Bye Bye Atom, Hello Sublime Text

There's very little that starts heated arguments in the Linux communities quite like a discussion about text editors. For a comparatively unexciting application such as an editor-it lets you type text, right?-the passion and energy that people bring to the defence of their favourite editor is really something to behold.

Perhaps even more surprising though, is the sheer amount of vitriol and vocal hate they'll dump on their most detested editors. And if that happens to be an editor you like and use, well, then you're not much better than the idiots who coded it in the first place.

I have certain expectations when it comes to editors. I write code. I want tabbed windows, advanced multi-file search and replace with regexes, syntax highlighting, bracket matching, code-folding, macros, and a means to compile the code form within the editor. And it must be cross-platform.

But I don't want an IDE. An interactive development environment suits some people, but not me.

I don't want to have any files in my project directories that the IDE needed to create so that it can manage a project. All I want in my project directories are the files I created-or decide for specific reasons to copy in from elsewhere. But all of those files are integral components of the project itself. Not a collection of config files for the IDE.

On Linux I create a makefile. I run the make command to build the project into an application. All I need my editor to do is make it easy to write code, and to run make. That way I have a fast workflow without any superfluous overheads from the editor or IDE. It halps keep my git repositories clean too.

I used to use Atom. It's a fantastic editor for programming, if a little slow to load. But it was free and open-source, so it ticked all the boxes for me and I could put up with the slightly tardy start-up times.

But Atom is a project owned by GitHub. And GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft has a vested interest in promoting its own IDE, so no surprises that Atom is being abandoned at the end of 2022. Not wanting to wait until then, I've decided to find a replacement and migrate to it now.

It took me all of thirty minutes to pick my new editor.

Atom was, let's say, heavily influenced by a proprietary editor called Sublime Text. It more or less looked like it, felt like it, and functioned like it. Because of that, I knew that Sublime Text could do everything I needed and more. But it isn't open-source, it is proprietary. And it isn't free. It costs £82 for a three-year license. For that you can install it on all of your computers, as long as you're the only person using it on those computers.

It does everything I need right out of the gate. However, the customisation you can do is just awesome-should you need to. I don't think I'll have to do any. Everything I need is already there. A quick ctrl-B calls make and my project is rebuilt.

And, because I insist that my editor doesn't pollute my project directories with config and project files, I sidestep all of the compatibility issues you hit trying to move from one editor or IDE to another. The new one isn't going to read the project files from the old editor, so you end up having losing so much time trying to claw your way back to working build sequences, and so on.

Sublime Text can work with its own internal methodology for projects if you want. But it's equally happy not to. So there was nothing it needed to read an understand that was the legacy of the previous editor, and it won't leave anything like that behind itself, either.

I've tried all of the other editors out there, and the common IDEs. Sublime Text is the closest thing left to my ideal editor. I coughed up the money, and bought a license key.

And it loads in a flash too.