Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Can you give some examples? I spend the majority of my time reading code nowadays, and I often have like 8 or more Sublime Text windows open (each open on a separate codebase). I cant imagine how much RAM it would take to do that in CLion or Visual Studio.

Sublime Text's text search is the killer feature for me. CTRL+SHIFT+F and I can search a million LOC+ codebase instantly, navigate the results with CTRL+R, do a sub-search of the results with CTRL+F, set bookmarks with CTRL+F2 (and jump to them with F2/SHIFT+F2), pop the results out to a different window for reference, etc. And all that happens with no jank whatsoever.

The LSP plugins make life easier, but even without that Sublime is often able to find where symbols are defined in a project using just the contextual information from the syntax highlighter.

I tried CLion for a while, but couldnt get productive in it. Ofc I'm much more experienced with Sublime, so maybe I just didnt give myself enough time to learn it, but CLion felt sluggish and inefficient. The smart code features are probably more advanced than Sublime's LSP plugins, but I didn't find anything that would make the switch actually an improvement to me.

It’s a lot of small things, so here are some examples:

* Click to find usage is exceptionally good.

* when refactoring, it will also find associated files/classes/models and ask you want to change them as well. It’s also smart enough to avoid refactoring things like database migrations

* Click-run just about anything is amazing. I work in multiple languages in multiple code bases. I get tired of figuring out how to install packages, run things, and even get into debug mode. Most major tooling is supported out of the box.

* Debugging. Lots of data types have smart introspection when debugging. It knows that Pandas tables should be opened in a spreadsheet, JSON should be automatically formatted, and you really just want that one property in a class already formatted as a string.

* Built in profilers and code coverage. This is something that’s always annoying to switch tooling with.

* Great Git integration, though that’s probably par for the course.

* Database integration in some toolsets (like Rails). If you need to look at records in the database, it will jump you directly to the table you need with Excel-style filters

* Local history on just about everything. This has saved my butt so many times. You can delete an entire folder and know you can restore it, even if you delete it from Git.

* Automatic dependency change detection. For example, after a pull, it will identify if new or updated updated dependencies were pulled. 1-click to install.

* Type hinting in in-type languages

Are you joking about the 8 editors?

I have a laptop I bought 10 years ago. It only has 16 gig of RAM [1].

I have had 8+ editors open, mix of visual studio and vs codes. And in VS you often group all your codebases into single solutions. So usually have multiple windows from multiple projects open in each ide.

It only struggles when I leave the debuggers running several days because of a slight (known) memory leak in visual studio. There's probably a fix but reopening the ide takes like 10 seconds. And it remembers all my open files.

All editors are much better, faster at searching, use less memory, etc. than they wwre 10/20 years ago.

Everyone's improved. You seem to be a bit stuck with an old impression.

[1] I have a vastly more powerful machine but I keep procrastinating switching my work setup over to it.

You'll be disappointed when you move over to vastly more powerful machine and performance improvement is neglible

To add to the other great responses if you use search a lot try JetBrains semantic search. It's like searching text but within code based on the parsed structure of the code, so you can find complex usages.

Notice that if you work with large projects it is crucial to give the IDE enough RAM so it doesn't thrash a lot. You can also remove a lot of its default plugins to make it much faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com