Sublime Text vs Vim

Overview

Sublime Text

Stacks33.8K

Followers27.8K

Votes4.0K

Vim

Stacks27.9K

Followers22.8K

Votes2.4K

Sublime Text vs Vim: What are the differences?

Introduction: Sublime Text and Vim are both popular text editors used by developers. While both are powerful tools, they have some key differences that distinguish them from each other.

User Interface: Sublime Text provides a user-friendly graphical interface, making it easier for beginners to navigate and use. On the other hand, Vim operates entirely in the command-line interface, requiring users to remember various commands and shortcuts for efficient usage.
Customization: Sublime Text offers a wide range of customization options. Users can easily install plugins, themes, and packages to enhance their workflow. In contrast, Vim is highly customizable, allowing users to modify the editor to their specific needs. Vim's flexibility comes from its ability to use a variety of scripts and plugins, providing extensive customization options.
Modes: Vim operates in different modes, including normal mode, insert mode, command-line mode, and visual mode. These modes allow users to perform specific actions efficiently, such as editing, navigating, or entering commands. Sublime Text does not have separate modes and relies on different key combinations for different actions.
Learning Curve: Sublime Text is generally considered easier to learn due to its graphical interface and intuitive design. It provides a gentle learning curve for beginners. Vim, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve as it requires users to learn its command-based system and various key combinations. However, once mastered, Vim's efficiency and speed surpass many other editors.
Text Editing Features: Sublime Text offers a wide range of built-in features for text editing. Its functionality includes multiple selections, auto-completion, and column editing. Vim, on the other hand, is known for its powerful and efficient editing capabilities. It provides advanced features like macros, search and replace with regular expressions, and text manipulation shortcuts.

In summary, Sublime Text provides a user-friendly interface with a gentle learning curve and a wide range of customization options. Vim, on the other hand, operates entirely in the command-line interface, offers extensive customization possibilities, and has a steeper learning curve. Vim's efficient editing capabilities make it a popular choice for more experienced users.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Sublime Text, Vim

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

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

Software Developer

Jan 9, 2021

Needs adviceon

Visual Studio Code

Atom

Node.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	Vim
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.
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
Statistics
Stacks 33.8K	Stacks 27.9K
Followers 27.8K	Followers 22.8K
Votes 4.0K	Votes 2.4K
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 Doesn't act like a Mac app 4 Flexibility to move file 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
Integrations
Linux macOS Windows	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Sublime Text, Vim?

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.

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

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

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

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

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

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

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 is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

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.

Related Comparisons

Sublime Text vs Vim: What are the differences?

Introduction: Sublime Text and Vim are both popular text editors used by developers. While both are powerful tools, they have some key differences that distinguish them from each other.

User Interface: Sublime Text provides a user-friendly graphical interface, making it easier for beginners to navigate and use. On the other hand, Vim operates entirely in the command-line interface, requiring users to remember various commands and shortcuts for efficient usage.
Customization: Sublime Text offers a wide range of customization options. Users can easily install plugins, themes, and packages to enhance their workflow. In contrast, Vim is highly customizable, allowing users to modify the editor to their specific needs. Vim's flexibility comes from its ability to use a variety of scripts and plugins, providing extensive customization options.
Modes: Vim operates in different modes, including normal mode, insert mode, command-line mode, and visual mode. These modes allow users to perform specific actions efficiently, such as editing, navigating, or entering commands. Sublime Text does not have separate modes and relies on different key combinations for different actions.
Learning Curve: Sublime Text is generally considered easier to learn due to its graphical interface and intuitive design. It provides a gentle learning curve for beginners. Vim, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve as it requires users to learn its command-based system and various key combinations. However, once mastered, Vim's efficiency and speed surpass many other editors.
Text Editing Features: Sublime Text offers a wide range of built-in features for text editing. Its functionality includes multiple selections, auto-completion, and column editing. Vim, on the other hand, is known for its powerful and efficient editing capabilities. It provides advanced features like macros, search and replace with regular expressions, and text manipulation shortcuts.

Sublime Text vs Vim

Overview