I've been trying out Sublime for a couple of months because I wanted a light editor (i.e. not an IDE) and that isn't so difficult to configure as Emacs.
Unfortunately Sublime ain't it. The problem is that my Emacs works better out of the box for everything it does that's important to me. I often find myself unproductive in Sublime, then I go searching for a plugin, then I find myself frustrated because the plugin I found doesn't work well enough for me.
Then I realized the reason for why I moved away from Emacs - it's so good in the things that it does well that you find yourself wanting more, you find yourself wanting to learn ELisp and then you get disappointed by how hard that is. Personally I'm currently rooting for LightTable, hoping to be the successor of Emacs. But it's still too young to tell and maybe a little too flashy for my taste.
I also work with Vim. For replacing Vim it depends on what you do with it. It's more comfortable than Vim for working on projects, but nothing else is better than Vim for quick stuff. Also - all plugins in all editors providing a "Vim mode" suck - that dual mode in Vim's personality is simply incompatible with how the other editors work.
On pricing - I find Sublime to be expensive and the author is releasing paid updates that are minor in delivering new functionality, yet you feel compelled to upgrade because that's were the fixes go.
Upgrading Sublime costs me about the same with IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and that's really not right, because IntelliJ IDEA is a really good IDE clearly worth every penny, plus it has an open-source edition so I'm confident that even if the company goes under, the project can still survive. Whereas Sublime competes with Vim and Emacs, both free, both awesome in what they do and both still being around in 50 years from now.
There are some things that Sublime does well. Things like Textmate-like snippets (available in Emacs in an awesome plugin btw - Yasnippet), multiple cursor editing or "go to everything". Compared to TextMate, at least it works multi-platform and have been using it without problems on both Ubuntu and OS X, but that's not a problem that Vim users have :)
But try it out by yourself, because this choice is personal and nobody else will be able to tell you what's the best environment for you.
I was using vim as my primary coding platform for a decade until I met sublime text. Notepad++, crimson editor never cut it for me but ST impressed me from the beginning and continued to give me features and freedom to do whatever I want (except print). You can't ever hang up vim since it's much quicker to edit using vim when you're ssh'd into a server. But if the files are locally or on a share I prefer Sublime Text for the following reasons:
* Vim in Windows never felt good to me.
* Multi-cursor editing
* auto-recover unsaved files upon loading the program
* snippets (type a little get a lot back)
* the ability to use a hotkey to open files quickly
* the robust hotkeys, regexs, and visual feedback are on par or better than vim.
The Vintageous plugin does a better job of emulating Vim than Vintage, I recommend using that instead. Neither one is perfect, but Vintageous covers most of the commands. It's good enough that I felt comfortable dropping Vim for ST entirely (disclaimer: not an expert Vim user so my bar is probably lower than average, YMMV).
I've been trying out Sublime for a couple of months because I wanted a light editor (i.e. not an IDE) and that isn't so difficult to configure as Emacs.
Unfortunately Sublime ain't it. The problem is that my Emacs works better out of the box for everything it does that's important to me. I often find myself unproductive in Sublime, then I go searching for a plugin, then I find myself frustrated because the plugin I found doesn't work well enough for me.
Then I realized the reason for why I moved away from Emacs - it's so good in the things that it does well that you find yourself wanting more, you find yourself wanting to learn ELisp and then you get disappointed by how hard that is. Personally I'm currently rooting for LightTable, hoping to be the successor of Emacs. But it's still too young to tell and maybe a little too flashy for my taste.
I also work with Vim. For replacing Vim it depends on what you do with it. It's more comfortable than Vim for working on projects, but nothing else is better than Vim for quick stuff. Also - all plugins in all editors providing a "Vim mode" suck - that dual mode in Vim's personality is simply incompatible with how the other editors work.
On pricing - I find Sublime to be expensive and the author is releasing paid updates that are minor in delivering new functionality, yet you feel compelled to upgrade because that's were the fixes go.
Upgrading Sublime costs me about the same with IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and that's really not right, because IntelliJ IDEA is a really good IDE clearly worth every penny, plus it has an open-source edition so I'm confident that even if the company goes under, the project can still survive. Whereas Sublime competes with Vim and Emacs, both free, both awesome in what they do and both still being around in 50 years from now.
There are some things that Sublime does well. Things like Textmate-like snippets (available in Emacs in an awesome plugin btw - Yasnippet), multiple cursor editing or "go to everything". Compared to TextMate, at least it works multi-platform and have been using it without problems on both Ubuntu and OS X, but that's not a problem that Vim users have :)
But try it out by yourself, because this choice is personal and nobody else will be able to tell you what's the best environment for you.