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Emacs vs Sublime Text: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Emacs and Sublime Text

Emacs and Sublime Text are popular text editors used by developers for coding and text manipulation. While both share similarities in terms of functionality and customization, there are several key differences that set them apart:

1. Extensibility: Emacs is known for its high extensibility and customizability through Emacs Lisp programming language. Users have the ability to modify any aspect of Emacs, including its user interface. On the other hand, Sublime Text offers a vast number of plugins and packages for extending its functionality, making it easier for users to add features without the need for extensive programming knowledge.

2. Learning Curve: Emacs has a steep learning curve compared to Sublime Text. Emacs relies heavily on keybindings and requires users to learn and memorize its extensive set of commands. Sublime Text, on the other hand, has a simpler and more intuitive user interface, making it easier for beginners to get started.

3. Performance: Emacs is known for its performance, especially for large files and long editing sessions. It efficiently handles multiple buffers and tasks, making it an ideal choice for heavy-duty text editing and programming. Sublime Text is also performant, but it may experience slight slowdowns when handling extremely large files.

4. Multi-platform Support: Sublime Text offers better multi-platform support as it is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Emacs, on the other hand, originated in Unix systems and its integration with non-Unix systems can sometimes be challenging.

5. Default Features: Emacs comes with a comprehensive set of default features that include text editing, file management, email client, newsreader, calculator, games, and much more out of the box. Sublime Text, while it provides basic text editing features, relies heavily on extensions and plugins to provide additional functionalities.

6. Price: Sublime Text is a proprietary software that requires users to purchase a license after the trial period ends, making it a commercial product. In contrast, Emacs is an open-source software distributed under a free software license, allowing users to use, distribute, and modify it without any cost.

In summary, Emacs offers extensive extensibility and customization options, has a steeper learning curve, and is highly performant, while Sublime Text provides a simpler user interface, better multi-platform support, relies on extensions for additional features, and comes with a price tag.

Decisions about Emacs and Sublime Text
Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.3M views

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.

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Andrey Ginger
Managing Partner at WhiteLabelDevelopers · | 3 upvotes · 491.4K views

Since communication with Github is not necessary, the Atom is less convenient in working with text and code. Sublim's support and understanding of projects is best for us. Notepad for us is a completely outdated solution with an unacceptable interface. We use a good theme for Sublim ayu-dark

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.2M views

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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