I used VS Code from roughly 2017 until the end of 2025. Eight years. That is a long time for any tool to stick around in a working setup, especially mine, where I have been known to switch terminal emulators on a Wednesday because the prompt was the wrong color.
In November I moved to Sublime Text. I have been using it as my main editor for about five months now and I have not opened VS Code on this machine since February except to check something for a client. Here is the honest version of why, what I miss, and what is better.
What pushed me out
Bloat, mostly. I am running a 2019 MacBook Pro that I have no interest in replacing because it works, and somewhere around late 2024 VS Code started feeling sluggish on it in ways it had not before. Cold start was four to six seconds. Searching across a medium-sized project would briefly pin the fans. Switching between two open windows had a perceptible lag.
I checked Activity Monitor once when it felt particularly bad. VS Code was using around 1.6GB of RAM with three small projects open. The thing is built on Electron, which is built on Chromium, which is built like Chromium. I knew this when I signed up. But there is a point at which “a text editor that is also a browser” stops being a clever architectural choice and starts being a thing that eats your battery.
The telemetry stuff was the second push. VS Code phones home a lot by default. You can turn most of it off in the settings, and there is a fork called VSCodium that strips it out at the source. I tried VSCodium for a couple of months. It was fine. But by then I was already wondering whether I wanted my editor to be a Microsoft product at all, given that Microsoft is increasingly clear about what it wants out of its developer tools (Copilot integration, telemetry-driven feature decisions, the whole platform-as-funnel thing). The sense I had, fairly or not, was that the editor was now a Microsoft product first and a developer tool second.
And the sluggishness on my older hardware was the daily reminder.
Where I landed
Sublime Text 4. The thing costs $99 for a license, which is roughly what I would pay for a decent dinner out with a couple of friends, and it lasts forever (or until they ship a major version that requires an upgrade, but Sublime’s pace is glacial in a good way).
Cold start on the same MacBook Pro: under a second. Sometimes I think it has not opened and then I see the window. Search across a project is instant. Memory usage is a comical fraction of what VS Code was pulling, usually under 200MB.
The vim mode, via the bundled Vintage package and the third-party Six or NeoVintageous plugins (I use NeoVintageous), is genuinely good. Better than VS Code’s vim plugin in my experience, which always had little quirks where commands would behave subtly differently in certain contexts. With NeoVintageous I have not had that problem in five months. Macros work, marks work, registers work, the whole thing feels like vim, not like “vim emulation.”
The package ecosystem is smaller than VS Code’s, by a lot. But the packages I actually use, syntax for the languages I write, a decent linter via SublimeLinter, a Git gutter plugin, a fuzzy file finder (built in, called Goto Anywhere, ridiculously fast), all of them work and have been working for years. I am not chasing the latest extension marketplace fad. The stuff that is there is mature.
What I miss
I will not pretend the move was free.
Live Share is the big one. The pair-programming feature in VS Code where you and another developer can edit the same file in real time, see each other’s cursor, share a terminal, share a server. It is genuinely excellent and Sublime has nothing close. When I do pair work now I either fall back to a screen-share over Zoom, which is worse, or I open VS Code specifically for the session and close it after.
Some specific extensions. The REST Client extension by Huachao Mao, where you write HTTP requests inline in a .http file and execute them, was something I used constantly for client API debugging. There are workarounds in Sublime (and I have started using Bruno as a standalone HTTP client) but it is a step backwards in workflow.
The integrated terminal. Sublime does not have one in the same first-class way. I have a plugin that gets me close, but in practice I just use a separate terminal window, which is fine but is one more Cmd+Tab per task.
Copilot, although I have mixed feelings about that being on the “miss” list. I had it. I miss it sometimes for boilerplate. I do not miss it for actual thinking work, where it kept suggesting confident nonsense. There are Sublime plugins now that do similar things via the OpenAI API, but I have not bothered to set one up.
The honest verdict
VS Code is fine for most people. If your machine is recent, if you do not care about telemetry, if you use Live Share or the Remote Containers feature regularly, stay where you are. I am not running a campaign. The vast majority of working developers I respect still use it.
This was just my own thing. An aging laptop, a slowly accumulating discomfort with how the product was moving, and a fondness for tools that feel like tools rather than platforms. Sublime Text feels like a tool. It opens, it edits text, it gets out of the way. That is what I wanted at this stage.
If you are interested in the broader “what shapes a daily-driver editor” question, I dug into something adjacent in developer life hacks for Google Chrome, though that is about devtools rather than the editor itself. Same general theme: the tools you use every day deserve some scrutiny every few years, even if you end up staying put.
Anyway, I have a Sublime window open right now and the file has been saved with no spinning beachball. Small joys.