I think people just have very different tolerances for latency and slowness.
I keep trying different editors (including VS Code), and I always end up going back to Neovim because everything else just feels sluggish, to the point where it annoys me so much I'm willing to put up with all the configuration burden of Neovim because of it.
I tried out Zed and it actually feels fast enough for me to consider switching.
Sublime Text 3 is still one of my favorite editors. I use VSCode lately because of its excellent "Remote SSH" integration - but when it comes to latency sublime has it beat.
Zed does not feel fast on my machine, which is a 13900K/128gb ram. It is running in xwayland though, so that could be part of the problem. It feels identical to vscode.
I was always a fan of Sublime Text and I moved away from it once because VSC felt more "hassle-free". The extensions just worked, I didn't need to go through endless JSON files to configure things, I even uncluttered its interface but at the end of the day I returned to good old Sublime Text. Now with LSPs it requires way less tinkering with plugins. I only wish it had just a little bit more UI customizability for plugins to use (different panes etc). Maybe with Sublime Text 5 if that ever comes.
Also about the speed: VSC is fast but in comparison... Sublime Text is just insta-fast.
I have used Sublime Text my entire pro programming career. Before that I used emacs for a while.
I love it and will not switch it for anything. It is maybe one of the best pieces of software ever made. A lot of the things such as multiple cursors, command palette etc where first popularized by ST.
Today, I use it to write Rust, Go, web stuff and with LSP I get all the autocomplete I need. I also use Kitty as a separate terminal (never liked the terminal in editor thing).
Things like Cmd-R and Cmd-Shift-R to show symbols in file and symbols in project work better, faster and more reliably than many LSP symbol completions.
ST4 is my go-to for quickly viewing and editing individual files. It really is instant compared to VSC.
I don't really run ST with any complex plugins though and leave cases where I want those for VSC. The ones I have installed right now are just extra syntax highlighting and Filter Lines (which I find very handy for progressively filtering down logs)
I still use ST for opening huge files. 9 times out of 10 if a huge file cannot be opened in any other editor, I will open it in subl and it will be just fine.
I paid for Sublime, but moved to VSCode because at least at the time it had better hassle free support for more languages. Including linters, auto formatting and just generally convenient stuff.
I‘m not sure where it stands now. My guess is that Sublime has caught up for mainstream languages, but the support for languages that are a bit more niche like Clojure or Zig is nowhere near as good.
I miss the speed and editing experience of Sublime though.
I was the same as you but in the end I returned to Sublime. Nowadays with LSP plugin you don't need much, just LSP + extension to support your language and that's about it.
They changed the licenses to 3 year from lifetime though, so it's a bit of a bummer but at the same time I get it.
Sublime's focused/minimalist UI is nice. VS Code sometimes feels like it tries to do too much.
My ideal editor would probably be something like a variation on Sublime Text that's modeled more closely after TextMate while keeping the bits that make Sublime better (like the command palette).
Sublime is the better Textmate. What would you do to subl to make it more like mate? I used textmate for years and years before switching to ST and it was a drop-in replacement.
Not that this was necessarily better in terms of capabilities, but TextMate had a very pleasing Unix-style extension model where there was no mandated language and extension commands used scripts/executables written in any language. There was even a nice graphical editor for fine-tuning exactly what input they would be given and how their output would be acted upon.
TextMate was very much "Mac OS X UI sensibilities combined with Unix power", whereas ST pretty much has its own self-contained philosophy that's then brought to Mac/Windows/Linux in a slick way.
The two are pretty close, but between the two TextMate feels more like a golden era OS X desktop app thanks to several small differences and tiny Mac-isms, and I'd like Sublime to have that feel too.
I also feel TextMate had the nicer overall UX. When I first tried Sublime, TextMate had the better text rendering (IMO). Sublime has more features but still doesn’t feel as slick somehow.
I’ve recently returned to Sublime from VSC. I prefer VSC’s UI for following links to definitons/references, but in most other ways I prefer Sublime’s nimbleness.
I'm begrudgingly stuck with VSCode because of language support in the smaller-community languages I work with, but any time it starts being a dog (and it doesn't take much, think a 20MiB test data file) I switch back for that purpose.
I'm also never letting it anywhere near a merge again, after the worst merge in my years of using git. Sublime Merge doesn't give me the same warm feelings as Sublime Text, but it works, and it won't choke on a big patch and apply a huge deletion without showing it to me first.
If you run xeyes and the eyes follow your cursor when it's above the application you want to test, it's running under xwayland. If they don't follow your cursor, the application is running under native Wayland.
Welp, looks like it is running native wayland yet the cursors are blurry. The only time I have ever experienced that is when an app is running under xwayland.
I use Helix and feel the same way. The pickers/fuzzy finder particularly have no equal for speed in any editor I’ve found. (Zed seems pretty fast but I didn’t get on well enough with it to find out how it performs with more serious use.)
fwiw I’ve also found the configuration overhead much lower with Helix than for pretty much any other editor I’ve seriously used.
This makes me want to use Helix, because while I love the idea of a terminal editor, I'm not the kind of person to whittle away a day screwing around with my config files.
It's the main reason I switched from Neovim. I didn't want to maintain a thousand lines of Lua of stuff to have a good baseline editor. I only wanted to maintain my configuration idiosyncracies on top of an editor with good defaults. I think there are Neovim distributions that accomplish mostly the same thing, but then I fell in love with Helix's Kakoune-inspired differences.
Helix has been stalled for a few months, and there are issues that make it frustrating to use at times. For example, :Ex and friends have been relegated to the plugin system (the root cause of the stall, it hasn't been merged). I still prefer it to the config overhead of nvim (as well as the kakoune-style movements!), but the paper cuts have hit a threshold and I've started writing my own text editor (I'd probably use Zed, were it not for lack of kakoune movement support): https://youtu.be/Nzaba0bCMdo?si=00k0D6ZfOUF8OLME
Stalled how? There was a release a couple of months ago. There's another on the way. There are regular changes merged in. There's been foundational changes (events) made to enable new features. The plugins are being worked on, and whilst the speed may not be for you, that doesn't mean its stalled?
The Helix community is the worst part about Helix. Especially the not so benevolent dictator of the project. Way too many comments like “if you don’t like how it’s done go use a different editor” instead of listening to feedback. That’s fine if they don’t care about adoption (they publicly say they don’t), but an actively hostile community doesn’t give me confidence in the editor, despite it being quite nice.
Author here. I listen to feedback, but it's hard to incorporate every possible requested feature without the codebase becoming an unmaintainable mess.
We're a small team with limited time and I've always emphasized that helix is just one version of a tool and it's perfectly fine if there's a better alternative for some users. Someone with a fully customized neovim setup is probably going to have a better time just using their existing setup rather than getting helix to work the same way.
Code editors in particular are very subjective and helix started as a project to solve my workflow. But users don't always respond well to having feature requests rejected because they don't align with our goals. Plugins should eventually help fit those needs.
I like this response. Kudos to sticking to your vision; it's easy to be swayed by users into building a kitchen-sink-fridge-toilet. If you build for everyone, you build for no one.
The community is welcoming, and will help solve issues. However, it’s true (and good IMHO) that the project seems to have a strong idea of what is and is not a core feature. They prioritise building what you might call the Helix editing model and the Helix vision for what an editor should be.
Importantly, Helix isn’t (or doesn’t appear to be) trying to become something approaching an OS, or to be a faster, easier to configure way to get an editor that works like [your preferred configuration of] vim or emacs with lower input latency.
I applaud these things! I like the Helix model more than the vim or emacs models, and the project’s priorities for what should and shouldn’t be in an editor core are pretty well aligned with my own. I do not find I’m desperate for plugins to fix some major deficiency, though I’m sure I’ll use a few once they become available.
This is all what I want to see and fits my definition of a good “benevolent dictator”, maintaining focus and taking tough decisions.
I do maintain a reasonable set of extra keybindings and small configuration changes, as well as a very slightly modified theme [0], but I don’t think many of them are essential and I try pretty hard not to conflict with Helix defaults or radically diverge from the Helix editing model.
It works for me right now, and keeps getting better (rather quickly if you install from git as I do). I’m excited for the future, especially seeing some of the features and improvements moving through PRs.
I've found attitudes like this to be the worst parts of the community.
Maybe it's quite nice because of how they've approached building it? I've been actively watching Helix for quite a while now, and I've observed as hostile those who approach the project are.
From what I've seen, they do listen to feedback. Perhaps similar to the person who said it had stalled, people take not saying yes as not listening to feedback?
Yeah, I think people turning up with an attitude of entitlement or a presumption that something should be a priority for the project summons at least resistance, if not hostility. I’ve never seen anything from the project that I’d call hostile, if anything, I’ve seen patience.
For that reason, I’m glad adoption is a non-goal [0] as it allows for the explicit exclusion of popular demand and copying other “successful” projects as criteria for decision making.
[0] I wish many more projects and companies would follow suit! Something well crafted to be loved by a small, committed, and sophisticated user base/audience is, almost without fail, so much more valuable and special than something designed for mass appeal (or evolves towards it once someone smells a juicy exit). Sadly, that’s not often where the incentives lie.
> I think people just have very different tolerances for latency and slowness.
I wonder if it's because of a form of "touch typing". I'm not really looking at text appearing as I type. My fingers work off an internal buffer while my mind is planning the next problem. If not so deep in thought to almost be blind, I am reading other docs / code as I type. I am not an ultra fast typist but if I mistype, I can feel it and don't need the visual feedback to know it. I might be this way because I am old and have used tools with lag you measure in seconds.
I only care about latency if it interrupts me and I have to wait and that's typically not typing but heavier operations. I am utterly intolerant to animations. I don't want less I want zero, instant action. I don't want janky ass "smooth scrolling" I want crisp instant scrolling. I have no idea why animations are even popular.
Some of the text-editor latency discussion reminds me of high screen refresh rates for office work. When people "check the refresh rate" they have to do that violent wiggling of window to actually have large content moving faster enough to see a difference. You have to look for it to then get upset about it.
The worse case would be if it's more of an illusion like fancy wines - a fiction driven by context. Lie to someone that an editor is an electron app and they will complain about the latency. Software judgement also has toxic fashion and tribal aspects. Something unfashionable will accrue unjustified complaints and something cool or "on your team" will be defended from them. I'm reminded of Apple fans making all sorts of claims about rendering unaware that they were using Apple laptops that shipped not running at their natural resolution and visibly blurry. Your lying eyes can't beat what the heart wants to believe.
> people just have very different tolerances for latency and slowness
I've honestly never considered this and it's genius. I have always been surprised when people recommend kitty as a "fast" terminal when it takes 200ms (python interpreter) to start up, which is unbearable to me.
But yeah, people sometimes just open a couple and see speed in other areas that I don't care about.
I would actually say that this is more of a system/OS issue to a point. Why doesn’t my OS keep such often-used programs in memory, simple opening a new window when clicked, like mobile OSs do? Just because desktop hardware can get away with a lot more, I believe that making programs go to a background mode, and pausing its thread would make everything so much smoother with zero, or even beneficial effect on memory/battery consumption.
It’s not genius. It’s just very appealing to those on the side of wanting something faster, because - like all topics like this - everyone is always looking for subtle ways to signal themselves as somehow patrician. “Oh, well, some people just want more ownership of their computer, that’s why I use Linux :)”, is similarly thought-terminating. The conversation shouldn’t end there.
Interesting. That tells me there's something wrong with my neovim config. When I open a file for the first time, it takes some time before it shows the contents of the file. It's not even a big config, but maybe I'm using a plugin that slows things down or something.
I keep trying different editors (including VS Code), and I always end up going back to Neovim because everything else just feels sluggish, to the point where it annoys me so much I'm willing to put up with all the configuration burden of Neovim because of it.
I tried out Zed and it actually feels fast enough for me to consider switching.