[stan680]

I've been using this fulltime for a few months so I can provide some perspective from real-world experience:

Firstly, on speed, I really recommend giving it a try. There's things like launch time / time to syntax highlighting which are nice to have and make it a joy to use but then there's things like instant 'Find References' and workspace search that I think contribute to a qualitative difference to the way I work - I simply would not use these features as much or in the same way if they took seconds (as they do in VS).

Seen some discussion comparing to things like Sublime - 10x understands c++ code much much better than sublime and that's crucial for making some of its best features like 'Rename' and 'Find references' work so well.

The other thing I think is worth mentioning is just how active and responsive the developer is. Bug-fixes and improvements often get implemented within hours of reporting. As an example, I've always been annoyed by how impossible it is to make VS do 'tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment' - after a brief discussion, this got sorted in 10x quickly. I think that's a serious advantage over Visual Studio, that often has annoying issues/bugs languishing for literally years.

[olig15]

I’m a heavy Visual Studio user (work for a AAA game dev, C++), and find VS without extensions horrible to use, but after Installing the ‘Visual Assist’ (which seems to be an industry standard in game dev at this point) extension it gives me all of the advantages you mentioned. Have you tried using this (admittedly paid for) extension?

[Zenity]

What got me into 10x is actually how similar the default setup is to Visual Assist (including default shortcuts). And since it supports Visual Studio solutions, 10x will just work out of the box with any Unreal project or many other similar large C++ projects. You could even switch back and forth without a problem while evaluating 10x, which is what I did the first couple of months or so when I started using it. It has already come a long way since then though, and I've been using 10x exclusively for quite a few months now (full time working on an Unreal project and some personal side projects). The developer is a former game dev himself, so he understands our particular needs quite well and is very responsive to them. The fact that 10x can easily manage those kind of codebases is what really differentiates it from other "lightweight" text editors in my book. Building and debugging still goes through Visual Studio for VS projects (with good integration and no required setup), so switching causes no disruption.

Compared to Visual Assist it may not have all the bells and whistles yes, but especially the code navigation (which to me is the most important aspect) and code completion is quite advanced already and incredibly fast, even compared to Visual Assist. Parsing the entire UE4 codebase for the first time (in the background) takes a couple of minutes. Opening it from cache is practically instant, all search operations / code completion are also near instant with no stalls whatsoever. In terms of refactoring it is more limited, but renaming symbols works well and that covers about 99% of the cases were I regularly use refactoring tools anyway.

And unlike Visual Studio or JetBrains IDEs, 10x is so fast and lightweight that I would like to use it for all of my text editing needs. That makes customizing it much more satisfying as well, which is quite easy to do with a straightforward Python API.

As you can probably tell I really love this editor, it has had a quite dramatic impact on my enjoyment of work already. It won't be for everybody (and it doesn't try to), but I would encourage everybody to give it a try. If it is the kind of editor you are looking for, I think you will be very happy with it.

[jim90]

Yeah, I have been a VAX user for years... took me 15 minutes of testing out 10x before I purchased it.

[jimmaswell]

> make VS do 'tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment'

Using an editorconfig file I never had an issue doing this. I get a tab if I hit tab and a space if I hit space.

[stan680]

The thing I've struggled to achieve in VS is using spaces to align function arguments split across multiple lines to the open parenthesis in a file that uses tabs for regular indentation. I'd be pleased to find out I'm wrong though :)