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Comment by natecavanaugh | Hacker News Reader

Personally, Atom is not my editor of choice (team Sublime!), but I really hope Atom succeeds. I do love it's hackability, and I would much rather have my plugins in JS, but alas, it's just not fast enough for me, yet.

However I held onto Textmate until 2010 and Sublime wore me down, so I'm a laggard as well.

So no negativity from me, because I just want a great editor that I can control and hack on. But I'll be real, I don't see it happening for a little bit. If sublime were to support JS plugins, I fear Atom might be in trouble at that point, TBH.

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This may sound like heresy but I seriously encourage checking out today's version of Visual Studio.

I dev on Ruby and I am a hardcore Sublime user, which is about as far away from Microsoft-friendly as you can get, and I have been really impressed by it.

Their app store is advanced, and crucially they allow Visual Studio to be setup with key bindings that match Sublime's, meaning switching over is really easy with almost little to no need to learn new macros. IDE's like Visual Studio can allow you to do code and class refactorings that make Sublime look like a joke.

Yeah, but the Visual Studio installer still sucks, there's no portable version that I know of, and extending it is a major undertaking. Plus, it's Windows only (the version for Mac is mostly a different app).

It is a great app, I agree, but it also comes with its own legacy.

I'm using the Mac version. Started with it today. It felt like getting all the benefits of RubyMine without the learning curve of needing to learn its non-Sublime macros, thanks to Visual Studio's option to automatically map key commands to mimic Vim, Sublime or Atom.

Not sure how difficult extending it is, but on day one in their app store I found all the important ruby bindings I needed to replicate what I value most in my Sublime set up: i.e. ruby linting and rubocop.

The switch was so painless I hardly noticed I wasn't using Sublime -- except in the moments of joy when I found the other powerful things it can do.

This stands in big contrast to RubyMine -- an IDE I absolutely also adore for its power -- but one that I found challenging to pick up due to its custom macros.

You mean Visual Studio Code? I feel we're talking about different things here...

Eh, yeah, I guess that's what I meant. Didn't know there was a distinction? This: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/

If you're talking about VS Code, I tried it a few months ago, and while it was faster than Atom, it also aggressively took over file associations, which is pretty irritating, TBH.

I'll have to look into the plugin API, though. I'd have to convert a lot of custom plugins, but that could be a fun weekend distraction.

If sublime natively supported JS plugins I think all Electron-based editors would be in trouble.

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