity, and customizability.

I think that every time I’ve worked on a large project with Emacs I’ve started trying to optimize the partial/fuzzy filename search, trying all of the different ways people suggest online to see which one feels natural until I realize I’ve spent an entire day on it.

Over time I’ve come to really value software that is customizable, but that comes with defaults that I really like, rather than software that’s even more customizable but that must be customized for it to feel right. God forbid I run Emacs somewhere without my conf and forget to disable electric indent mode and want to flip my desk when it does its terrible default behavior.




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