Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code

Overview

Sublime Text

Stacks33.8K

Followers27.8K

Votes4.0K

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) are popular text editors used by developers. Here are the key differences between Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code:

User Interface and Customization: Sublime Text has a sleek and minimalistic user interface with a clean design. It provides a wide range of customization options to personalize the editor's appearance and behavior. On the other hand, VS Code offers a more feature-rich user interface with a sidebar, integrated terminal, and a powerful command palette. It also provides extensive customization options.
Extension Ecosystem: The Visual Studio Code Marketplace offers a vast array of extensions, covering various programming languages, frameworks, and tools. VS Code's ecosystem is supported by a large community, which regularly contributes new extensions and updates existing ones. Sublime Text also has a good selection of extensions, but it may have a smaller community and fewer options compared to VS Code.
Performance and Resource Usage: Sublime Text is known for its exceptional performance and speed. It has a lightweight footprint and quickly loads large files. Sublime Text's efficiency is attributed to its core design and optimized rendering engine. On the other hand, while VS Code is built on the Electron framework, it has made significant strides in performance optimizations. It offers good performance for most development tasks, but it may consume more system resources compared to Sublime Text.
Language Support and IntelliSense: Both Sublime Text and VS Code provide language support and code completion features. Sublime Text has a strong core functionality with built-in support for various programming languages. However, VS Code offers more advanced language support and IntelliSense capabilities out of the box. It provides intelligent code suggestions, real-time error highlighting, and code navigation features, making it a popular choice for developers working with complex codebases or multiple programming languages.
Pricing and Licensing: Sublime Text is a commercial product and offers a trial version with full functionality. To continue using Sublime Text beyond the trial period, a license needs to be purchased. On the other hand, VS Code is an open-source editor released under the MIT license. It is free to use and can be extended and customized without any cost.

In summary, Sublime Text provides a lightweight and fast editing experience with a rich set of core features, while VS Code offers a more extensive ecosystem, powerful customization, and advanced language support.

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Advice on Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code

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

Samriddhi

Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling

Sep 26, 2020

Decided

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

1.04M views1.04M

Comments

410-Ventures

Nov 18, 2020

Review

PyCharm (pro)

great editor designed specifically for Python and python apps
complex (good for configurability, bad for simplicity)
expensive ($200 first year, $120 third year)

PyCharm (free)

same as above but without a REST client or support for other web development tools (which you will likely end up using)
ok to get your feet wet (you can always upgrade later) Full comparison: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html

VS Code (free)

Configurable "IDE" with support for most modern languages
TONS of simple-to-install extensions that add functionality
Great docs and UI

Sublime Text (free)

one of the most minimal editors out there
it just works

It's really down to personal preference. But I would recommend downloading all of the FREE editors, getting setup in each, and keeping only the ones you like.

My personal choice for web development is VS Code but I started with Pycharm (free), and use Sublime text on occasion.

Just focus on learning and developing and you will find what features you're looking for.

12.1k views12.1k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sublime Text	Visual Studio Code
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.	Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
Goto Anything;Multiple Selections;Command Palette;Distraction Free Mode;Split Editing;Instant Project Switch;Plugin API;Customize Anything;Cross Platform	Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 33.8K	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 27.8K	Followers 169.1K
Votes 4.0K	Votes 2.3K
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 Number of plugins doing the same thing 4 Doesn't act like a Mac app 4 Flexibility to move file	Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Linux macOS Windows	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code?

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.

Vim

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.

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

User Interface and Customization: Sublime Text has a sleek and minimalistic user interface with a clean design. It provides a wide range of customization options to personalize the editor's appearance and behavior. On the other hand, VS Code offers a more feature-rich user interface with a sidebar, integrated terminal, and a powerful command palette. It also provides extensive customization options.
Extension Ecosystem: The Visual Studio Code Marketplace offers a vast array of extensions, covering various programming languages, frameworks, and tools. VS Code's ecosystem is supported by a large community, which regularly contributes new extensions and updates existing ones. Sublime Text also has a good selection of extensions, but it may have a smaller community and fewer options compared to VS Code.
Performance and Resource Usage: Sublime Text is known for its exceptional performance and speed. It has a lightweight footprint and quickly loads large files. Sublime Text's efficiency is attributed to its core design and optimized rendering engine. On the other hand, while VS Code is built on the Electron framework, it has made significant strides in performance optimizations. It offers good performance for most development tasks, but it may consume more system resources compared to Sublime Text.
Language Support and IntelliSense: Both Sublime Text and VS Code provide language support and code completion features. Sublime Text has a strong core functionality with built-in support for various programming languages. However, VS Code offers more advanced language support and IntelliSense capabilities out of the box. It provides intelligent code suggestions, real-time error highlighting, and code navigation features, making it a popular choice for developers working with complex codebases or multiple programming languages.
Pricing and Licensing: Sublime Text is a commercial product and offers a trial version with full functionality. To continue using Sublime Text beyond the trial period, a license needs to be purchased. On the other hand, VS Code is an open-source editor released under the MIT license. It is free to use and can be extended and customized without any cost.

Sublime Text vs Visual Studio Code