Its indentation, snippet execution and bracket matching simply work and don’t get in your way. VSCode feels super awesome for day to day coding and writing markdown blog posts. There’s a million little things that add up to a good or crappy experience. For example, does the auto-indenting and execution of snippets work naturally? How about dealing with split window panes and navigating code bases? To me “feel” is how the editor reacts to certain things. VSCode wins today and will certainly win in the future. VSCode looks very modern and you can customize every little nook and cranny of its UI. Plus, one of its biggest weaknesses is you can’t customize critical areas of its UI.įor example, you can’t even get the default sidebar to render on the right side of the editor. Sublime Text looks pretty decent but it’s starting to show its age. Of course VSCode uses more memory, so I guess in theory there’s more surface area for crashes to occur but I haven’t personally seen this happen.Īlso, I was running the stable version of Sublime Text and the Insiders version of VSCode. I’ve put in monster coding sessions (10+ hours) on both editors and didn’t notice any crashes or slowdowns over time. There’s not much to say in this category because I found both editors to be very dependable. On paper Sublime Text is faster but in practice for most every day web development tasks VSCode is absolutely fast enough where you won’t even be thinking about performance. For that I would typically filter it down and inspect it with grep, less and other Unix tools. I’m sure Sublime Text would smoke VSCode on very large files but honestly, I simply don’t edit huge 5mb+ files in my code editor. It’s something you can totally deal with – at least at the scale of my projects. I do run Windows 10 and the input delay when typing inside VSCode is not that much slower than typing in Notepad or an Explorer window so I would say that’s very good.ĬTRL+P searching is slightly slower in VSCode but it’s not slow enough where it’s annoying or getting in the way.

The largest applications I work on tend to have hundreds of files and tens of thousands of lines of code and moving around files feels very good in both editors. However, once both applications are up and running I can’t say that VSCode is much slower than Sublime Text for the projects I work on. It starts up almost instantly and VSCode takes around a solid 1.5 seconds to start on an SSD with an i5 3.2GHz CPU. When it comes to using a code editor, there are a number of things you can judge it on such as performance, stability, looks, feel and its extensibility. To take an editor I’ve been using for many years and just throw in the garbage as if it were moldy pizza crust is a pretty big deal, but I switched because the pros out weighed the cons. To my surprise I uninstalled Sublime Text 3 after about 5 hours and have been happily using VSCode for the last month. With that said, it’s been about 8 months since I last tried VSCode so I thought I would try it out again.

That means when something new or better comes along, I tend to have very little emotional attachments and jump ship. I’ve been using it for years for full time code development and writing.īut I would also consider myself to be a pragmatic programmer with very little brand loyalty.

Read why I switched to VimĪnyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of Sublime Text. In Mar 2019 I switched to using Vim because VSCode was too inefficient for writing.

Sublimetext vs vscode