

Ben Halpern on January 02, 2019

markdown guide

I've used Atom for the last several years and had been mostly happy with it. Over Christmas I switched to VS Code though and I don't think I'll be looking back. Code is faster and has a noticeably less lag. One of the reasons I moved was seeing new packages coming out on Code and leaving Atom in the dust.

For a month of Flutter I used Android Studio and found it a bloated and complex. I've since switched Flutter development to Code as well.


The Atom->VS Code keymappings really made VS Code stick for me. Usually when I get used to keymappings it's hard to get productive quickly with a new editor.


I can totally relate. I'm usually a IntelliJ-fanboy, but the keymappings-template for vscode really let me feel like home in it.


I used to tweak and configure commands and settings but it was too much work so now I try to learn the defaults (unless it's something I really don't like).


People don't realise how bloated Android Studio is until you use a lighter editor like VS Code 😄


Atom's speed (not it's extensibility, which I loved) put me off it and almost off of trying VS Code.

I'm glad I did though, over the last couple of years I gradually moved from Sublime Text to VS Code and I'm very happy now! Atom is but forgotten.


Honestly, the hardest part about getting moving in flutter development is getting the AVM going tbh... It's 2019 ffs!


Hello Ben,

My case was that some weeks ago I started loving to code on my 4gb & 1.44Ghz laptop with no reason, I was used to use Visual Studio Code and Atom, but both of them are very laggy on my laptop so I started searching for a new editor and... I found Sublime Text!

It's the fastest code editor on the web!! No lags at scrolling or writing!
I felt in love since the first second I tried it!


Well Ram and Processor speed is not the issue , try upgrading to a ssd , it makes all the difference.


It already has an SSD, but it's a tablet/laptop so it's not as fast as an SSD for PC.


Did you buy the license? If not how are popups. I'm also stuck on a 4GB machine


I used Sublime Text for a long time. For a while with the popups and then after purchasing a license.

They are fairly unobtrusive honestly, and it's a great editor.

I think by the time I can afford a license, I would have purchased a stronger machine 🤔 I'm still technically a student

If you are a student, JetBrains provides license for the whole suite for students.


I don't think JetBrains products are suitable for 4G RAM machines, it feels laggy even on my i5 8250U 8G RAM 512G SSD laptop.

When I need to do some web development on my 4G RAM Surface Laptop, I use Brackets which is quite feature-rich out-of-the-box for web development and has a far smaller memory footprint than VSC and Atom (not to mention those JetBrains offerings), although the responsiveness is only on par with VSC.

If I need to do some more general code editing quickly with the low-spec Surface Laptop (which is rare), I use the Caret Chrome App. Although Google officially stopped supporting the Chrome Apps on platforms other than Chrome OS, they can still be installed and used cross-platform with their direct download links in the Chrome Web Store. As I need to use Chrome to browse the web anyway, using Caret means it takes next to nil extra resource.


Hi Mkenzo, I wouldn't share cheat/crack codes on a public website populated by developers who probably earn money from apps like that one.


As @rhymes mentioned, please don't share license codes for a product meant to be paid for.

I am so sorry. I am new at this platform. I don't have enough experience. Won't happen another time.🙏

Hi @Mkenzo thanks for the heads up. I actually laughed when I saw the notifications and that there's a deleted comment. Don't beat yourself up just yet, although I will advise you to work on your dev ethic, or something like that, im not sure. The more you interact in dev communities, the more you'll understand.


Since I've got 12GB of RAM. I'll be sticking to Vscode/IntelliJ IDEA. I'm a dartisan/flutterian guy so I've got Vscode as my code editor for now.

But I would prefer sublime text for low RAM usage and non-electron apps. Haven't tried emacs or vim.


Yes, the flutter with emulators is rather heavy. I heard they are working on a more native emulator, which will be much faster and lower mems.

My (current) 8 year old machine with 6GB is just not enough for flutter.

That said, vscode is much lighter on resources than IntelliJ though.


You can use any editor for dart, using sublime text as code editor and a terminal/command line as you launch the app. But you don't get the debugger inside of the sublime text, therefore only vscode and intellij idea are the only options available.

I dont think vscode is lighter than intellij idea as it would increase the ram usage overtime. From 700mb~6GB when idle(no emulator).

Oh really, I might just give IntelliJ another go.

I must say that I've never experienced the memory creep whilst coding go, python, vue and polymer.
Perhaps there is an issue with the dart/flutter plugins?

Once I'm more familiar with dart and flutter, I might go to sublime.

They're both heavy RAM usage. it's not about the electron, it's the OpenJDK Library that keeps the RAM growing. the DartVM is only 150~200mb while the flutter plugins is just 30mb~ less.


Okay Ben, but I'm gonna tell you the whole story.

I started learning Vim in october because apparently I had nothing better to do. It started out like a nice hobby, every few days I would open up a file, tried to move things around, delete stuff, learn a new command or something and it was nice until I said "Guess it's time to make my own vimrc". Oh boy. It turns out that it was way more entertaining than I was expecting.

The plugin hunting didn't last very long. I found a post about Vim that had a phrase that stuck with me "let sublime be sublime, let Vim be Vim", that was enough to convince me to not try and make Vim behave like Sublime text. But there was still one thing I wanted and that was a good fuzzy finder, and my friend google had the answer for that, fzf. FZF it's best thing ever, it's the only plugin that I would consider essential (even though Vim has a search feature already).

The real time sink was the keymap. It was so dificult to "get it right". I spent an afternoon (on a week day) browsing in github repositories looking for vimrc configs. I'm really happy with the "final result".

The next stage of the journey was trying to find a way of using Vim outside of a terminal. I tried a few Neovim frontends and other editors emulation. In the Neovim GUI department I gotta say that I really liked Onivim and nvim-gtk.

  • What I liked about Onivim was the integration with language servers, it enables features like goto definition and autocomplete like in VSCode. It consumes like half of the resources that VSCode requires it is still an electron app that takes quite a bit of RAM.

  • Nvim-gtk is my favorite way of using Neovim, is basically like a terminal except that it provides a few widgets that I appreciate like a file explorer, "real tabs" with a closing button, a plugin manager menu and other stuff. It's written in Rust so is cross-platform, and fast. The only thing that is a bit annoying is the fact that I can't make the cursor stop blinking.

And so now that I have a Vim setup that makes me happy I've decided to go back to Sublime text and see if can get some of that modal editing that I liked about Vim. So far I have tried the NeoVintageous plugin (If anyone wants to learn vim but don't want to use it yet that plugin is a good place to start). I have to say that is a good vim mode, but I stopped using it because it was missing some features and a few others do not behave like I would expect, is like that off by one error that you just can't fix.

Since modal editing is still posible within Sublime text I'm making my own keymap settings (I keep them here) in the form of a package so I can disable everything when I don't need it. The keymap is inspired by Vim but instead of trying to be exactly like Vim I remap Sublime's built-in commands to get a more consistent behavior. I don't get the composable commands that Vim has but I still get a little bit of the modal editing that I wanted.



I am currently playing with clojure and have decided to give vscode a chance as my main editor (mostly due to IDEA clojure plugin being pretty crappy IMO). I am not too thrilled. That editor feels just as slugish as JetBrains IDE-s, but doesn't offer nearly as much functionality.


Have you tried Cursive with IntelliJ? cursive-ide.com





I've used VSCode for ~2 years or so, but before that I jumped around from:

IDLE -> emacs -> Sublime -> Atom -> Sublime

I love VSCode though, so much faster than other Electron-based editors and so full featured!


Sorry for a slight off topic , but nano is forever. I have tried so many editors ( vscode,visual studio, sublime, atom, vim ), but nano is the killer. Dead efficient. Still not clear why people love ide? ((((;


is it a real question? fulltext/regexp search through source directory and dependencies, integrated version control (highlighted edited lines, browsing history for each line/change), one-click go-to definitions, syntax highlighting, etc.


Well. It was not a question, just a statement. Don't want to start flame here, (: But for those things you've mentioned
git cli / grep / perl / diff / tomtit works perfectly for me . I would say with even better level of effectiveness in comparison with IDE-like tools

then there's not much to add. neither I want to argue about others' workflow.. but it seems to me that you're missing the point: "integrated" environment. your workflow is a based on UNIX philosophy, but not every programmer works on unix-based OS. not everybody needs to know well bash, perl, sed, etc. and lastly, there are reasons why mouse & GUI were invented: visualisation of information. it just depends on what sort of work you do.

I am doing quite well with every task requires me to write code, because it's just a text. Linux tools work perfectly with text/source code. I don't need IDE to make text search and replacement. An "integration" toolkit is almost pre-installed on every Linux box, if it is not, it's just a few commands of package manager to add desired tools.


Last year I worked with:
Atom -> VSCode -> Atom -> vim

No reason for me to switch back to Atom at one point other than my weird resistance to downloading VSCode on my Mac. VSCode is my favorite text editor and I love the built-in terminal. Atom is slow. vim has the potential to make me a little faster, which isn't correlated to being a better programmer, I just enjoy the speed and proficiency. I have some plugins, like a fuzzy finder and a cute terminal, but I still don't know what I truly need of vim quite yet. vim is already neat so I can't imagine dozens of plugins being necessary. Definitely creeping on plugins posted here.
Nice topic, Ben!

EDIT: Guess I should also mention that my switch to vim is going well so far 🔥


I love the integrated terminal, too. Are you using wim via the vscode plugin or have you jettisoned vscode completely?

I use the plugin and have vim mode enabled a lot, but I often disable it for certain kinds of tasks. It's gotten to the point where vscode is the only terminal I use and it's where I do all my markdown editing, etc...


I use vim via the vscode plugin when I'm on my desktop, which is Windows. To be honest, I don't really get the same experience with vim in vscode like I do on my Mac with just vim. But I haven't messed around with the plugin much. Still prefer iterm2/ohmyzsh, but vscode is, like you said, better for certain tasks.


Honestly, I don't understand the hype about switching IDEs. I've been on PHPStorm since I started web development professionally and used sublime for small scale projects before.
I tried VSCode occasionally, but found myself always switching back. All those features that Atom and VSCode list as hot new features have been in PHPStorm for years. I also tend to miss the double shift feature in other IDEs. Since Jetbrains provides free licences for open source projects, I can't find a reason to switch.
I still use sublime as a simple, fast text editor on the side, though.


PHPStorm is a full fledged IDE whereas VSCode is just an editor. You can't compare a full fledged IDE with code editor.


Agreed Vignesh D. Where is the line between an IDE and a text editor for you? I struggled with this question during a conversation recently.

In an IDE,

  • IDE always focuses one Particular Framework/ Platform (For eg. You cannot work on Ruby on rails project in PhpStorm)
  • IDE contains most features already build in for that platform.
  • IDE always contains a single project file that lists the project code files and related actions

In a Code Editor,

  • Code editor doesn't focus on any specific Platform or framework. Code Editor can work across all frameworks (For Eg. VSCode can be used with Assembly programs that runs in Arm and also HTML Code that runs in a browser)
  • Code editor is bare bone and contains minimal features like syntax highlighting out of the box. Most Features are provided via plugin. Users, depending on the technology they work, should install necessary plugins
  • Code editor doesn't have a central project file as such (This feature is available via an extension anyway)

I've recently started using Intellij IDEA for Scala development, and it's quite nice. The RAM usage is really high but it has a lot of handly plugins for Scala making it a must have for me.

I still use VS Code for almost everything else :D


Actually I use different editors based on the requirement.

IntelliJ IDEA or Android Studio on my daily job. They are feature-rich editors that eats a lot of RAM, but it's all worth it.

VS Code, for lightweight editing, like web projects, Flutter, editing large debug logs, or just browsing around huge Android project files without opening in the heavyweight IntelliJ/Android Studio.

Nano, if I am over a terminal connection. This is my preference over the Vi(m) editor.

Extra: Sometimes I use VS Code only to use the REST Client plugin because of the flexibility that the plugin provides.


It's recent in terms of how long I've been coding... but my project last year was to switch from Sublime to VS Code. I guess that means I've officially been using VS Code for a year now. I couldn't be happier with it. I basically carried over the keyboard shortcuts from Sublime so I didn't have to learn anything new. It's prettier (IMPORTANT THINGS), the Git integration is 💯, and it has everything I need to successfully do my work!


Hmm, well for me I started at Atom but I was just learning web development then.
Well I'm sure it's much more complex then that, I ended up trying code and man, I can't see myself going back to anything.

Love how fast and fully featured Code is.

That's my story lol.


My journey was Pycharm -> Neovim -> VSCode -> Pycharm

I still use Neovim from time to time, but I was really disappointed with VSCode. I expected it to be much more lightweight editor and found it difficult to run and debug some types of applications. That surprised me, because it's really popular in the Python community.


Well I was used to develop on Linux, so I was a vim-fanboy.

But since I have to work with a Windows machine in my new job, I wasn't able to get vim running in a way that fit my needs.

So I tried Atom and some others and stopped at phpstorm.

Everything I build around vim on Linux was just there and I just needed to get used to the new keymapping.

So far I will keep it for webdev.

For all the other things I still use Linux. So no change there :)


I was using phpstorm previously for all of my development including Symfony and react. Recently switched to vscode after reading a lot of praises for this editor. Now, there's no going back. It's so much faster. Fast to launch and really less lag while working.


I swapped from RubyMine to VSCode in the last few months. I'm not entirely thrilled with the change, as RubyMine had more powerful code inspection, was better at jumping to method definitions, etc. However, there were other things I wanted to do with the money that I would have spent on the IDE.

I do have a fallback license for RubyMine 2017.2.5 that I would be more than happy to keep using, but we use WSL at work, support for which only made it into RubyMine in version 2017.3.

So close, yet so far.

If anyone uses VSCode for Ruby on Rails and has any hot tips about getting the code inspection to run smoothly, I'd love to chat!


Was on Atom for a while but loving the Sublime Text just because of all integrations and mostly to validate terraform, helm(yaml) stuff. My fav iz zsh+sublime as I spend about 96% of the day in terminal doing VI but nothing beats faster than

st somefile.yaml


st somedir/

doing a quick edits and save it.


Sublime Text > VS Code > TextMate > Vim > VS Code

From Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code

Sublime Text is a great editor, and, to be honest, I've never seen a GUI code editor opening so fast as Sublime Text. The only thing I missed in Sublime Text was a better language support, including linting, code completion and etc. That is why I switched to Visual Studio Code.

From Visual Studio Code to TextMate

VS Code is great. The UI, the editing features, the extensions and its frequent updates. By the way, it is, IMHO, the best code editor for JavaScript and its children (TypeScript, Dart, etc).

As a Ruby developer, there is a lot of things I miss in VS Code. After all these code editor switches I've learned this is not a editor problem, but a language one. Ruby is kinda hard to auto complete, because of its characteristics, compared to Java or C#, for instance.

I had a great experience with TextMate. It has a lot of macros and other kinds of tooling that really helps developers. Also, it's very famous among Ruby devs. The only problem with it is that it is not updated very often. There are some really old tools & scripts from Rails 3-4 that just don't work anymore.

From TextMate to Vim

I really liked the idea of macros and automation inside the code editor, and Vim offered me that. The learning curve took me ~3-4 weeks, but that worth it.

Vim is great, but it has to be fine-tuned to work in its best. So, I went back to VS Code.

From Vim to VS Code

My final review is that VS Code is really great. One of the things that I really like in it is the VS Code Live Share extension, perfect for pair programming (I've used Atom similar feature and it was really bad back then).


This really resonated with me as I have a similar story. Notepad++ and Nano in the early days at school until I found Sublime Text. Sublime is great, like really great. It's so fast. To this day I still use Sublime for quick editing here and there if I don't want to have a whole extra VSC instance running for a directory full of bash scripts or something.

Then I came across vim. I didn't have the patience to sit down and grind out that learning curve as you were so brave to do, but I still use it. Honestly it's the easiest way to quickly edit a file, whether it's a simple SSH config, another bash script, or for some quick notes. Not having to leave your terminal in some operations is a nice QOL boost. But wow it can be daunting.

Now VSCode. I can't possible explain how nice this is, and maybe it's because of the wonderful web dev support Microsoft has been adding over the year. I was on Atom for a very brief period until the startup time became well over a minute and that editor would chug opening and working with large files. Maybe that's gotten better, but I have no want to move back. VSCode is fantastic.


I switched from VSCode to VIM, and I'm glad I went this way.

I had some familiarity with the "language" of VIM, but it was on the very basic level. All of it started after I installed a VIM plugin for VSCode. Of course, in the beginning, it was hard, but after about a week, I became as efficient as with the "vanilla" VSCode.

After another week, my speed of editing has noticeably increased. I liked it, and I felt like it was the time to build my own .vimrc.
It took me about a week to set up the config that kind of matched my needs.

After two weeks, I realized that I've installed too many plugins, and I wasn't utilizing VIM's built-in features enough. The decision was made, I'm going to rebuild my config from scratch. I tried to adopt a problem-solving mindset, every time I bumped into some rough edge, I tried to solve this problem with a vanilla VIM features, only after that, I was reaching for a plugin.

These work for me the best:

  • fzf (multi-use fuzzy finder for file/tag/phrase search)
  • vim-ranger (a terminal file explorer/manager, I use it outside vim also)
  • goyo.vim (distraction-free writing mode, I use it mostly for prose)
  • vim-commentary (you don't need to know comment convention for all the filetypes)
  • vim-surround (change/add/delete common surroundings - quotes/tags/parenthesis)
  • ALE (Asynchronuous Linting Engine, I use it to run ESLint)
  • YouCompleteMe (a great autocompletion engine)
  • emmet-vim (write HTML/CSS like a wizard)
  • vim-import-js (auto-import a JS variable)
  • ctags (it scans your project and extracts the tags - significant variable names) and a few JS/TS specific plugins.

My productivity and speed of editing have increased. It's worth mentioning that tweaking the .vimrc was a ton of fun for me. Almost every day is a source of new tricks. In addition to VIM, I use tmux as a terminal multiplexer, so all of my development takes place in one terminal window.


Right now I'm fully on-board the VSCode train.

Before this, I used Atom for a couple of years, which was really nice and it looked good, but after installing a few plugins, the startup times and just general lack of super fast response made it a no-brainer when vscode launched.

No longer using sublime, unless I need a second small editor alongside the main one.


About My System and Me:
Well, I am using Arch Linux x86_64 - for which atom doesn't have any official support, but you can install it from the Archlinux Repository with pacman.

I have been using Atom for 2 years. I mainly code in Ruby, and now learning HTML, CSS, JS. But for small projects and scratchpad, I use TUI nano editor, GUI geany and mousepad editors.

Now moving to VSCode:
One day I decided to move to VSCode completely. I uninstalled atom, and installed VSCode. I used it for a day or two as far as I can remember. VSCode was first very confusing to me.

In atom I used to select multiple lines by holding ctrl key and then use the primary mouse button to select lines. I use ultra light theme with colours.Yes, the white theme, black makes me sick, and I prefer #FFF white.
I use the powermode extension in Atom, which spawns colourful particles as I type, which makes the editor funny.

The VSCode has powermode, but that's not good enough, like the Atom. I can't select multiple lines directly. I needed to perform some trick (after a Google search) to get the multiline selection working.

And I needed to tweak VSCode a lot to make it look like what I wanted. Generally I want a simple interface, because it's just a code editor.

Both Atom and VSCode are resource intensive and requires around 200 - 300 MiB memory to start up. Even with a fast SSD, the loading time of both Atom and VSCode is no lesser than 5 seconds.

So I moved back to Atom, and I am happily using it...


My code editor journey has been as follows -

  1. Notepad
  2. Notepad++
  3. Atom
  4. Sublime Text
  5. Atom
  6. VSCode
  7. Vim
  8. Kakoune

At first, when starting out with web development, I used Notepad mostly because I did not know about the concept of a code editor :) . Then I found Notepad++ and it seemed amazing to me at the time - basic stuff like syntax highlighting and code folding and line numbers made me say "wow, this is cool". Then I saw Atom on some tutorial video online and started using it.

Atom was too slow on my computer so I decided to use Sublime Text. Sublime Text did not have a lot of plugins and a GUI settings editor so I came back to Atom. Then I discovered VSCode which was a good balance so I switched to it. I saw some article saying that vim will make me a better developer so I started using vim. I don't think it improved my productivity, it probably reduced it.

Then I discovered Kakoune which gave me a better experience with help messages out of the box so I switched to that.


I looked at all the existing IDEs with only one contraint : Speed. And I found Sublime Text.

I had used ST2, it was awful so switch to Atom back in the years.

Since then ST3 has been released and I brought a licence the day after I tried it again as I was amazed about the speed!

I actually did the same for my Git UI app to visualise the history. I was using GitKraken until they did their upgrade where you need to pay and can't use it anymore for free, so I searched for an alternative which is also fast and I found fork.dev!

With those tools I feel like my environment is really fast. No more waiting for opening/closing those apps and opening/closing many files (which I do quite a lot everyday).

I really recommend you to have a look at Fork if you don't know it yet!


I have been using Sublime Text for a long while now, and still use it. I will admit however, I have been reading a lot of talk about various other editors. I am currently giving VS code a look, and just stumbled on CodeSandbox. While I like how VS Code has everything (Terminal, editor, etc.) In one place, I'm not sure that I'm ready to leave Sublime just yet.

I'm not one to just switch because folks say it is the next best thing since the last best thing. When I hear of something new, I'll take a look, and if I like it better than the tool I'm using, I'll use it. But a lot of what I read seems like nothing but opinion, which, nothing wrong with having an opinion, but the NPM vs Yarn, Parcel vs Webpack, etc. Doesn't seem any different than the Mac vs PC, Apple ][ vs Commodore 64, Ford Vs Chevy "debates".


I see lot speak for VSCode, I still somehow not that comfortable with VSCode than I was with IntelliJ.

As a full stack, I looking for a sweet spot between Java and Javascript.

There are lot of good things about VSCode.

I will talk about bad and looking for suggestion how to improve my experience in there.

  • VSCode is not good large codebase. Its slow. it revs up my CPU.
  • Java classpath scan is killing.
  • Annoying popups from plugins ( which does not tell me what it wants me to do )
  • Keybindings are great but still I need to learn VSCode keys like command palette and sometimes i dont know what i am looking for.

so still I have a love/hate relationship VSCode. I am sticking with VSCode/IntelliJ for now.


I'm trying to switch from Sublime to VS code, mostly for the debugging which doesn't really exist in sublime. It's not going as easily as I'd like. Not because vscode is bad, it not +it's an amazing platform, but it's not an extention of my brain like sublime was. I'll still use sublime for quick editing, but vscode provides a more consistent workflow than sublime.


I recently went from Brackets (a great open source editor) to Visual Studio Code. The difference is quite starking. It's like going from driving a BMW sedan to driving a Porsche. I don't know what took me so long to switch to a better editor. But now I am glad I did it.



I switched to Atom in November and is been great. I like the GitHub integration and having markdown preview built in is a plus!

I've downloaded a few packages. Recently the linter I downloaded was being buggy so I had to disable it.

I plan to stick with Atom for a while. I can use package reccomendations!


I switched from Webstorm (and Netbeans, for PHP development) to VSCode about half a year ago, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I suppose you can call VSCode a 'compromise' ... it's quite lightweight, more lightweight than Webstorm and Netbeans (and Eclipse), but a little bit more 'heavy' than Sublime. It's a bit "between" an IDE and a text editor, and that's what I see as the ideal balance. I like the terminal and I do use VIM a lot, but I don't want to do all of my development in VIM ... I do want an "IDE".

Another thing is that the learning curve for VSCode is pretty small - install a bunch of plugins and get used to the main commands and windows, and that's it. I don't want to spend a huge amount of time getting familiar with the complete 'ecosystem' around an IDE/editor, or spending 2 weeks to optimize all of it.

Coming from Webstorm, in the beginning I really had to get used to VSCode, and I spent a decent amount of time setting it all up so that it works in the way I like (settings, keyboard shortcuts, plugins), but now I'm pretty happy with it, I'm not looking back.

Also tried Atom for a few days but quickly dumped it, I think pretty much everyone agrees that VSCode has surpassed Atom in almost every respect ... right?

VSCode isn't perfect (there are still a few things that I feel worked better in Webstorm, full text search and Git diffs/history come to mind) but it's definitely "good enough".

Works well not only with Javacript but also with PHP, so it's replaced both Webstorm and Netbeans ... only when doing Java development I'm still using another IDE (Eclipse is hard to beat for Java development).


2 years of Atom/VS Code, and have recently been granted a student license for Jetbrains products (about 4 months ago). My experience is that PHP development is much faster with PHPStorm, but I can still see myself using VSCode without losing too much. Laravel autocompletion is still quite iffy compared to Symfony. For basic code editing / frontend work, I still use VSCode over Webstorm.


Hi Ben,
Late last year I decided to switch back to SublimeText and 'forced' my commitment by going fully licensed. This switched me away from JetBrains tools, not so much because I was unhappy with the tools in general, but because I have yet to find an editor as fast and versatile as ST3.

I have found that ST3 can replace all my other editors for coding and even as a text editor (I favor Markdown).

My other editor, not so much by choice but by day job, is Xcode due to my daily iOS grind.


I have recently switched to VS Code. Once configured, you are on Boeing then. I was using Sublime Text before. VS Code's built-in terminal functionality is way more productive than its git integration.



So I sort of "switched". That is to say that I started to use vscode for golang development which is a significant departure from PHPstorm which I use for my day to day web dev work.

Vscode is pretty decent so far. It's code completion is decent, along with it's type hinting and syntax checking. I keep wishing things were better all around, but it is good enough. I suppose that is the difference between a $200 ide a year vs $0.


Few months ago i switched to PHPStorm for PHP development. Loving it. Coming from a 'basic' editor like Atom and Brackets, its way better for what i use it. My framework even has a custom plugin to make the editor support more and understand whats happening


I've been using atom mostly for rails and vs code for angular and Vue. But something strange happened few days ago when I mistakenly opened my rails project in code. At The moment I think I'll be using code. Atom lags too much


Vim to VSCode Here.

Transition is very fast and in fact, I started to write extensions. Extension development environment in VSCode seems to be great. Vim Plugin for VSCode is also up to the standard. Its faster and looks exactly same in all the 3 OS (Mac, Linux and Windows)


Switched from spacemacs to neovim. It's a bit hard breaking all my muscle memory (:w instead of SPC F S was hard) but I've found it easier overall since it starts almost instantly and runs far better than emacs.


I recently switched to spacemacs from VS Code and I'm happy with it. I made the switch for two reasons:

  1. I started using a Chromebook and it doesn't have the capacity to run VS Code
  2. I've been doing a lot of repetitive stuff and a macro system has made it easier to do

I like spacemacs because it uses few enough resources to run on my new computer, it has macros, I can stick with my previous knowledge of Vim's keybindings, and I don't really have to learn how to configure every little detail of emacs until something really starts to bother me.


I've been reluctant to call it a "switch," but I recently took up Vim. I've been using Emacs, and as with any editor I'm sure, I had this growing list of little issues and frustrations. Nothing some editing of my init.el file wouldn't have solved. My bigger issue was that I couldn't use Emacs at work, at least not the way I want to.

My root problem is one of control, and at the office I don't have enough. The hypothesis I'm testing is whether and to what extant I can mold Vim into the shape I want without having to deal with bureaucracy every time I want to install a package. And on a tangential thread I'm trying out a different philosophy. I wrote about it a bit recently, and the jury is still out. I can't say I'm vastly more productive as of yet, but the experiment is looking promising enough that I haven't bailed on it.


I've gone from Sublime, to Atom, to VS Code, to Intelij. For my current work (some java, mostly typescript) nothing comes close to intelij, not to mention my vimrc can transfer over which is amazing. VS Code is too slow on larger projects.


Vim -> VS Code -> Vim -> VS Code

I've been using VIM for a long time but I decided to try VS Code after all that hype. Tried it the first time, liked it but too heavy (I was coming from VIM). Then I started working a lot with Vue and the Vue plugins for VIM aren't as good as the ones for VS Code so I decided to try it again and stick with it for a while till I have a bigger picture of it.

Nowadays I'm fully on VS Code with VIM plugin on top of it and happy, the only issue here is the heavy part compared to pure VIM.


Coming from a little different kind of angle here - I've been developing in C# using JetBrains Rider for the past year or so but recently, having moved to a web project, moved to JetBrains WebStorm assuming the similarities would pay off.

Whilst it's undeniably a great piece of software, I found it to be too much for what I was trying to achieve. Having used Atom and Sublime in the past, I found myself longing for something a bit more minimalistic. I'm sure I won't be rocking the boat too muc🤓h in saying VS Code is fantastic - the best of visual simplicity vs functional depth.

Also, VS Code's Power Mode in amazing


I used:
Edit++, basic suff.
Eclipse, takes so long to load ( i dont know now ).
Aptana, because why not ...
Phpstorm, tooo much stuff..
Sublime, i paid for the version 2, and i stop using it because i have to pay for the new version... WTF ???, i regret it.
Atom, again take to long to load.
VSCode, so far, nice.


Went from BlueFish -> SublimeText -> VSCode.

But haven't been consistent with anything long enough to master it. I will when my youngest starts school & I'm back to dev full time.

I'm totally cool with changing my flow to fit the editor rather than expecting the editor to fit my flow.


I've used all kind of editors - all the way from Notepad to Atom. But the switching from Atom to VSCode nearly 2 years ago ended the long streak of "Editor Switching". From basic C programs to advanced App building (Android/Windows), VSCode can handle all of them.


I recently jumped from VS Code to Spacemacs. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to go back. I recommend it to anyone curious about vim or emacs.


I switched from Atom to VS Code about two months ago and will never look back. Everything just...works and works so well.


I was a die-hard Atom fan for so long, but I've just switched to VS Code for the 3rd attempt at loving it... and so far so good! I am smitten!


Switched from Atom to VScode and I'm loving it.


I switched from Sublime 3 to VS Code earlier this year. Best coding decision I've made. The plugins and the ability to debug my web code is above what I would have expected from a free text editor.


Used sublime, used atom, vs code is where I’ve settled.


I've using Vscode. That so much fast and comfortable as a professional editor. Before that, I've used Atom, Notepad++ and PHPStorm, but Vscode is good for me. :)


From Vim here, and slowly trying to get to Emacs, as I heard many powerful features from it.


Loads of people at work switched to VS Code from various IDEs they were comfortable with.

I didn't.

They are suffering.

I am not.


Switched to VSCode about 6 months ago and love it.


Been using Sublime for years but all the hype on VScode made me try it. Honestly, I was used to Sublime & its keymaps & all these new ones are kinda irritating to me in Vscode.


I began with SublimeText3; now I oscillate between Visual Studio Code and RubyMine - depending on what codebase I'm working on 😊


I've been hopping back and forth a lot, but I've settled down for ease of use/performance.

I'm sticking with ST3 and neovim, and I'm loving it so far.


I've been using Sublime Text for a while and I tried Atom but it was too laggy. I tried VS Code around December and I'm not going back, it's smooth and powerful.


I started learning #Go in VSCode. I switched to Goland (intellij) and never looked back. Even in free beta version it is a great IDE for day to day usage. Even if I have only 8GB of RAM it works OK.


I went from using Atom when learning to Brackets at college. Was surprised that was their editor of choice but I'm actually really liking it for what it is.

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