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?
I ditched Sublime ages ago. Speaking of which where is Jon Skinner? The guy has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth is he alive still? ST3 has been in development for two years now as of yesterday and still doesn’t appear to have a release date and is still riddled with bugs. ST3 forever beta. I tried atom for a while too, but it was too laggy and buggy for me to actually use it and just felt like a Sublime ripoff to me.
I used to love ST but times change. Most of the packages out there are buggy and outdated it seems the community have started moving on. I still have it installed but I think I will uninstall it soon because I just don’t need it or use it anymore. As you point out lack of JS support is a dealbreaker for me too. The intellisense in Webstorm is great, it really is a full featured testing coding suite.
For those that wanna save a click….
Cost
Commercial
99US
Personal
49US
And theres some free options, with ALOT of requirements….
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I use Codelobster It works better for me.
There’s always PHPStorm if you need the PHP support.
I’ve just switched from Atom to Webstorm. Webstorm has a great understanding of the code which means e.g refactoring becomes easy with it, control-click to navigate to the method/class etc., good debugging facilities etc. etc.
For anyone coming from a Java/C++ IDE background and expecting the same great tooling, Webstorm is a no-brainer.