I have been an avid user of Sublime Text Editor for as long as I can remember. I still remember when I used to use Notepad++ and the day I switched over to Sublime. I used the trial for about a week and then bought a licence for $70 (a big deal for me at the time due to not earning much money).
But now I feel as though Sublime Text Editor has fallen behind. Don’t get me wrong, it is a glorious text editor and I not only use it to code, but I also compose emails in it, I write Markdown and take notes in it. Sublime has always been there but I have yearned for more
Being a front-end developer I work with Javascript quite extensively. While Sublime can handle the task, it doesn’t really offer you much in terms of autocompletion, support for ECMAScript 6, AngularJS or out-of-the-box support for Node.js applications and more.
I think Sublime Text Editor is great as it is (this blog post was written in Sublime), but the lack of assistive features for a modern front-end web application workflow has meant I am doing a lot of things manually and needing to rely on command line tools to perform actions that I would prefer the IDE to perform.
I have instead decided to switch to Webstorm 9 IDE by JetBrains. Not just because it works with Javascript a lot better, but it ships with on-the-fly code linting and error checking, support for testing, powerful code searching and my favourite feature of all: smart code refactoring.
Having said that, I won’t be abandoning Sublime Text Editor completely. I will still use it from time-to-time, but I think going forward I will write my Markdown in Byword and code in Webstorm instead. Webstorm also lacks support for other basics and doesn’t fit into my WordPress development workflow because it can’t work with PHP. For an Angular or AureliaJS app, it is perfect though.
Have you made the switch from Sublime Text Editor and if so, what did you switch to?