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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
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  4. Text Editor
  5. Sublime Text vs Vim vs Visual Studio Code

Sublime Text vs Vim vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Sublime Text
Sublime Text
Stacks33.8K
Followers27.8K
Votes4.0K
Vim
Vim
Stacks27.9K
Followers22.8K
Votes2.4K
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

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

# Introduction

1. **File Navigation**:
   Sublime Text allows for quick and easy file navigation through a sidebar with a list of files, while Vim and Visual Studio Code offer more versatile file navigation using commands and shortcuts.

2. **Customization Options**:
   Sublime Text provides a vast range of customization options through plugins and themes, offering a high level of flexibility, whereas Vim focuses on a more minimalistic approach in terms of customization, and Visual Studio Code offers a balance between the two.

3. **Mode of Operation**:
   Vim operates in modes such as normal, insert, and visual mode, emphasizing keyboard shortcuts for efficient text editing, while Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code rely more on traditional mouse-based interactions for editing.

4. **Community Support**:
   Visual Studio Code has a large and active community that regularly contributes to its development, providing frequent updates and a wide range of extensions, while Sublime Text and Vim rely more on their core functionalities with less frequent updates from the community.

5. **Learning Curve**:
   Sublime Text has a more straightforward learning curve with an intuitive user interface, making it easier for beginners to get started, whereas Vim has a steep learning curve due to its unique commands and modes, and Visual Studio Code falls somewhere in between, catering to users of varying expertise.

6. **Resource Consumption**:
   Sublime Text is known for its lightweight and fast performance, making it suitable for low-resource systems, while Vim also has a minimal footprint, ideal for quick edits, and Visual Studio Code, with its feature-rich environment, requires more system resources to operate smoothly.

# Summary

In Summary, Sublime Text, Vim, and Visual Studio Code differ in file navigation, customization options, mode of operation, community support, learning curve, and resource consumption.

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Advice on Sublime Text, Vim, 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
Walter
Walter

Jan 12, 2021

Review

Neovim can basically do everything Vim can with one major advantage - the number of contributors to the code base is just so much wider (Vim is ~100% maintained only by B. Mooleanaar). Whatever you learn for Neovim you can also apply to Vim and vice versa.
And of course there is the never ending Vim vs Emacs controversy - but better not get into that war.

162k views162k
Comments
Rogério
Rogério

Software Developer

Jan 9, 2021

Needs adviceonVisual Studio CodeVisual Studio CodeAtomAtomNode.jsNode.js

For a Visual Studio Code/Atom developer that works mostly with Node.js/TypeScript/Ruby/Golang and wants to get rid of graphic-text-editors-IDE-like at once, which one is worthy of investing time to pick up?

I'm a total n00b on the subject, but I've read good things about Neovim's Lua support, and I wonder what would be the VIM response/approach for it?

372k views372k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sublime Text
Sublime Text
Vim
Vim
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.

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.

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
Vertically Split Windows;Vimdiff;Folding;Plugins;Flexible Indenting;Unicode
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
27.9K
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
27.8K
Followers
22.8K
Followers
169.1K
Votes
4.0K
Votes
2.4K
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
    Flexibility to move file
  • 4
    Doesn't act like a Mac app
  • 4
    Number of plugins doing the same thing
Pros
  • 347
    Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)
  • 328
    Fast
  • 312
    Highly configurable
  • 297
    Less mouse dependence
  • 247
    Lightweight
Cons
  • 8
    Ugly UI
  • 5
    Hard to learn
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, Vim, 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.

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.

Emacs

Emacs

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.

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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