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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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If you've recently switched code editors— How's it going so far?

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vinceramces profile image
Vince Ramces Oliveros

Since I've got 12GB of RAM. I'll be sticking to Vscode/IntelliJ IDEA. I'm a dartisan/flutterian guy so I've got Vscode as my code editor for now.

But I would prefer sublime text for low RAM usage and non-electron apps. Haven't tried emacs or vim.

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jaakidup profile image
Jaaki

Yes, the flutter with emulators is rather heavy. I heard they are working on a more native emulator, which will be much faster and lower mems.

My (current) 8 year old machine with 6GB is just not enough for flutter.

That said, vscode is much lighter on resources than IntelliJ though.

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vinceramces profile image
Vince Ramces Oliveros • Edited

You can use any editor for dart, using sublime text as code editor and a terminal/command line as you launch the app. But you don't get the debugger inside of the sublime text, therefore only vscode and intellij idea are the only options available.

I dont think vscode is lighter than intellij idea as it would increase the ram usage overtime. From 700mb~6GB when idle(no emulator).

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jaakidup profile image
Jaaki

Oh really, I might just give IntelliJ another go.

I must say that I've never experienced the memory creep whilst coding go, python, vue and polymer.
Perhaps there is an issue with the dart/flutter plugins?

Once I'm more familiar with dart and flutter, I might go to sublime.

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vinceramces profile image
Vince Ramces Oliveros

They're both heavy RAM usage. it's not about the electron, it's the OpenJDK Library that keeps the RAM growing. the DartVM is only 150~200mb while the flutter plugins is just 30mb~ less.

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mateusz__be profile image
Mateusz Bełczowski

My journey was Pycharm -> Neovim -> VSCode -> Pycharm

I still use Neovim from time to time, but I was really disappointed with VSCode. I expected it to be much more lightweight editor and found it difficult to run and debug some types of applications. That surprised me, because it's really popular in the Python community.

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abraham profile image
Abraham Williams

I've used Atom for the last several years and had been mostly happy with it. Over Christmas I switched to VS Code though and I don't think I'll be looking back. Code is faster and has a noticeably less lag. One of the reasons I moved was seeing new packages coming out on Code and leaving Atom in the dust.

For a month of Flutter I used Android Studio and found it a bloated and complex. I've since switched Flutter development to Code as well.

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dfockler profile image
Dan Fockler

The Atom->VS Code keymappings really made VS Code stick for me. Usually when I get used to keymappings it's hard to get productive quickly with a new editor.

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dploeger profile image
Dennis Ploeger

I can totally relate. I'm usually a IntelliJ-fanboy, but the keymappings-template for vscode really let me feel like home in it.

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abraham profile image
Abraham Williams

I used to tweak and configure commands and settings but it was too much work so now I try to learn the defaults (unless it's something I really don't like).

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philnash profile image
Phil Nash

Atom's speed (not it's extensibility, which I loved) put me off it and almost off of trying VS Code.

I'm glad I did though, over the last couple of years I gradually moved from Sublime Text to VS Code and I'm very happy now! Atom is but forgotten.

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robertfish profile image
Robert Fish

People don't realise how bloated Android Studio is until you use a lighter editor like VS Code 😄

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anthrogan profile image
Anth Rogan

Honestly, the hardest part about getting moving in flutter development is getting the AVM going tbh... It's 2019 ffs!

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mkenzo_8 profile image
mkenzo_8

Hello Ben,

My case was that some weeks ago I started loving to code on my 4gb & 1.44Ghz laptop with no reason, I was used to use Visual Studio Code and Atom, but both of them are very laggy on my laptop so I started searching for a new editor and... I found Sublime Text!

It's the fastest code editor on the web!! No lags at scrolling or writing!
I felt in love since the first second I tried it!

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

Did you buy the license? If not how are popups. I'm also stuck on a 4GB machine

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Hi Mkenzo, I wouldn't share cheat/crack codes on a public website populated by developers who probably earn money from apps like that one.

;-)

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sloan profile image
Sloan the DEV Moderator

As @rhymes mentioned, please don't share license codes for a product meant to be paid for.

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mkenzo_8 profile image
mkenzo_8

I am so sorry. I am new at this platform. I don't have enough experience. Won't happen another time.🙏

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rhymes profile image
rhymes • Edited

Don't worry, welcome to devto!

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

Hi @Mkenzo thanks for the heads up. I actually laughed when I saw the notifications and that there's a deleted comment. Don't beat yourself up just yet, although I will advise you to work on your dev ethic, or something like that, im not sure. The more you interact in dev communities, the more you'll understand.

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jacobherrington profile image
Jacob Herrington (he/him)

I used Sublime Text for a long time. For a while with the popups and then after purchasing a license.

They are fairly unobtrusive honestly, and it's a great editor.

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sduduzog profile image
Sdu

I think by the time I can afford a license, I would have purchased a stronger machine 🤔 I'm still technically a student

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dhandspikerwade profile image
Devin Handspiker-Wade

If you are a student, JetBrains provides license for the whole suite for students.

jetbrains.com/student/

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wuyazero profile image
wuyazero

I don't think JetBrains products are suitable for 4G RAM machines, it feels laggy even on my i5 8250U 8G RAM 512G SSD laptop.

When I need to do some web development on my 4G RAM Surface Laptop, I use Brackets which is quite feature-rich out-of-the-box for web development and has a far smaller memory footprint than VSC and Atom (not to mention those JetBrains offerings), although the responsiveness is only on par with VSC.

If I need to do some more general code editing quickly with the low-spec Surface Laptop (which is rare), I use the Caret Chrome App. Although Google officially stopped supporting the Chrome Apps on platforms other than Chrome OS, they can still be installed and used cross-platform with their direct download links in the Chrome Web Store. As I need to use Chrome to browse the web anyway, using Caret means it takes next to nil extra resource.

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preetjdpdev profile image
Preet Parekh

Well Ram and Processor speed is not the issue , try upgrading to a ssd , it makes all the difference.

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mkenzo_8 profile image
mkenzo_8

It already has an SSD, but it's a tablet/laptop so it's not as fast as an SSD for PC.

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vinibrsl profile image
Vinicius Brasil • Edited

Sublime Text > VS Code > TextMate > Vim > VS Code

From Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code

Sublime Text is a great editor, and, to be honest, I've never seen a GUI code editor opening so fast as Sublime Text. The only thing I missed in Sublime Text was a better language support, including linting, code completion and etc. That is why I switched to Visual Studio Code.

From Visual Studio Code to TextMate

VS Code is great. The UI, the editing features, the extensions and its frequent updates. By the way, it is, IMHO, the best code editor for JavaScript and its children (TypeScript, Dart, etc).

As a Ruby developer, there is a lot of things I miss in VS Code. After all these code editor switches I've learned this is not a editor problem, but a language one. Ruby is kinda hard to auto complete, because of its characteristics, compared to Java or C#, for instance.

I had a great experience with TextMate. It has a lot of macros and other kinds of tooling that really helps developers. Also, it's very famous among Ruby devs. The only problem with it is that it is not updated very often. There are some really old tools & scripts from Rails 3-4 that just don't work anymore.

From TextMate to Vim

I really liked the idea of macros and automation inside the code editor, and Vim offered me that. The learning curve took me ~3-4 weeks, but that worth it.

Vim is great, but it has to be fine-tuned to work in its best. So, I went back to VS Code.

From Vim to VS Code

My final review is that VS Code is really great. One of the things that I really like in it is the VS Code Live Share extension, perfect for pair programming (I've used Atom similar feature and it was really bad back then).

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josef profile image
Josef Aidt

This really resonated with me as I have a similar story. Notepad++ and Nano in the early days at school until I found Sublime Text. Sublime is great, like really great. It's so fast. To this day I still use Sublime for quick editing here and there if I don't want to have a whole extra VSC instance running for a directory full of bash scripts or something.

Then I came across vim. I didn't have the patience to sit down and grind out that learning curve as you were so brave to do, but I still use it. Honestly it's the easiest way to quickly edit a file, whether it's a simple SSH config, another bash script, or for some quick notes. Not having to leave your terminal in some operations is a nice QOL boost. But wow it can be daunting.

Now VSCode. I can't possible explain how nice this is, and maybe it's because of the wonderful web dev support Microsoft has been adding over the year. I was on Atom for a very brief period until the startup time became well over a minute and that editor would chug opening and working with large files. Maybe that's gotten better, but I have no want to move back. VSCode is fantastic.

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jacobherrington profile image
Jacob Herrington (he/him)

I recently jumped from VS Code to Spacemacs. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to go back. I recommend it to anyone curious about vim or emacs.

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patrickodacre profile image
Patrick O'Dacre • Edited

I did the same. I love the old-school feel, the customizability, and Projectile, Magit, and Org Mode just won me over.

I do PHP, JS, C# / .NET primarily and I'm insanely productive in Spacemacs.

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milkstarz profile image
malik

I've recently started using Intellij IDEA for Scala development, and it's quite nice. The RAM usage is really high but it has a lot of handly plugins for Scala making it a must have for me.

I still use VS Code for almost everything else :D

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panta82 profile image
panta82

I am a JetBrains guy, but I use vscode and sublime for lightweight text editing.

I am currently playing with clojure and have decided to give vscode a chance as my main editor (mostly due to IDEA clojure plugin being pretty crappy IMO). I am not too thrilled. That editor feels just as slugish as JetBrains IDE-s, but doesn't offer nearly as much functionality.

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joshyoerger profile image
Josh Yoerger

Have you tried Cursive with IntelliJ? cursive-ide.com

Emacs + Doom + Cider is also a very powerful environment - albeit a fairly steep learning curve.

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panta82 profile image
panta82

Cursive is the one I didn't like. Maybe I missed something, but I found it almost impossible to actually type my code due to its super-strict and kind of broken pair matching engine.

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aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel

I've used VSCode for ~2 years or so, but before that I jumped around from:

IDLE -> emacs -> Sublime -> Atom -> Sublime

I love VSCode though, so much faster than other Electron-based editors and so full featured!

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stevezieglerva profile image
Steve Ziegler

Switched to VSCode about 6 months ago and love it.

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visualizertrue profile image
Aaron Barnett

I switched from Atom to VS Code about two months ago and will never look back. Everything just...works and works so well.

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vonheikemen profile image
Heiker • Edited

Okay Ben, but I'm gonna tell you the whole story.

I started learning Vim in october because apparently I had nothing better to do. It started out like a nice hobby, every few days I would open up a file, tried to move things around, delete stuff, learn a new command or something and it was nice until I said "Guess it's time to make my own vimrc". Oh boy. It turns out that it was way more entertaining than I was expecting.

The plugin hunting didn't last very long. I found a post about Vim that had a phrase that stuck with me "let sublime be sublime, let Vim be Vim", that was enough to convince me to not try and make Vim behave like Sublime text. But there was still one thing I wanted and that was a good fuzzy finder, and my friend google had the answer for that, fzf. FZF it's best thing ever, it's the only plugin that I would consider essential (even though Vim has a search feature already).

The real time sink was the keymap. It was so dificult to "get it right". I spent an afternoon (on a week day) browsing in github repositories looking for vimrc configs. I'm really happy with the "final result".

The next stage of the journey was trying to find a way of using Vim outside of a terminal. I tried a few Neovim frontends and other editors emulation. In the Neovim GUI department I gotta say that I really liked Onivim and nvim-gtk.

  • What I liked about Onivim was the integration with language servers, it enables features like goto definition and autocomplete like in VSCode. It consumes like half of the resources that VSCode requires it is still an electron app that takes quite a bit of RAM.

  • Nvim-gtk is my favorite way of using Neovim, is basically like a terminal except that it provides a few widgets that I appreciate like a file explorer, "real tabs" with a closing button, a plugin manager menu and other stuff. It's written in Rust so is cross-platform, and fast. The only thing that is a bit annoying is the fact that I can't make the cursor stop blinking.

And so now that I have a Vim setup that makes me happy I've decided to go back to Sublime text and see if can get some of that modal editing that I liked about Vim. So far I have tried the NeoVintageous plugin (If anyone wants to learn vim but don't want to use it yet that plugin is a good place to start). I have to say that is a good vim mode, but I stopped using it because it was missing some features and a few others do not behave like I would expect, is like that off by one error that you just can't fix.

Since modal editing is still posible within Sublime text I'm making my own keymap settings (I keep them here) in the form of a package so I can disable everything when I don't need it. The keymap is inspired by Vim but instead of trying to be exactly like Vim I remap Sublime's built-in commands to get a more consistent behavior. I don't get the composable commands that Vim has but I still get a little bit of the modal editing that I wanted.

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buphmin profile image
buphmin

So I sort of "switched". That is to say that I started to use vscode for golang development which is a significant departure from PHPstorm which I use for my day to day web dev work.

Vscode is pretty decent so far. It's code completion is decent, along with it's type hinting and syntax checking. I keep wishing things were better all around, but it is good enough. I suppose that is the difference between a $200 ide a year vs $0.

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peterwitham profile image
Peter Witham

Hi Ben,
Late last year I decided to switch back to SublimeText and 'forced' my commitment by going fully licensed. This switched me away from JetBrains tools, not so much because I was unhappy with the tools in general, but because I have yet to find an editor as fast and versatile as ST3.

I have found that ST3 can replace all my other editors for coding and even as a text editor (I favor Markdown).

My other editor, not so much by choice but by day job, is Xcode due to my daily iOS grind.

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

I switched from Webstorm (and Netbeans, for PHP development) to VSCode about half a year ago, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I suppose you can call VSCode a 'compromise' ... it's quite lightweight, more lightweight than Webstorm and Netbeans (and Eclipse), but a little bit more 'heavy' than Sublime. It's a bit "between" an IDE and a text editor, and that's what I see as the ideal balance. I like the terminal and I do use VIM a lot, but I don't want to do all of my development in VIM ... I do want an "IDE".

Another thing is that the learning curve for VSCode is pretty small - install a bunch of plugins and get used to the main commands and windows, and that's it. I don't want to spend a huge amount of time getting familiar with the complete 'ecosystem' around an IDE/editor, or spending 2 weeks to optimize all of it.

Coming from Webstorm, in the beginning I really had to get used to VSCode, and I spent a decent amount of time setting it all up so that it works in the way I like (settings, keyboard shortcuts, plugins), but now I'm pretty happy with it, I'm not looking back.

Also tried Atom for a few days but quickly dumped it, I think pretty much everyone agrees that VSCode has surpassed Atom in almost every respect ... right?

VSCode isn't perfect (there are still a few things that I feel worked better in Webstorm, full text search and Git diffs/history come to mind) but it's definitely "good enough".

Works well not only with Javacript but also with PHP, so it's replaced both Webstorm and Netbeans ... only when doing Java development I'm still using another IDE (Eclipse is hard to beat for Java development).