
Switching to Sublime Text from Vim in 2017 - EduardoBautista
https://eduardobautista.com/switching-to-sublime-text-from-vim-in-2017/
======
falcolas
I only have two comments:

> Any popular editor usually has a “Vim mode” that you can install and you can
> achieve native Vim productivity.

I would editorialize this to say "closish to native vim productivity", since
there are virtually no vim mode plugins for popular editors which offer a
complete set of vim features. Even EVIL mode (as of the last time I checked
it) has a few notable discrepancies which arise from mapping Emacs
functionality to vim keybindings.

> I’d rather do my part to ensure good desktop software will continue to
> exist, even if it’s proprietary. I will not use shitty software just because
> it’s open source.

Perhaps I'm just a troglodyte, but I agree with this sentiment heartily.

~~~
sushisource
I think a lot of us can agree with the last bit, but that said VS Code is
actually pretty darn nice.

~~~
Existenceblinks
Do you know how to remove 5 stupid menus on the left; explorer, search, git,
debug, and extension.

I don't agree with all these as default.

Explorer (basically the nav tree): Just give me a toggle key and hide it by
default please (I mean hide its icon nav too)

Search: really? something + F is fine for short key like the others do.

Git: I haven't even tried to use version control inside text editor. It is
just illusion of ease. It's not significantly different from switching to a
terminal. A terminal has its jobs to do, please use it. You will use it anyway
for other tasks.

Extension: This is even worse to be default. I don't think I have something to
frequently do with extensions.

I like its light computation compared to Atom. I had switched to VS Code for a
while, then switched back to Atom. Maybe I'm just lazy to remember new keys.

Edit:: Just found it, "Hide activity bar". Sorry for being lazy :/

~~~
benley
Jut hit ctrl-b to collapse them. I don't know how to completely get rid of the
icon strip, but it doesn't have to be a big sidebar.

~~~
Existenceblinks
Thanks, I knew cmd|crtl+b. But yes, I'd like to completely hide them. It is
annoying to see something I don't use appear on screen, even its icons.

------
AdmiralAsshat
To go to the reverse route, I'm a SublimeText and Vim user that's debating
going _back_ to pure vim.

Much of the functionality that I used ST for I found Vim could do naturally,
with no plugins. This presentation taught me alot
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TX3kV3TICU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TX3kV3TICU)),
such as basic command completion.

There is some stuff that Sublime can still do that I don't think Vim can
(multi-cursor editing comes to mind, and that's still really handy when I'm
making edits to HTML). Other stuff can be done by both but I happen to like
ST's better (the awesome GitHub package comes to mind).

And finally, I did pay $70 for an ST license, so I imagine I'll keep using it
for another few years or so. But given that I do alot of remote administration
on RHEL/CentOS boxes where vim is the only thing I can safely assume to be
installed, it doesn't hurt to stay fluent in vim for such a day.

~~~
cseelus
> There is some stuff that Sublime can still do that I don't think Vim can
> (multi-cursor editing comes to mind, and that's still really handy when I'm
> making edits to HTML) […].

[https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-
cursors](https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors)

I use this with NeoVim and it works perfectly.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Good to know! Although based on my scenario above, I'd prefer to keep it to
vanilla vim, at least until I feel I've mastered it. I thought I had at least
a moderate understanding, but 20 minutes of 'vim' searches on youtube
demonstrates that the rabbit hole goes far deeper than I could have imagined.

------
tombert
I would agree with you, except I really do feel like NeoVim has fixed nearly
every big problem I've had with Vim.

There were definitely hackey things you had to do with regular Vim, but NeoVim
adds a much better interface for plugins and lets you use whatever languages
you'd like for making plugins...Not to mention that it has had proper async
support for years now, much before regular Vim got it.

Using NeoVim, I can still do all my work in the terminal with tmux, and have
the interface that I'm familiar with. Sublime is a great editor, and I use it
as a quick little "paste-buffer", but I don't really feel I'm as productive
with it as I am with my NeoVim + tmux combo.

~~~
EduardoBautista
Yes, NeoVim is definitely an improvement over regular Vim. Hopefully more
people will begin to use NeoVim and make it the standard going forward.

~~~
throwaway2016a
As an avid vim user I was trying to google and see reasons to use NeoVim and I
couldn't find any except "built in terminal"

Any advice on why I should switch?

~~~
tombert
The tab-autocomplete when you hit the ":" key gives out written suggestions.

All the plugins you know and love with Vim should work, and you can write new
plugins in virtually language.

New features tend to reach NeoVim faster than with regular Vim; most notably
async support.

NeoVim used the XDG system for configs, so it doesn't pollute your home folder
with a bunch of dotfiles.

And this might just be in my head, but I just feel like the entire system is a
bit snappier and runs faster.

===== EDIT: ====

falcolas pointed out that I was mistaken on the first point:

> The tab-autocomplete when you hit the ":" key gives out written suggestions.

That appears to be in regular Vim.

~~~
falcolas
> The tab-autocomplete when you hit the ":" key gives out written suggestions.

Can you explain this a bit more - how does this differ from vim's tab
completion for ex commands?

    
    
        :e ~/.vim^I
        .vim/     .viminfo  .vimrc
    
        :help ctrlp-
        'ctrlp-<c-p>' ctrlp-options [...]

~~~
tombert
Looks like I lied (or was using an old version of Vim a few years ago). I just
tried it on my machine and got the tab autocomplete with written suggestions
in both Vim and NeoVim.

My bad!

------
hhsnopek
I hate these types of posts...

"Why I'm no longer using vim and now using X" typically result from not
digging into Vim enough. All the issues the OP is having have been resolved
from either updates to vim, switching terminals, or just understanding vim
basics.

NOTE: Plugs can be slow and the OP is correct that some are hacky, but
typically there's the Vanilla Vim solution to a problem that takes a little
bit of reading and/or finding to solve.

If plugin/loading speed is really an issue then switch to using Alacritty and
Neovim, use vim-plug for async & lazy loading plugins. You get truecolor
support and you're using your GPU to render everything. If plugin speed is
still a problem, learn why they're loading slowly, then dig into why rather
than just saying "they're hacky or clunky". Silver search is great, but if you
understand how to execute terminal commands from vim (:!) then you can grep
everything and remove the need for silver search. I use FZF
([https://github.com/junegunn/fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)) which is
another fuzzy searcher that's optimized for speed, built with Go.

For those that don't want to put in the time to optimize and learn vim, then
by all means switch editors. But don't blame the editor ("I will not use
shitty software just because it’s open source.") unless it's truly the root of
the problems, explore and find better ways. A key thing to remember as a Vim
user is there's always a faster way and your .vimrc will always be different
from another's.

Edit: For those interested in my setup
([https://github.com/hhsnopek/dotfiles/blob/master/.nvimrc](https://github.com/hhsnopek/dotfiles/blob/master/.nvimrc))

~~~
rikkus
Last time I mentioned having switched away from Vim due to its plugins not
giving the functionality I get elsewhere, the reaction was not good. As with
the parent comment, somehow it was my fault, as I'd failed to update to the
latest vim, changed terminals, or '[understand] vim basics'.

I've been using various vi-alikes, including vim, since 1996, so, yes, I have
used just about every vim plugin, used vi[m] on every terminal you can name,
plus several you may have forgotten existed, and would guess I know the basics
by now, considering 90% of what I've edited over the last 20 years has been
through Vim and most of the other 10% has been through work-alikes.

Please don't insult people by making assumptions about their knowledge,
experience and commitment. I - and the OP, I assume(!), have put the work in
and have decided the grass might be greener elsewhere. Please respect that and
be constructive. The OP seems to be trying to help others by pointing at what
they did / are doing to try and live with another editor.

~~~
hhsnopek
The intent was not to insult the OP, rather express the problem with all the
articles that are "Vim to Editor X/Y/Z" which all, typically, relate to
Plugins & Performance. Most problems have solutions that just require more
searching. Now I'm not saying you or the OP didn't take time to do this, but
using plugins that are slow and bulky like CtrlP and syntastic have their
alternatives.

I'm fine with the OP switching editors, I could careless which editor someone
is using or switching to, but don't place the blame on plugin performance,
plugin bloat, or building an IDE; Vim isn't an all-in-one solution and that's
okay, we can push it to be an all-in-one solution.

My constructive criticism is that these problems are in every editor, don't
pin it on vim plugins or the amount of plugins you're loading into vim.
"releativenumber" is a valid reason to switch editors, but the rest of the
reasons are applicable to all editors.

Edit: "switching terminals" -> "switching editors"

------
bbmario
You don't need to gratuitously bash the open source community because you
don't like Javascript-based editors. It doesn't make any sense, you are just
ranting. There are plenty of open source projects inspired by Sublime Text,
written in many different languages and environments.

[http://limetext.org/](http://limetext.org/)

[http://edbee.net/](http://edbee.net/)

[https://github.com/richrd/suplemon](https://github.com/richrd/suplemon)

[https://plugins.geany.org/geanyextrasel.html](https://plugins.geany.org/geanyextrasel.html)

Since they are all open source, if you don't like something, just change it.

~~~
EduardoBautista
> Since they are all open source, if you don't like something, just change it.

I'd much rather give the Sublime Text devs money. I don't have the time or
knowledge to create an editor as good as Sublime Text.

~~~
bbmario
You can help the open source project of your choice with money too:
[https://www.bountysource.com/](https://www.bountysource.com/)

You can also help with documentation, translations, bug reporting, QA, etc.

------
bitcharmer
I've recently switched from Sublime Text to Atom. I've used Sublime for a few
years and was very unimpressed when I first installed Atom 2 years ago. For a
long time it remained slow and clunky, but recently not only did they improve
performance significantly but also made the whole user experience much easier
and pleasant.

I suggest taking a look at Atom before spending money on Sublime. The number
of plugins and extension is just enormous. You might get surprised.

~~~
randomsofr
I tried to use Atom for a while, but it becomes slow once you load a few
projects. With Sublime or Vim i can have more than 4 instances and it stills
runs smooth, but Atom starts lagging and feels heavy.

~~~
level
Atom tends to be my go-to, but being built on Electron is what hurts it the
most, in my opinion. I don't reboot my work machine often, only for updates,
which means that having 2 or 3 projects (in 2 or 3 windows) can eat a lot of
memory if it has been open for a while.

It's frustrating having to restart my editor because the Electron window gets
stale and needs to be closed.

------
c0achmcguirk
I would recommend vim-easymotion and command-t for a big speed improvement
over relativenumbers and CtrlP.

In my experience Sublime is _much_ slower than Vim.

~~~
bphogan
That's odd. I switched from Command-T to CtrlP a couple years ago for speed. I
wonder now if I should look again.

~~~
michaelmrose
Unite.vim is really nice too

------
iamNumber4
I went through a similar change, switching to Sublime a few years ago.
However, I hate to say it as a die hard Linux enthusiast, Visual Studio Code
is by far the best editor.

However, Vim always works. What do I mean by this? Chances are if you do any
real development work, you are having to remote into another system. For
sublime, VSCode, etc... you'll have to Mount the remote file system. Well that
has failed me a few times, especially if the remote system does not support
anything other than sshfs and you are on Windows machine. Terminal access
means Vim. Vim just works 100% of the time.

So... I've come back full circle to Vim, because it just works and I don't
have to change my workflow, because I'm in a different environment/borrowed
machine.

------
zeveb
> What I didn’t like about Vim was that a good number of plugins always felt
> like a hack.

> Also, why not Emacs? I wanted to change my editor, not my operating system
> :P.

He really made a mistake here, IMHO. Spacemacs is _exactly_ the right solution
here: can run on the console, can run in a GUI, _meant_ to be extended
(extending emacs isn't a hack: it's using emacs).

~~~
mixedCase
I briefly tried Emacs both alone and with Spacemacs. Spacemacs configuration
is impenetrable, specially if you're not a LISP fan and Emacs simply needs _a
lot_ of glue to work well with Evil. Even then one has to know and use quite a
few regular keybinds. At that point it just wasn't worth the effort to me over
using a more modern and straightforward editor.

~~~
zeveb
> Spacemacs configuration is impenetrable, specially if you're not a LISP fan

I find its configuration very nice — I don't actually use spacemacs regularly,
but I miss how clean its package system tends to be over normal emacs configs.

And _everyone_ should be a Lisp fan, since it's the best language we've
managed to come up with yet.

> At that point it just wasn't worth the effort to me over using a more modern
> and straightforward editor.

I don't think there's any editor more modern than emacs; there's certainly
none more powerful. More straightforward? Well, nano is probably the most
straightforward, but I wouldn't want to use it regularly.

------
diminish
Is VIM with plugins really that slow compared to Sublime Text? I'm curious
what plugins OP was talking about.

~~~
sirtaj
Until vim 8, everything in vim ran in a single thread with little or no
cooperative multitasking. So if you have a handful of plugins that do any non-
trivial thing with the contents of a buffer in real time - dynamic syntax
highlighting, running an external process or other such things - pretty soon
those milliseconds add up and there is a visible delay between your typing and
the on-screen cursor. Vim 8's background tasks were created precisely to deal
with these sort of problems.

~~~
jorvi
Vim 8 async was created to prevent/revert a massive exodus to NeoVim. The
NeoVim team actually made a (solid) commit that Bram didn't outright reject,
but wanted modified. He jerked around the NeoVim team, having them make lots
of modifications and in the end basically said 'not gonna do it lol, who needs
async anyway'. Out of that came NeoVim. Then NeoVim started to pick up major
steam and lo and behold, Vim had async pretty quick.

~~~
sirtaj
Right, I've heard that floating around, and it's true that neovim exists
primarily due to the lack of async in vim. Whether or not it appeared in vim 8
because of neovim is something I can't personally answer.

------
meow_mix
> Ignoring the node modules directory

This is one of the most annoying things about being in a node js project,
whether you're just grepping or searching for a specific file it's a real pain
point if you've forgotten to ignore it

------
cdevs
Nano for configs & logs, sublime for long term programming. I either user vim
mode in sublime for movement or my own hotkeys that are more easy for me to
remember. mulicursor editing is a must and a game changer from the days of
editing 1400 lines at once without it. atom was soooo close to fitting my
needs but it failed big time on opening files over ssh mounted file
systems.(electron issue?) if that gets fast maybe I'll go back. The JavaScript
modding and plugins were kind of nice.

------
noisy_boy
I've been using rnu for fairly long time and it has never slowed me down.
Ctrl+D/Ctrl+B for forward/backward paging combined with /<search> is very fast
in Vim. Maybe because I don't use any heavy plugins.

On the topic about plugins, does anybody know of a plugin which allows me to
give "names"/"tags" to files so that I can jump back to them with a shorter
"name" instead of the full path?

------
riquito
I think that the this "vim mode" plugin for Visual Studio Code has the best
roadmap/checklist for supported vim features out there.

[https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/blob/master/ROADMAP.md](https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/blob/master/ROADMAP.md)

Every "vim mode" plugin should have something like that

~~~
mixedCase
In my experience both JetBrain's Vim plugin for their IDEs and the Visual
Studio (not Code) plugin are better than the VSC plugin, but the latter is the
best I've tried after those two.

------
jitl
For me, the biggest advantage of VIM is vim-tmux-navigator, which makes
navigating between vim splits and tmux panes seamless. Pressing CTRL-{h,j,k,l}
navigates to the next split or pane in that direction.

I don't think I'll ever be able to switch to a GUI editor unless I can
navigate between that editor's splits and my tmux panes in the same way.

------
cygned
The primary reason I never really used Sublime is that it is not Open Source.
I am happy with Emacs at the moment.

------
nunez
I just can't muster going back to an IDE after using Vim for the last several
years. It does everything I need a text editor to do, is super lightweight and
is almost always available. I bet I could use vi in a toaster.

------
SloughFeg
This is essentially the choice I made a couple years back. Vintageous isn't
perfect but it's the best vim emulator I've used. Sublime is a great text
editor on top of it.

------
knodi
Hmm. I'll wait for "why I moved back Vim" post.

------
draw_down
In 20 years of coding, the use of vim or emacs has never quite clicked with
me. I get that they're infinitely scriptable but the basic experience of using
them just seems so miserable. Sublime is one of my favorite programs ever, for
the reason that I so rarely have to think about it or wait for it. Some of the
best money you'll ever spend, in my view.

