[illumen]

Extensible editors like Sublime, vim and emacs, amongst others, let you program them easily. As a programmer this is useful.

This plugin is maybe 30 lines of code.

With 1,988 packages and 1,436 authors(in Sublime's case) they turn into customised IDE's that 2.15 million package users are using. If there is a bug, you can submit a patch, or fork a plugin - and people do. This means plugins can be fixed quickly and easily by many people if there is a need. Plugins compete against each other, and cooperate with each other in the same space.

The core stays simple, optimized, highly crafted, and stable. The innovation, and quick implementations of solutions to new problems happen inside plugins. High levels of integration is possible, and does happen within the plugins.

Check out Arduino-like, which turns Sublime into an Arduino IDE https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Arduino-like%20IDE

An IDE is simply loading all the plugins at once, even the parts you don't need.

[kayoone]

Yeah that sounds sweet in theory. In practice i would first have to learn python and get into the ST api before i could build my own plugin or fix existing ones, so that would probably take some time that i dont have. And while there are lots of plugins i found quite a few areas (C# for example) where plugins are there, but haven't been updated in a long time and don't work for certain aspects of the language etc. You can obviously work with them, but they don't exactly make me drop VS.

I also hardly no anyone that works with C#, Java or Objective-C without an IDE, because you lose a lot of productivity. I enjoy working with ST in JS/php and other dynamic languages though where intellisense etc does not matter too much.

[dsego]

I use ST for a Cocoa/OpenGL app, and love it much more than xcode. When you actually know what you are doing, all that auto-voodoo stuff just gets in the way.

[lugg]

Visual studio has to be the best ide I've ever had the pleasure of using. Sadly I'm not much of a fan of Microsoft or its technologies (C# is great if you're into that sort of thing.)

For me its all pretty simple, ides in Linux or Mac get in my way. That is the only reason. Sublime, vim. They take learning, yes you have to spend hours configuring over their lifetime of usage, yes you have to have a core understanding about how they work. But its worth it. They're fast - like blistering fast. Once they're setup to my liking: they get right the fuck out my way and take a back seat to writing code. They do exactly what I expect, and they do it exactly how I told them to do it. (Can you tell I'm a developer yet) They dont bug me about my syntax mid thought, they wait till I'm done and save or consciously call on them for a clean up.

Also as a personal opinion and an anecdotal one at that: eclipse and netbeans are pretty ugly, menu systems and configuration is done in XML. Why would any human want anything to do with that kind of thing? BTW I'd have something to say about xcode but its still loading...

[kayoone]

I am a mac user myself and only use VS with Unity3D on Windows. But man, it has really turned my opinion about IDEs. Yes, even Jetbrains IDEs are slow compared to Sublime/vim but every time i have to explore a huge Api or framework to find out how things work i feel crippled by Sublime. For example in PHP i often need to know

- Which classes implement this interface ?

- What was the namespace of that class again ?

- take me to the definition of this (in a different file)

- show me uses of this function across the entire codebase

Yes you can also do all of that with some nifty search action in Sublime, but i don't think its as efficient.

When you work for example with a node or angular project that doesnt matter, i am happy with Sublime there, but i currently built a huge application on top of symfony2 in php with tons of third party libraries and in that case it just doesnt work well.

[lugg]

Sorry took so long to reply.

I hate to be one of those people who say you're doing it wrong but it sort of sounds like it. I manage just fine with cmd+p and large projects.

I would have to suggest installing a few plugins there are quite a lot of "perfect php sublime setup" blog posts around to give you ideas.

We have a large symfony install and a large api I work on and never really feel "I wish I had an ide" I guess to each their own. Sublime and vim are really what you make it. As for any tech, ides included you have to master them before you can get the most out of them.