They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore
33 points by diktomat
33 points by diktomat
The one feature I can't live without is: remote ssh, remote wsl, remote containers.
The ability, from my desktop, to open code from any of my machines, and drag'n'drop files or copy/paste code between them as if they were all on my local machine? It's very valuable to me.
This website is beautiful
I recently discovered Gram, a Zed fork. Seems like it scratches the same itch.
+1 to Gram. Zed is a great editor! ...too bad it has all the other stuff I don't need or want. Gram fixes that problem.
Why don't you just not use the stuff Zed has that you don't need?
Zeds codebase is a real complicated beast and one of Grams reason for forking is so that the author can "learn to use Rust for serious projects". If Zed were to change its license now, will Gram ever be able to stand on its own?
Wouldn't that just incentivize them to keep building more and more and more and more AI features? I wish to reward the people who build for me, so that they will build more for me. The pitch behind Gram is that it's a hard fork where all the engineering effort still is focused on human use.
Zed's AI features and subscription provide the means to afford development. I don't think it makes the editor any worse, regardless if you make use of these features.
That means Gram is also made possible by Zed's AI features, because without Zed there's no Gram. Besides the "engineering effort" of Gram is just ripping out features.
If you get a bug in Gram, where do you report it? And who will fix it?
Well I can't speak for the other person, but I am actually building my own IDE because I feel like neither VSCode nor Zed fully captured the dream behind Atom. I'm trying to build the hackable IDE of the future
It works for me now, so if it were frozen in time I'd be fine for as long as it works. My main editor is Helix anyway.
Do you know how relaxing it is without the daily “update available” and “view release notes” ritual? There is nothing I dread more than release notes.
These days you can just auto-close them in VSCode, because you can be 99% sure it's more agentic stuff. I'm not sure when was the last time I've seen any feature that actually improved my workflow. Heck, we could even say "affected", because to me it feels like VSC hasn't meaningfully changed in years, besides what the AI craze brought in.
All I know is that I can place my text cursor and read the surrounding code without a bombardment of popovers, pop-unders, pop-left-and-rights, pop-inlines, pop-in-and-out-too-fast-to-sees.
Odd to see the author seemingly being so averse to LSPs, they are useful and deterministic tools. I can totally understand being dismayed that your editor is slowly being turned into "a prompt with an editor tacked on", but not only do these popovers predate the whole AI craze, I can't personally imagine myself developing without them, it's so much smoother to see errors highlighted and signatures always available, than the old "make edit -> compile -> check errors -> fix errors -> recompile -> repeat" loop.
I don’t see any aversion to Language Servers, only to having the editor move things around and pop things up by itself all the time. Turn off things like inlay hints and inline colour swatches and automatic tooltips and only activate them manually, then there’s no problem.
If that were the author's argument, I'd agree, I also don't like being knocked out of focus by over-eager tooling. But the OP isn't arguing for configuring your editor to be less nosy, rather:
It’s been a few weeks since I returned to Sublime Text. It does everything I need. There is not a single “feature” I’ve missed from VS Code or Zed. Many I’m glad to see the back of.
The perfect dev stack is a collection of software that each does one job and doesn’t suffer main character syndrome. I want to code, I’m not looking to make lifestyle choices. I don’t want a bloated everything app. Don’t get me started on the “unified toolchain” plague! Show me the latest VC-backed build tool and I’ll show you ten lines of PHP that does a better job.
This to me implies that the author wants their text editor to be strictly a text editor (perhaps with syntax highlighting) and nothing more.
I don’t know who develops it and I don’t care.
Eh, as long as the software in question is closed source I very much do care.
Apart from that, hard agree to pretty much everything in this post.
yarp. I used to be a BBEdit user, but I very much knew and cared who was behind that. (There also wasn't a good mac vim when I started using that.) Beyond knowing who was behind it, these days, it'd be table stakes for me to have a good vim mode.
I'll surely be reusing "main character syndrome" to characterize single-window apps that want to be platforms.