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Switching back to my old buddy Sublime Text from VS Code 🤷🏻‍♂️

Sarthak Sharma on November 12, 2019

Okay, this will be a really quick article. Up until just a few days ago, I was a VS Code lover like anyone else these days. I use to write a column...

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James Edmonds • Nov 12 '19

I forget exactly what I needed to do to improve the performance, but while working in a large workspace I've often found the culprit is the file watcher service. You can add directories to exclude from intellisense, mainly node_modules and your build output directory. The only directory intellisense should care about is your source code. Doing so led to vscode becoming much more responsive. I might make a post about it once I've finished moving house...

James Edmonds • Nov 17 '19

Looks like somebody beat me to it! dev.to/vaidhyanathan93/ulitmate-vs... main sections to note are the files.watcherExclude, files.exclude and the search.exclude, this may require customisation based on your setup, but you could also do this per workspace. Another tip is to disable extensions you don't need per workspace.

Pavel Ravits • Nov 12 '19

There is problem with ubuntu regarding file watching with vscode, comparing to windows or mac. And excluded node_modules, but still I was forced to increase the limit in linux. I don't know, maybe causes some issues with cpu later...

Utkarsh Talwar • Nov 13 '19

That's a good idea. A post to look forward to. 😃

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

That would be a great idea James 😊

Asaju Enitan • Nov 12 '19

please make a post about it, I found out VSCode is best for my Angular projects but old processor makes it a hassle

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

Woho !! Things escalated real quick down there. Anyway, I agree with you completely Niels. But consider this a quick fix. Also few laptops were old enough that even upgrading ram couldn’t help (old processors). So, by adjusting in what they have and getting the best out of it, the short term solution can be shifting to lighter options but in long term buying a new laptop is a better option of course. 😊

Jeff • Nov 12 '19

My laptop from 7 (8?) years ago had 16GB of RAM. I'm not looking for a cookie or anything, but RAM should always be a priority for devs.

(Granted I was also doing 3D, but I think RAM should be a priority regardless. CPU and disk space are second class citizens.)

Bhupesh Varshney 👾 • Nov 12 '19

Sublime is my go to editor, never leaving it
plus VScode = electron = chrome = RAM Eating 😆

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

Exactly!!

Hey Bhupesh, Do you mind sharing some plugins, themes, and Tricks here.

Bhupesh Varshney 👾 • Nov 12 '19

Some of the plugins I use

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

Thanks man. JavaScript Completions is ❤️

maxdevjs • Nov 16 '19

It seems that JavaScript Completions has been replaced by JavaScriptEnhancements, being the former unmaintained nowadays

James Thomson • Nov 14 '19

I'd also add AdvancedNewFile to the list and Material Theme package.

Here's my customised preferences incase you're interested:

{
    "binary_file_patterns":
    [
        "node_modules/",
        "public/",
        "vendor/",
        "*.jpg",
        "*.jpeg",
        "*.png",
        "*.gif",
        "*.ttf",
        "*.tga",
        "*.dds",
        "*.ico",
        "*.eot",
        "*.pdf",
        "*.swf",
        "*.jar",
        "*.zip",
        "*.chunk.*"
    ],
    "bold_folder_labels": true,
    "color_scheme": "Packages/Material Theme/schemes/Material-Theme.tmTheme",
    "font_size": 12,
    "highlight_line": true,
    "ignored_packages":
    [
        "Vintage"
    ],
    "indent_guide_options":
    [
        "draw_normal",
        "draw_active"
    ],
    "indent_to_bracket": true,
    "line_padding_bottom": 3,
    "line_padding_top": 3,
    "overlay_scroll_bars": "enabled",
    "show_tab_close_buttons": false,
    "tab_size": 2,
    "theme": "Material-Theme.sublime-theme",
    "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
    "use_simple_full_screen": true
}

Thomas • Nov 12 '19

Totally agree, I was feeling some perf issues on webstorm when i was running a VM.
The first thing I did was a RAM upgrade, now I run 16GB and it's smooth again.

I enjoy webstorm so much I don't know how I would do without it !

But it's still nice to know that getting SublimText can be a quick fix.

Roland Csibrei • Nov 12 '19

I am running into the same problem with my Surface laptop 2 with 8 GB of RAM and an i7 CPU, so it's not a third world problem as Niels was trying to state. Thanks for the article and for the response though! But have to tell, Niels is right, working professionally and do not have the basic tools seems to be contraproductive and ridiculous...

Asaju Enitan • Nov 12 '19

same here
8gb RAM, core i7, but the laptop is pretty old and I am not in liberty to purchase another one so a quick fix is something I'd love to switch to

Nguyen Kim Son • Nov 12 '19

I am also a sublime text lover but it’s true that vscode is doing some stuffs far better than sublime. At the end I just use them both, sublime mostly for exploring code (read only) and vscode for a more intensive code editing (and pycharm for advanced stuffs :) ).

Utkarsh Talwar • Nov 13 '19

With the right extensions, I think Sublime Text can be pretty powerful. We've made sizeable, production-ready projects on it in the past. Of course, VS Code has some feature advantages over it, but still Sublime Text is pretty capable imo. 😄

Nguyen Kim Son • Nov 13 '19

Yeah that's another imperfect thing about Sublime: it doesn't work great out of the box. That being said installing extensions is quick and we just need to do that once.

The VS killer feature for me is the debug & breakpoints though, being able to inspect quickly and visually while debugging speeds up a lot the workflow IMO.

Ben Sinclair • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

It's likely that buying another 4GB is cheaper than buying Sublime Text. I picked up a 2GB stick from my local CEX store the other day for £1. I do realise that's different depending where you live.

Heiker • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

Sharing is fun. Here I go.

Plugins

AceJump: Allows you to move the cursor to any character to any place currently on screen.
Origami: Better split pane control.
FileManager: Manage your files without using the sidebar.
NeoVintageous: Vim emulation.
Requester: HTTP client for Sublime Text 3.

Themes

Night Owl: A port of Sarah Drasner's VScode theme. Includes both Dark and Light theme.
Rubber: Minimalist theme. A port Rubber theme for VScode.

Pratik Rane • Nov 13 '19

Thank you! FileManager worked for me. Just enough options. Seems better than SidebarEnhancements which is just too much.

Felföldi András • Nov 12 '19

I had the same issue when I was working on my React Native hobby project called Sudoku Mobile (shameless plug here).

My laptop almost became unusable and my battery was draining very quickly. I switched to Atom (another Electron based app :D) for the project and I didn't have this issue anymore, but I really missed VSCode.

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 13 '19

Atom is also good. You may wanna share some resources for it ?

Felföldi András • Nov 13 '19

I don't really know about any good stuff for atom as I didn't use it much in the end. I went back to VSCode within a few days and tolerated the performance issues. Atom couldn't property comment JSX at the time (for me at least) and that made me switch back.

Pooria A • Nov 13 '19

What if you have only a 2015 MacBook Air with 4GB RAM? Is it still cheap to upgrade? I assume this mentality that if it's cheap for me then it's cheap for everyone is what stops many developers like you to build experiences suitable for all users (e.g people against accessibility, React concurrent mode etc)

Ben Sinclair • Nov 13 '19

I would like to make the hasty generalisation that if you're driving a MacBook, money is not an object in the first place.

Pooria A • Nov 13 '19

Upgrading to a new MacBook is always a big purchasing decision. Can I afford it? Yes. Do I want to while my 2015 MacBook is working fine? No!

Anyway I'm not really talking about myself. I do web development and I'm running mostly nodejs apps in CLI. My VS Code is working pretty smooth. I'm just arguing that the mentality to expect users to upgrade to support un-optimized apps is wrong.

rhymes • Nov 14 '19

@moopet I think that's also a general assumption we shoudn't make. I bought my first Macbook with Google Summer of Code's money during uni. I wasn't wealthy, at all :-)

People are also allowed to save for the things they want, we shouldn't judge them.

The point here is that software shouldn't be slow, it's not "hey, who cares, upgrade your computer"

Mike Schinkel • Nov 19 '19

We shouldn't judge people for living their lives how they want to live them — as long as they are ethical and following the law — but when someone works in a profession then by all means we can judge them for their level of professionalism. A professional developer choosing to work on a computer with only 4GB RAM is just unprofessional.

Now I get that different parts of the world computer costs are a larger percentage of income and I empathize, but if a person is a reasonable developer their incomes can be much higher relative to many others in their region, and good professionals should invest in good tools.

Put another way, I hire freelance developers to work on projects for my company. If I found out that someone was switching to Sublime (instead of using PhpStorm) because they only had 4GB of RAM In their computer, I would be unlikely to hire them unless I determined that it was chicken-and-egg problem; e.g. that they would invest in a better computer but first needed the income to get them there. And I have actually hired someone who did exactly that, and now he works on a state-of-the-art computer, because he is a professional.

But a team of developers where many only have 4GB ram? That sounds like a recipe for a disastrous codebase.

Ben Sinclair • Nov 19 '19

I don't think 4GB is unprofessional per se, it depends what you're doing with it.

It's plenty for a lot of work: I've just logged onto my home dev box and checked, and it's got 6GB, is running hugo and gatsby servers and a couple of Vim instances in tmux.

And out of that 6GB? 5 of it is currently unused. You might say that's because it's headless, but it is what I use for personal development :)

Mike Schinkel • Nov 19 '19

You are talking apples and oranges. The discussion was about not being able to use a quality IDE on the desktop because of only 4GB RAM. An SSH target is a different fruit entirely.

Ben Sinclair • Nov 19 '19

You're right, but the conversation seemed to have moved on to "professional developer" with no further qualification.

Mike Schinkel • Nov 19 '19

For clarity then, I was assuming the original context of the conversation when I commented my opinion that developers sticking with 4GB by choice was unprofessional.

Maximilian Burszley • Nov 12 '19

That's not an apology. "sorry you're offended" is never an apology.

💾 bun9000 • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

Exactly. It’s specifically called a non-apology. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apolog...

Try not to do this in a professional environment, folks! It happens a lot which is why I mention it, and it’s a huge problem... Especially if you’re “calling someone out” for responding to criticism in a way you don’t like. It just adds fuel to the fire.

It’s something most people do without realizing it. Try and take a few moments before responding with “apologies” to see if you might be giving a fauxpology because, chances are, you’re response could escalate things. And if you’re entire point is to comment on how someone is already escalating things... Well, you can see the cycle.

Thomas Redstone • Nov 13 '19

No, they realise.

Maximilian Burszley • Nov 13 '19

Apparently so since they deleted all of their comments.

K • Nov 12 '19

I'm planning to switch to github.com/cdr/code-server

I'm already using AWS Cloud9 for cloud development because everything on its EC2 is configured like the production environment and it works from all machines.

But I prefer the usability and extensions of VSCode, so I'm not too happy with C9.

Since MS is offering VSCode remote via Azure already I think it will get better in the future. Meaning, most of the "hard" things will be done on the server, allowing me to just provisioning a bigger machine if things get out of hand.

Let's see how this goes :)

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

I was planning to do that too. Do share your learnings.

Fyodor • Feb 1 '20

Yes, please, K!

Jaaki • Nov 12 '19

Nice article.

Yes, I've also found that VSCode has really become a memory hog.
My one 10year old laptop has 4GB Ram and my one 10year old desktop has 6GB Ram and not planning to update them but rather replace them sometime.

So I see myself switching to Sublime today and I'll give those plugins a try. Thanks

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

Don’t forget to come back and share your finds as well. 😊

Lawrence • Nov 12 '19

Putting developers on workstations that have only 4GB of ram is like making a carpenter work with stone tools. If you want professional work, you must supply professional tools.

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

That's quite the privileged perspective, Lawrence. I know plenty of people who begin coding on computers with 4 gigs of RAM. "Professional work" is very subjective. I started coding on a 4GB laptop myself and only upgraded my RAM much later in my professional career, and I've done plenty of "professional work", trust me.

The point of this post is to give people options, not get into a flame war about how much memory is enough for development.

Lawrence • Nov 12 '19

I'm not flaming you or developers; this is a note to employers.

Robbo • Nov 15 '19

I'm honestly dumbfounded someone would even accept working with 4gb ram. Chrome and the os will use most of that before you even do anything. Wtf. They are wasting so many man hours waiting for things to process for sure. Including the hours looking into why something is slow when they are on hardware that sounds a decade old. The reason it is slow is because the computer is slow...

rhymes • Nov 15 '19

The reason it is slow is because the computer is slow...

Yes, the computer is slow for today's standards, but the author literally demonstrated how changing to a different IDE (that's currently developed and popular, have been since 2008 and it's just written with a different technology, C++ and Python) enable those users to have a fast developer experience again.

Doesn't this tell you anything about slow software? :)

Lawrence • Nov 15 '19

Would you refuse to play any game that was made after 2012 because the newer graphics made it slow on your computer from 2008? Saying that modern tools need to be fast on old tech is to reject the fundamental building block structure of all human technology. In other words, that is a very flawed loaded question.

Robbo • Nov 15 '19

Yeah I have no doubt in my mind at all that they are going to have slow experiences again when using it because they leave a single tab too many open in Chrome. They lose productivity learning a new tool and one that they probably liked more too because they are on hardware that has worse specs than the phones in their pockets.

rhymes • Nov 16 '19 • Edited

I think you misunderstood me, or, which is more likely, I wasn't clear myself.

I'm not pretending that, let's say, Windows 10 has to work on a 90s PC. The author of the post, myself and other people basically illustrated that there are tools that are still relevant, Sublime Text in this case, that work well with older computers (and obviously newer ones) without sacrificing the developer experience (or to be clearer, the experience of the developers that use the IDE).

VSCode is a terrific product and the team at Microsoft should be applauded, they were able to create such a good product around a platform that has been known since the beginning to be a memory black hole. The reason why Electron is still popular is because it offers a tradeoff: more resources occupied for a faster and better developer experience (in this case, the developer who create platforms, VSCode itself).

It's a choice, it's not mandatory.

Writing an IDE is a hell of time and resource consuming choice for any company or solo developers, especially now that VSCode has eaten most of the pie. But that doesn't mean it can't be done in a better way, where better is probably subjective at this point :)

Since the tech world is not a monoculture, or at least it shouldn't be, thankfully there are multiple choices, some that occupy more resources, some that occupy less, some that have a bigger community, some that don't, some that are open source, some that aren't. Vim for example is still extremely relevant today, but has been around since the dawn of time, is that old technology? Yup. Do we care? I'm not a Vim user but I wouldn't if I were.

It's probably way more complicated to contribute code to Vim than it is to contribute code to VSCode, but this is also the result of a choice. They chose (well, back then they probably had to) a technology that's harder for the people who create the platform but allows them to distribute the result on all types of computers.

Going back to my distaste for slow software, it's still about that choice that I just mentioned. I've never said that I'm against modern technology nor I think VSCode is particularly slow.

BUT

the point is the product, how much we really need it (and need is super subjective because I could technically develop with Emacs in the console like I used to do for years) and how it helps my user experience. If the product on paper is great but I spend the day looking at htop, probably that "great" is relative. After all, if we want to be annoying, these are the system requirements for VSCode:

We recommend:
1.6 GHz or faster processor
1 GB of RAM

taken from their official website code.visualstudio.com/Docs/support...

and they are way well under the capabilities of the computer the author was referring to.

Games are an all in. If I want to play "Random game TM" and my system specs are not up to it I'm left with two choices: invest into a more capable computer (or faster upgrades) or not play the game at all.

Games are literally the benchmark on which video cards R&D is done. It's an industry that fuels itself. There are new advancements, those advancements are used by the latest games and those games are used as a benchmark to improve 3D rendering or such.

VSCode is just an IDE, let's not forget that :)

Darkø Tasevski • Nov 13 '19

@moopet You can use Sublime Text for free.

Honestly, I'm not sure if the company making their own devs working on a laptop with 4gb RAM pay for several Sublime Text 3 licenses...

Maciej Sopyło • Nov 13 '19

For free for non commercial use (since it clearly says you can use it for free for evaluation).

Ben Sinclair • Nov 13 '19

That's twisting the words of the license. If you're continuing to use it for personal use, you're not evaluating it. You're breaking the license agreement.

Ben Sinclair • Nov 13 '19

You can, but then you can also break into someone's house and steal their RAM chips, if you really want to.

Darkø Tasevski • Nov 13 '19

Whoa, I've just mentioned it. You can use it for a free evaluation, but once you start using it for work then it becomes an ethic issue. I've used a free version while I was learning javascript before VSCode was even on the horizon, had no 80$ bucks to spare for something like this then.

But today, when I'm actually making money from my work, I'm using Webstorm and paying for its license. There is no excuse, especially for us developers, to use pirated software when most of us can afford it and support fellow developers.

Ben Sinclair • Nov 13 '19

Quite. I'm big on sticking to license agreements these days (though I may have been less enthusiastic when I was a kid) because if you think it's fair to use winrar forever or to say you've found a "loophole" or something, then you can't expect anyone to treat your own licenses with respect.

Ben Sinclair • Nov 13 '19

Yes, my daily-driver laptop is from 2010 or 2011, and I've added an SSD and boosted it to 8GB (which is more than enough for my personal development needs).

ollie • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

I’ve been considering this recently too. I really did like the minimalism of Sublime and I don’t use half the features in VSCode like the git GUI or the debugger.

I might give it a bash and see how I feel, the only minor concern is TypeScript intellisense?

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

You can use the plugin I suggested in the article or if anyone knows a better plugin shoot it in the comment section below.👇🏼

Seanmclem • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

My cheap and underpowered laptop at home has 8 GB of RAM. Developers seem to usually think that that's too little these days, but it can run easily 10+ VS code sessions, each with dozens of tabs open, each with several terminals running, all with corresponding Chrome windows that also have dozens of tabs open. I never experience any slowdowns. Ever

Asaju Enitan • Nov 12 '19

did you build this laptop yourself?
if so, please do share the details or the name of the laptop

Seanmclem • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

Off the Shelf. Got it on Amazon 2 years ago.

ASUS UX360CA-AH51T
CPU Core i5-7Y54
RAM 8GB

Pavel Ravits • Nov 12 '19

What os?

Seanmclem • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

Windows 10

Utkarsh Talwar • Nov 13 '19

Damn. Can't believe you're getting this kind of performance on your machine with Windows 10. Any specific tweaks you've done? Mine is 4y/o with 8GB RAM and Core i5-5200U. I don't get anywhere near that kind of performance.

Seanmclem • Nov 13 '19 • Edited

The only specific thing I've really done is - I don't use it for anything other than development. I don't install or run anyting for any function other than writing code and running it

Drazen Dotlic • Nov 19 '19

Exactly! People seem to forget that there "may" be other things running on the computer, not just our IDEs. Except if we make it only run our IDEs and runtime environments (say, browsers) then things aren't so bad.
My (macOS) machine has plenty of RAM which is mostly used by my non-development related apps, almost all of which are Electron based because I don't like using different tooling when I use Windows. When I do run Windows, which is in a VM configured for 8GB of RAM, I only run development stuff and what-do-you-know, no problems with memory.

Zizaco • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

"with 4GB I'm pretty sure that VS Code isn't the only thing they have issues running"
I was thinking the same. 😅

I was an advocate for Sublime Text for a long time and then switched to vscode. With 12GB of RAM, I've found no issues running vscode + docker-compose with about 8 containers.

Ceyhun Kerti • Nov 12 '19

you will open each file in a new tab, leading to multiple VS Code instances running simultaneously,

Are your sure ?

I think multiple tabs are managed with monaco editor state using;
saveViewState and restoreViewState methods.

So there should be only one editor instance with state management for multiple tabs.

Correct me if i'm wrong.

Jim Priest • Nov 12 '19

The big feature missing in Sublime for me for so long was a terminal. But now with Terminus (packagecontrol.io/packages/Terminus) I'm back using Sublime :)

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

Yeah just installed it 😊😊

Paulo Renato • Nov 12 '19

I am a big fan of Sublime Text since 2012, and I have also tried VSCode for several times, last one for 2 months, but Sublime its just so dam quick, that I always comeback to it.

I don't work in that big projects, that can cause memory issues, but anyway I usually work in machines with 8GB, 16GB or 32GB, thus memory was never an issue for me.

A big plus for me with Sublime is that I can open really huge text files, that I cannot with VSCode, aka like log files ;).

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Nov 12 '19

Even though I use MacVim I also use when needed Sublime since it can handle large amounts of files and searching is less painful and sometimes mass editing is easier to do.

A single editor is not enough.

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 13 '19

Of course, a single editor is not enough.

Ryan • Nov 12 '19

I've been using VS Code for awhile now and have been enjoying it, up until I started working on a very deep project and I started experiencing slow downs as well. Interesting to learn it may be related.

Though I have never used Sublime it seems like as good of a time as any to give it a shot. I am curious though, do people not like Atom?

Anand Kumar • Nov 13 '19

Atom is also based on electron. On catalina(after recent upgrade), it refused to open for me but then next version fixed it. It is quite good but not as good as vscode. Though, in atom the way it shows syntax error and all is much better and productive. I wish vscode gets that.
So, i used all three, and each one of them has its own pros and cons. So I would suggest all to try it by themselves and use the one that is suitable for you.

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

Never played that much with it.

Asaju Enitan • Nov 12 '19

sometimes Atom does that thing too, hog memory

Anand Kumar • Nov 12 '19

Nice.
I also planned to switch to sublime. Speed is great. I faced some challenges though which (may be) someone here can help.

I use NVM and so default node instance doesn't work out of the box without tweaking the configuration.
No Cmd + Click navigation. If someone knows any plugin for the same, do let me know.
Working with react project, need to install babel as the JSX support is missing not available out of the box.

So, VS Code is great to just install and get started without any plugins. On the other side, yes it is slow at times and depends on project.

Things may vary for people to people. I like sublime for couple of things but sometimes, I feel, I have to use VS Code so it all depends on need and project we work on too.

rhymes • Nov 14 '19 • Edited

I switched back too, Sarthak. I have a mid 2012 Macbook Pro (with 16GB) and I have strong feelings against slow software (I can't stand "rails console" when it takes forever to start because... Rails) and although I love VSCode and appreciate a ton the work the team has done for the developer community, I ended up switching back to Sublime.

It all started last June with this tweet:

rhymes

@rhymes_

My mac isn't happy with Visual Studio Code these days :(

The extensions host goes up to 103% of CPU usage for minutes at a time

14:07 PM - 25 Jun 2019

0 1

The obvious thought was: an extension gone haywire. Remove the plugin, remove the problem.

I then proceeeded like so and the result was:

rhymes

@rhymes_

@andaizhao I've uninstalled solargraph, VSCode is still hogging my CPU :(

The first image is with both VSCode and Sublime opened
The second image is only with Sublime

I waited a few minutes after VScode started before taking the screenshots

🧐

17:14 PM - 29 Jun 2019

0 0

I also tried to disable all extensions, but the culprit was the extension host, part of VSCode:

rhymes

@rhymes_

@healeycodes @andaizhao I've uninstalled all extensions, restarted VSCode and this process `Code Helper /Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resou… --type=watcherService` is still at 116% CPU, even 200% at times for the first few minutes.

I think I'll stick with Sublime for a while :)

09:19 AM - 30 Jun 2019

0 2

It might have been a particularly unlucky build of VSCode, but I still had to develop, I couldn't spend days researching.

It took me an hour to switch back to Sublime.

The startup time is faster than VSCode, I also noticed I don't actually need boatloads of extensions (VSCode's are generally fancier) and I have one less installation of Electron running all day :D

I switched in 3 months ago, I'm not regretting it.

The only thing I'm actually missing is how faster search/grep is in VSCode, the reason is they don't use JS/TS at all, but defer the search to ripgrep, a Rust command line alternative to "grep", much faster than the original.

If only ST3 did the same I'd have literally zero complaints about the IDE

(well, maybe only the fact it's not open source :))

Utkarsh Talwar • Nov 15 '19

Thanks for sharing your experience! Good to know ST is working well for you. 😃

rhymes • Nov 15 '19 • Edited

I haven't opened htop in a long time since I switched :D

Master Teeee • Nov 13 '19

Yeah. My $150 smartphone has 6GB of RAM...

Pooria A • Nov 13 '19

Apologies for ad-hominem, my bad. However you saying "serious" developers is also No True Scotsman in some ways!

Anyway, 4GB of RAM on windows is terrible but on a Mac it's not that bad. Builds and page loads rely mostly on CPU and HDD speed and with my comparison with the latest Mac there is not much difference. The only difference is in the amount of resources you can have open at the same time which I agree sometime is annoying but doesn't really slow me down.

Even so, developers get paid but they live in different locations which means different level of income but hardware prices are mostly same anywhere. It's of course a problem but I don't want to continue this argument. I think there shouldn't be any expectation from the developers of tools for users to buy new hardware to be considered serious. At the moment most of the developments are put into electron based apps which are just simply inefficient but cheaper to develop and the responsibility of handling the burden is on the user to buy better hardware. I just think it's not fair to those who can't afford and should go back to the less progressive tools like sublime, same as the teammates of OP.

Don Alfons Nisnoni • Nov 13 '19

I think it will be better if you upgrade all of your RAM ... But VSCode does consume a lot of memory because it's built on Electron which is like the Chrome browser. But if you might not have money ... you can use Sublime ... but it all depends on you ... if you think you have enough to use Sublime, keep going. But I recommend using VSCode ... RAM is an important thing for the programmer, especially when working on large projects. But I do not blame you.

Good article, bro ...
Thank you...

Dev_NIX • Dec 16 '19

One of the things I loved from VSCode was the LSP and the debug adapter protocol, and I switched back quickly to Sublime for the reasons mentioned in this article.

If you liked the autocompletion, there is a Sublime plugin to use the same modules you love from VSCode: github.com/tomv564/LSP (I use the github.com/sublimelsp/LSP-inteleph... adapter and it works great!).

Also, there is a very interesting WIP to use the same debug adapters. It still needs some work, but if it gets more usable I will immediatelly uninstall VScode from my computer: github.com/daveleroy/sublime_debugger

Matthew Hartman • Nov 13 '19 • Edited

Great post Sarthak!

This is why I continue to use Sublime Text as I have found VS Code too slow.

IMO, 4GB of ram is plenty. I have a netbook with 4GB of ram on it with a bare metal Linux install and it runs fast.

Part of the problem is Windows is quite a resource hog, so having things like Chrome and VS Code running simultaneously will give your computer a heart attack.

I can vouch for a plugin called Hyperclick which allows you to click through imports (super handy!).

Check it out:
github.com/aziz/SublimeHyperClick

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 13 '19

Gotta check out, looks cool. Thanks, Matthew.

Guillermo Estrada • Nov 13 '19

Came here for exactly this. You put it on the nicest words. I would add that the extra RAM VScode uses for the extensions really make your life easier as a developer, so it's a trade off, and Sublime does not have anything close to that.

Also, adding a "we're hiring" with the "non-upgradeable" 4GB RAM horror story before seems counterproductive LOL.

chrismooreproductions • Nov 12 '19

A short time ago I was working on a project which involved dealing with large amounts of xml and log files. VSCode was fantastic for the code side of things but more or less useless for viewing the larger files. Sublime really saved my bacon for that purpose!

Josh Waller • Nov 12 '19

My team has noticed an improvement in performance by disabling the git tracking in vscode. Not ideal, but speeds improved.

bitten • Nov 13 '19

What's "git tracking"?

Josh Waller • Nov 13 '19

The git integration with vscode. There is an icon on the left bar that when clicked opens and shows the changes in the git repository. This integration (if not disabled) will consistently monitor changes to all files in your repository.

bitten • Nov 17 '19

Ahh gotcha. Thanks!

Robert Laverty • Nov 13 '19

Sublime Text 4 dev builds are now available! 🤩
gitter.im/SublimeLSP/Lobby?at=5dcc...

yankleber • May 23 '20

"Now don't get me wrong, VS Code runs on Electron and it is very memory intensive, but with 4GB I'm pretty sure that VS Code isn't the only thing they have issues running."

Now don't get me wrong but it doesn't seem to happen with Sublime. C'mon, we are not talking about a 3D game here. It's just a TEXT EDITOR.

Melroy's Blog • Nov 13 '19

I don't care if ram is cheap, a decent software developer at Microsoft should ask himself/herself why vs code is using so much resources!

Drew Ardner • Nov 13 '19

Vscode uses electron if I remember correctly, so it's going to probably have a lot of the same memory quirks as chrome. It's essentially a fancy web app.

DanR • Mar 11 '21

Right. So got as far as "If you have 4GB RAM" and stopped. And then came down to the comments to see that- everyone else noticed that, too.

And then when I saw I could create an account on dev.to with an AppleID or Git, but not Google SSO... I'm here long enough to post this, then I'm on my way.

Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴 • Nov 12 '19

I use both. VS Code for frontend only projects. Sublime Text 3 for the daily Ruby on Rails projects I work on.

Also, I'd only use Sublime Text to open large files or large projects.

Both editors are great.

Pratik Rane • Nov 13 '19 • Edited

Did you just forget to mention something for integrated terminal?! Here I mention it for you! :D

Terminus: Bring a real terminal to Sublime Text

After installing here is something more to it.

To open terminal with "Ctrl+Alt+T" follow below steps

Go to Preferences> PackageSettings> Terminus> KeyBindings
Replace everything in right window with the following code

[
//Open as many terminal in new tab with 'ctrl+alt+t'
{
"keys": ["ctrl+alt+t"],
"command": "terminus_open",
},
]

To make it horizontally split like IDE's go to View> Layout> Select "Rows: 2"

Melroy's Blog • Nov 13 '19

I also think that Microsoft should really look closely into their cpu & memory & io consumption. 4gb should be enough people! More memory means just lower performance, since what is all loaded into memory?

Vs code just open text files...

Pooria A • Nov 13 '19

You still didn't get my point. The point was that it's not anyone's business to tell others they have to buy new hardware if they are "serious" developers.

James Eastham • Nov 18 '19

I've always known about sublime text, but never really used it too much. I have found the same thing with VS code eating up my resources recently though.

Just installed sublime text, and your complete list of plugins. Let's see how I get on :)

Thanks for the article though!

Igor Moura • Nov 19 '19

I really loved Sublime, but the lack of plugins and the lacking community (at least when compared to VSCode), along with the fact that my whole team was using VSCode ended up making me switch.

Even with 8gb of ram it wasn't enough to work properly without hitting swap all the time. I had to upgrade to 12gb, and yet I still suffer with all of ram being used sometimes (mostly due to MS's python server taking up 1~2gb of ram easily). VSCode sure is fancy and helps a lot, but it's a real ram hog.

On lower specced machines (such as my chromebook), I prefer to use vim. I can't even imagine how one could work with VSCode with only 4gb of ram.

Brandon Conway • Nov 13 '19

I made this exact same switch last week! I got tired of my 16GB MBP being unresponsive. It isn't just 4GB machines, VS Code will bring any machine to it's knees when using flow and the vscodevim.

Paul Fox • Nov 15 '19

I tried vscode for about a week. It locked up on a 32gb workstation. I had better luck with eclipse based IDEs in the past, but I'm done with any software that uses more than 500mb of RAM including OS processes if I have a choice. Unfortunately I have to watch my work laptop hog 6gb for MacOS and Forcepoint...

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 13 '19

Yeah, my point exactly.

Germano Corrêa • Nov 12 '19

I feel you. When my work's computer had only 4GB of RAM I had to code with sublime because of the same reason, our project is legacy and GIANT. When they upgraded my machine to one with 8GB of RAM, I came back to VS Code :)

Utkarsh Talwar • Nov 13 '19

Sublime is a blessing for less powerful machines. 😇

Shakir Samoon • Nov 12 '19

I don't know anyone uses a 2nd editor, but I'm type of a guy use for a long time. And it is SublimeText. To be honest SublimeText is a lifesaver in many situations.

But, working on a machine that only have 4GB RAM is not a good thing for a developer. Even an i3 processor is okay but A 4GB RAM?

It's 2019, and most of the frameworks requires a decent amount of RAM. If my guessing is right, 8GB RAM is enough for now (if you don't use a VM).

But with 4GB I'm pretty sure that VS Code isn't the only thing they have issues running.

O • Nov 12 '19

It’s intellisense parsing the scripts. If you disable it you’ll lose those code helpers but you’ll lose much more. If you can afford a vps, get one and install your plugins to the ssh instance Using the ssh connect plugin. I was a sublime user who moved to vscode and had the same probs. Also, 4gb of RAM is too little like Niels says, but Neils, companies are stingy sometimes and don’t provide good hardware for anyone. Where I work now, an underpowered PC laptop is given out to us, while the entire dev team uses our own personal macbooks. More horsepower and better software is the answer!

yankleber • May 23 '20

As usual Microsoft clogging user machines with their bloated products... Not really a surprise.

A couple months ago I returned coding in PHP and as I couldn't decide among VSCode, Sublime and Brackets I ended picking VSCode. Right in the first bat one of the things that really annoyed me since the beginning is its very long time to load -as much as Visual Studio!- that IMO is too long for a plain text editor. Oh, well, I can live with it...

So yesterday I was happily working on a project when my keyboard stopped to work out-of-the-blue in the middle of a code typing! What the heck? So after a quick observation I figured that the problem happens EVERY time I type <?php ?> at the end of a long line. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense I know, but it is what it is. Curiously the navigation keys keep working but not the chars. The keyboard will return to work normally if I close and reopen VSCode BUTt if I move to the end of a long line and repeat that same sequence... dang... It stops again! Definitively I cannot use an editor that may cause my keyboard stop to work if I type the main tag of the language I am using! LoL!

Long story short this morning I switched to Sublime and I am amazed so far. First thing I enjoyed is that it takes barely 1 second to load. Now I am trying to get used to it.

ruchinmunjal • Dec 8 '19

On windows 10, if using windows defender, adding vscode.exe and your project folder to exclusion list helps as well. It's risky. But... Well you are already risk taker if you are doing huge dev project on 4 GB ram :)

Shamima Hossain • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

Does sublime text have same Git support as VSCode? For ex: the way we can just press an icon to commit, pull,push or even synchronize changes?
Also,I found it a bit hard to configure things when working on a new language for ex: python in sublime
IMO, just found VScode to be super friendly when it ame to these. But I haven't worked in big teams writing huge codebase. So it is sth to think about. Great observation!

Roshan Sharma • Jan 21 '20 • Edited

Hey Sarthak, nice post!

Thanks for mentioning all those packages. They do minimise the shift in experience when switching from VSC to ST - something I had been looking up for before landing right on this post.

Sublime along with those packages - best of both worlds!

Cheers!

Sarthak Sharma • Jan 22 '20

😊

LTN Games • Nov 12 '19

While I dont disagree that vscode does use quite a bit of RAM, it's yet to use more than Firefox with only 2 tabs open lol That being said I just can't go without the debugger, integrated terminal and git. I use them all the time.

Alek • Nov 12 '19

I'm definitely gonna be adding some of those plugins to my Sublime Text set up.

As for more useful plugins, Advanced New File and Project Manager are two of those I can't live without now.

Pavel Ravits • Nov 12 '19

For me on ubuntu, 16Gb is not enough with vscode.
I don't know what is the issue, but that is how it is.
Moreover 6 cores instead of 4 makes a difference as well.
I all these extensions and customizations, including eslint abd prettier, I can't imagine going to other editor.
I also switched from webstorm to vscode.
I hope sometimes they switch to faster engine. The response of vscode is not 100% fast.

Patrick R • Nov 13 '19

I relate completely. VSCode has indeed been a source of frustration. I've also tried to move back to Sublime a few times...unsuccessfully

I later realised that my vscode configuration is much closer to that of an IDE than it is a text editor.
Some being:

integrated debugger (node, ruby)
language server plugins for autocompletion (solargraph)
Unit test sidebars (mocha)
CI Integration plugins
Background tasks (typescript compiling)

In that perspective, I don't think a lot of comparisons are fair. Each is good at its own thing.
It's also very possible that I'm not familiar enough with Sublime to configure it well enough.
Suggestions are welcome :)

Sunil • Nov 12 '19

You forgot pretty json.

Command+control+j=json nirvana

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

That’s so cool man. Will surely check them out.

wkrueger • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

I also noticed you use Angular. Angular development mode -- at least for our application -- seems to be quite heavy on memory leaks, to a point even 8GB ran can not suffice. At 4GB ram you'd certainly be close to 100% the time on swap.

Our apps rely heavily on maps, which are heavily stateful, even tough I try to umnount them properly, with subsequent live reloads a tab can slowly climb its memory usage to the 4GBs.

Not to even mention any webpack system is quite memory hungry, the TS language service and other goodies you've already mentioned also become quite hungry on big projects. (the TS team itself has created the subprojects feature for problems like that). Some of the goodies (like the TS service) will be there on any editor you go.

Maximilian Burszley • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

niceties like public health care and education

If you mean the US, we don't have those things. It's kind of a big thing in politics right now.

Rafael Antonio Mejía Rosales • Nov 13 '19

Having reached this point where we start complaining about how much RAM VSCode needs to run I wonder why wouldn't make sense moving towards an actual IDE like Webstorm? (or PhpStorm depending on your stack).

I always felt like hybrid solutions to any given problem end up missing the whole point, and VSCode is neither a proper IDE and or a simple text editor...

What is the point of using Sublime Text if your project demands a lot of tools and you have a powerful machine that can easily run PHPStorm?

If you really like your web development environment to be snappy and you're not willing to wait for 5 or 10 secs for a task to finish, why would you bother with PHPStorm or VSCode?

Shrinidhi Anil Varna • Nov 12 '19

Nice article, but why I started Vscode is because it shows me errors then and there itself. On the other hand Sublime text doesn't do that. And in large projects when I have used Vscode like for flask or django, it was actually giving the problems which you have mentioned in the article. So Vscode has its pros and cons.

Anand Kumar • Nov 13 '19

Completely agree. So, i feel we can keep both in our system and use it based on needs may be.

Bastien Chevallier • Nov 13 '19

4GB RAM in 2019 🙄

I use Docker Machines with Skaffold, VSCode, Chrome with so many tabs (almost 50)

I constantly use 10GB minimum...

I couldn't work well with only 4GB for sure... I think that 16GB is a minimum in 2019

Justyn Clark • Nov 13 '19

JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate!

F everything else!

So many of my teammates submit smelly code and uncaught syntax warnings because they don't have Code Inspection that comes with a real dev's IDE :)

Boki • Nov 15 '19

Since a couple of updates ago, VS Code has been really terrible. With the same work project that hasnt grown that much, the editor was working fine. Same plugins, themes and so on. After that all of the sudden it started behaving really dumb. When opening files it doesnt recognize some imports, until i open up that file from the import as well. The errors that is showing in code are not errors and i have to type space and remove it to realize it is not an error. I am looking into switching it as well, cause it is becoming unbearable. And I am currently using a MacBook Air with 8GB of ram, but it seems RAM doesnt matter because the same problems I am facing with using a desktop Linux/Windows machine with 16+ RAM and a much faster processor.

Yevhenii Ponomar • Nov 14 '19

i was reading about remote vscode. it worked really easy with google cloud spot instance, (do not have azure account).

but after i noticed they got devcontainers, jumped on that, works really good, with docker compose v2 (instead of v3) i can limit cpu and memory, 2 cpu and 2gb is enough...

Sinaru Gunawardena • Nov 14 '19

As a software developer, your most valuable tool is your computer. Investing on a good machine will help to you to use the software IDEs better and in return be more productive.

At least: 16GB ram, i7(latest Gen), m.2 SSD 256GB storage

Fyodor • Feb 1 '20

Guys, you forget the context: author mentions BIG projects, and I'm pretty sure that's the main reason of performance lags. And that's the reason for developers who work mostly with smaller or mid-size projects to avoid upgrading their machines. There's just no need for that in most cases, except for that big project.
I have a similar problem I describe here, and I believe such cases may have place. Sublime Text is a great helper. Vim is even better, but it's for marginal persons 😁
Of course, you better have one decent machine which you can always rely on. But laptops which you use on-the-go mostly can be light (in all meanings).

And by the way, I hate holy wars, but VS Code is awful in performance, I had tested it in comparison with Webstorm on two Mac machines (performant and week), and Webstorm does his web development job eating much less resources and producing much higher value ☝️

Jade Danial • Nov 13 '19

It is the same with my experience while coding my project in VS Code I notice my Macbook Air's battery drain faster than usual and my Mac's performance becomes slower, then I switch back on using Sublime Text and I notice the difference. When using Sublime Text I can code more longer hours without charging my Macbook and the performance is faster than using VS Code.

László Károlyi • Nov 19 '19 • Edited

Ahem.

I'm a loooong time ST user, and a plugin dev.

VScode is a nice experiment, but far from production-ready, and that's mostly because electron and javascript, none of which is soothing on memory usage. Once you start to eat up memory with a huge project, you'll see how clunky it can get.

You just reached the point where it became painfully obvious, whereas I saw it from the start and couldn't live without the snappiness of Sublime Text.

May I offer my configuration repository: github.com/karolyi/st3-config

Greg Engle • Nov 13 '19

Good write-up. I go back and forth between VSCode, IntelliJ and Visual Studio myself. I prefer Visual Studio most days.

Utkarsh Talwar • Nov 13 '19

Damn! Now that's what I call a resourceful comment. 💯

黄璞 • Nov 16 '19

I know there must be some discussions about RAM...Even without looking at the comments.😅😅😅

Peter Tyldesley • Nov 12 '19

My 2017 MacBook Pro struggles to run vscode sometimes, especially if I have lots of tabs open. I just can't bring myself to change editor because I love it so much!

Syed Faraaz Ahmad • Nov 12 '19

Nice! I've been wanting to switch back to sublime for the same reasons but couldn't find the right plugins, I'll try these now

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

Do share you item finds as well. 😊

Haruan Justino • Nov 12 '19

For those that use linting Sublime Linter

Wesley Witt • Nov 12 '19

i'm shocked to hear of anyone doing development on a pc with 4gb ram. my phone has 4gb of ram. ram and disk is nearly free so it seems the thing to do is order more ram.

Sarthak Sharma • Nov 12 '19

Mine has 8GB. But that's not the point of this post. 🙂 It's quite common for folks to have systems with 4GB of RAM when they start out. Plenty of college grads who join the workforce right out of college have systems with 4GB RAM.

That said, I do not wish to argue with you on whether RAM and disk is "nearly free" and whether anyone should do development on systems with 4GB RAM.

The point of this post is just to give a quick fix to people who might be facing memory issues on VS Code. If they want to upgrade their RAM, that's another solution. It's always good to have options. 😏

Vishal Chovatiya • Nov 12 '19

Facing same issues.
So i use both vscode & sublime.
Code traversing is also lightning in sublime when projects are big unlike vscode.
Moreover, sublime works well with remote files.

Mahade Walid • Nov 13 '19

Good for a Dev.to post. Not for productivity.

Seyi Abidemi • Nov 14 '19

This is a really nice article. I enjoy real reading every comment aswell.

Hector Minaya • Nov 12 '19

True

gholden • Nov 12 '19 • Edited

I use sublime... Code is great, but as it's an electron app it's a real resource hog. There is no reason to have an editor that is such a beast when it comes to resources.

Sagnik Dutta • Dec 4 '19

Hey Sarthak,

Kudos on the effort and posting your thoughts.

ST is represented by Batman, right when I was about to have a go on VSCode.

Now I feel obligated to use Sublime :(

Just kidding!

imad • Nov 14 '19

For me, the most important reason for not using Sublime is that it's not free

jitendra purohit • Nov 13 '19

I am feeling VS code light as feather because i came from Android Studio which tops the list when it comes to memory consumption. Now I'm thinking what it would like to work with sublime😂