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  1. Stackups
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  5. Emacs vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code

Emacs vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Sublime Text
Sublime Text
Stacks33.8K
Followers27.8K
Votes4.0K
Emacs
Emacs
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes322
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

Emacs vs Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

# Introduction

### Key Differences Between Emacs, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code

1. **Customization**: Emacs is highly customizable through Lisp programming, allowing users to tailor the editor to their specific needs. Sublime Text provides a wide range of customization options through settings and plugins, but it's not as flexible as Emacs. Visual Studio Code also offers extensive customization through extensions, making it more user-friendly for those who prefer a GUI-based approach.

2. **Performance**: Emacs tends to be lighter on system resources compared to Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code, making it a preferred choice for users looking for a fast and efficient text editor. Sublime Text is known for its fast performance and responsiveness, making it suitable for large projects. Visual Studio Code, while resource-intensive, provides a smooth and stable performance, especially when working on web development projects.

3. **Community Support**: Emacs has a dedicated community of users who contribute to its development, providing a wide range of resources and support. Sublime Text also has an active community that creates plugins and themes, but it may not be as extensive as Emacs. Visual Studio Code has a large and vibrant community that constantly releases new extensions, updates, and helpful tips for users.

4. **Features**: Emacs is known for its powerful text-editing features, such as macros, keyboard shortcuts, and integration with other tools. Sublime Text offers a rich set of features like multiple cursors, distraction-free mode, and a command palette for quick access to functionality. Visual Studio Code excels in language support, debugging tools, and IntelliSense, making it a versatile choice for developers working on various programming languages.

5. **Cost**: Emacs is free and open-source, making it accessible to all users without any cost barriers. Sublime Text offers a free version with limited functionality, but a license must be purchased for full access. Visual Studio Code is free to use and offers a range of features for developers at no cost, making it a popular choice among programmers.

6. **Cross-Platform Compatibility**: Emacs, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code are all available on multiple operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux, ensuring that users can seamlessly transition between different platforms without any compatibility issues.

In Summary, the key differences between Emacs, Sublime Text, and Visual Studio Code lie in customization, performance, community support, features, cost, and cross-platform compatibility, offering users a variety of options based on their specific needs and preferences.

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Advice on Sublime Text, Emacs, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
Samriddhi
Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

1.04M views1.04M
Comments
410-Ventures
410-Ventures

Nov 18, 2020

Review

PyCharm (pro)

  • great editor designed specifically for Python and python apps
  • complex (good for configurability, bad for simplicity)
  • expensive ($200 first year, $120 third year)

PyCharm (free)

  • same as above but without a REST client or support for other web development tools (which you will likely end up using)
  • ok to get your feet wet (you can always upgrade later) Full comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html

VS Code (free)

  • Configurable "IDE" with support for most modern languages
  • TONS of simple-to-install extensions that add functionality
  • Great docs and UI

Sublime Text (free)

  • one of the most minimal editors out there
  • it just works

It's really down to personal preference. But I would recommend downloading all of the FREE editors, getting setup in each, and keeping only the ones you like.

My personal choice for web development is VS Code but I started with Pycharm (free), and use Sublime text on occasion.

Just focus on learning and developing and you will find what features you're looking for.

12.1k views12.1k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sublime Text
Sublime Text
Emacs
Emacs
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Goto Anything;Multiple Selections;Command Palette;Distraction Free Mode;Split Editing;Instant Project Switch;Plugin API;Customize Anything;Cross Platform
Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML.;Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.;Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.;Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.;A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs others are available separately.
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
33.8K
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
27.8K
Followers
1.2K
Followers
169.1K
Votes
4.0K
Votes
322
Votes
2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 720
    Lightweight
  • 652
    Plugins
  • 641
    Super fast
  • 468
    Great code editor
  • 442
    Cross platform
Cons
  • 8
    Steep learning curve
  • 7
    Everything
  • 4
    Doesn't act like a Mac app
  • 4
    Flexibility to move file
  • 4
    Number of plugins doing the same thing
Pros
  • 65
    Vast array of extensions
  • 44
    Have all you can imagine
  • 40
    Everything i need in one place
  • 39
    Portability
  • 32
    Customer config
Cons
  • 4
    Hard to learn for beginners
  • 4
    So good and extensible, that one can get sidetracked
  • 1
    Not default preinstalled in GNU/linux
Pros
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Linux
Linux
macOS
macOS
Windows
Windows
No integrations availableNo integrations available

What are some alternatives to Sublime Text, Emacs, Visual Studio Code?

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

gedit

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Kakoune

Kakoune

Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim, as such most of its commands are similar to vi’s ones. Kakoune can operate in two modes, normal and insertion. In insertion mode, keys are directly inserted into the current buffer. In normal mode, keys are used to manipulate the current selection and to enter insertion mode.

Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver

It gives you faster, easier ways to design, code and publish websites and web applications that look amazing on any size screen. Create, code and manage dynamic websites easily with a smart, simplified coding engine. Access code hints to quickly learn and edit HTML, CSS and other web standards. And use visual aids to reduce errors and speed up site development.

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