Sublime Text 4 [video]
I used Sublime Text 3 through college and drifted between tools the past few years of my professional life, variously trying JetBrains&#x27; IDEs, VSCode, and some others. For Go, GoLand was nice, if heavyweight; for Python, VSCode had a fantastic plug-and-play experience, though it was hard to shake the feeling of using a web app, albeit a snappy one.<p>The Sublime Text 4 dev builds pulled me enthusiastically back to Sublime full-time, and I&#x27;m excited that it&#x27;s close to release. It&#x27;s been carefully modernized and is a joy to use. In particular, writing Go in Sublime with LSP (gopls) and Sublime&#x27;s Go Build System plugin essentially makes it an IDE for me, but still as snappy as, well, Sublime. That&#x27;s a hard combination to beat. I suspect Sublime&#x27;s approach of &quot;do one thing well&quot; (text editing) is especially well-suited for a language like Go, which has such an excellent selection of first-party tools. Sublime&#x27;s approach lets those tools shine rather than hiding them away.<p>It&#x27;s hard to name all of the features that feel fast. Some are little, like scrolling; many are bigger, like starting up the editor, switching projects, and searching for symbols, all of which are instantaneous. Even the dev builds have been remarkably stable; the result of the care taken is that the whole application feels <i>crafted</i>. It&#x27;s a quality that HN (rightly!) laments is lacking in much modern software.<p>There are caveats; in particular, to get gopls to work, I recall having to search around a plugin&#x27;s GitHub issues to find a solution for some problem with my $PATH. Not everyone will want this upfront learning investment. For me, the tradeoff was worth it. Having gotten familiar with the Sublime console and just a bit of how its plugin system works, there are no longer any parts of my editor I&#x27;m scared of and consider a black box.<p>Finally, I am happy that I <i>paid</i> for Sublime; I own my copy. The VSCode community seems vibrant and sustainable, but when trying it, I couldn&#x27;t shake the feeling that I was living in Microsoft&#x27;s world. They&#x27;ve shepherded it well so far, and it would seem they have incentive to continue. But despite being OSS, I never felt it was mine. One modicum of validation to that feeling: Microsoft recently (last year?) switched to a closed-source model for the Python language server that made the VSCode python experience so great for me. So overall, the transaction with Sublime HQ felt clearer to me. I paid them money for a great editor, rather than using an editor for free in exchange for goodwill or developer mindshare. That is a transaction I&#x27;d make again.