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

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 of top VS Code Themes and Plugins every month in my monthly blog series "Ultra List" as well, but recently, I shifted back to Sublime Text.

Why? Let me tell you in this blog post.

Why? 🤔

So while we were working on a big old project, I observed something. Some of my teammates started complaining about their systems slowing down when working on that project. They complained about this often, and after a while, I just couldn't ignore the issue. So I decided to look into it, and I found out that the culprit was VS Code. When you work on big projects with lots of files, the folder structure starts looking like this.

The problem starts here: the more files you have and the bigger your project, the more resources VS Code will start to consume. The Search Indexing and File Watcher scripts start eating up your memory. Moreover, to work on such a project, you will open each file in a new tab, leading to multiple VS Code instances running simultaneously, and eventually, your CPU usage will start to look like this.

If you have 4GB RAM, like some of my teammates, you can't code efficiently on a big project like this. And I can't tell my teammates to upgrade their RAMs. So the better approach for me was shifting to my old mate Sublime Text, see if it could help reduce the memory load on our machines without sacrificing general efficiency and important VS Code features we've all come to rely on, and then help my teammates set it up correctly. I am pleased to report that this was a successful experiment and I'm gonna stick to Sublime Text now, at least for the foreseeable future.

Check out its memory usage for the same workspace.

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How? 🤔

So if you think this is cool and could help your machine run lighter so you can code faster, stay with me and find out how you can achieve this too.

Once you install Sublime Text and Package Control, here is a list of plugins and themes that can help you to have the same experience you're used to on VS Code.

Plugins

1. GitGutter: It has everything that you need from a git plugin.

2. ColorSublime: It is possibly the best plugin out there for themes. This plugin can help preview a theme real-time, even if that theme is not installed on your Sublime Text at that time. 🤯

3. Sublime​Code​Intel: Code completion like VS Code but way lighter.

4. SideBarEnhancements: Take your sidebar options to the next level with this plugin.

5. BracketHighlighter: Best Bracket Highlighter; matches a variety of brackets such as: [], (), {}, "", '', , and even custom brackets.

6. PlainTasks: An opinionated to-do-list plugin for Sublime Text (2 & 3) editor.

Themes

Now that you have the basics taken care of, it's time to personalize your setup. Check out these themes and give your Sublime Text a facelift.

• Materialize
• Agila Theme
• Seti

Other Cool Stuff

If you want to explore further and see what more you could do with Sublime Text, go check out this AWESOME list. 📃

dreikanter / sublime-bookmarks

Sublime Text essential plugins and resources

Sublime Text Bookmarks

Sublime Text is a cross-platform text and source code editor, with a Python application programming interface. Its functionality is extendable with plugins. Most of the extending packages have free-software licenses and are community-built and maintained. — Wikipedia

This tiny project follows GitHub community trend to aggregate the most essential bookmarks for specific subject in the form of a handy well-structured collection. Here you will find tutorials and learning materials for Sublime Text, general purpose extensions for coding and text editing, and specialized extensions grouped by usage profiles.

This list not supposed to include absolutely all Sublime Text plugins, due we already have Package Control for this. It is intended to be a starting point helping to setup working environment, or check out for new extensions to make your existing Sublime setup more awesome. You may find ★ here and there in the list. It stands for Editors'…

View on GitHub

It contains everything from useful books and community resources to plugins for specific profiles like JS, Python, and Ruby that could make your life much easier. You can also find some cool icon packs and fonts in there to customize the look and feel of your Sublime Text further. 🎨

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Conclusion

And that's it for this post; short and sweet, just like I promised. That's my journey back to Sublime Text, a code editor I used for years before switching to VS Code. I'm really happy to discover that it's still amazing, better than ever in fact, and has a thriving ecosystem and community. Since switching back to it, I've seen a huge improvement in the productivity of my team, especially when working on big codebases. We've seen reduction in task completion times by as much as 60%, according to reports in our product management tool, ClickUp, which is awesome by the way and definitely worth checking out. So if you've been feeling done with VS Code and its memory-hungry tendencies, or if you simply want a change, go try Sublime Text and see the results for yourself.

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One More Thing

If you're looking for work, we're hiring fullstack developers (MERN) at Skynox Tech! You can apply on Angellist, LinkedIn, or via direct email to [e-mail]. 😀💯

Ooh, and lastly, if you're already a Sublime Text lover and long-time user, please share your own experience and cool plugins and themes that I might've missed.

Comments

[Bhupesh Varshney 👾]

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

[Sarthak Sharma XenoX]

Exactly!!

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

[Bhupesh Varshney 👾]

Some of the plugins I use

• HTMLBeautify
• Markdown​Live​Preview
• Python PEP8 Autoformat
• Word​Count
• Github​Emoji
• Java​Script Completions

[Sarthak Sharma XenoX]

Thanks man. JavaScript Completions is ❤️

[maxdevjs]

It seems that Java​Script Completions has been replaced by JavaScriptEnhancements, being the former unmaintained nowadays

[James Thomson]

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
}

[ollie]

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 XenoX]

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

[Nguyen Kim Son]

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 XenoX]

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]

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.

[Thomas]

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.

[Paulo Renato]

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 ;).

[Syed Faraaz Ahmad]

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 XenoX]

Do share you item finds as well. 😊

[Heiker]

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]

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

[Jaaki]

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 XenoX]

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

[Sunil]

You forgot pretty json.

Command+control+j=json nirvana

[Sarthak Sharma XenoX]

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

[Anand Kumar]

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

1. I use NVM and so default node instance doesn't work out of the box without tweaking the configuration.
2. No Cmd + Click navigation. If someone knows any plugin for the same, do let me know.
3. 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.