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How To Replace VSCode

21 November, 2022 02:00

text editor musings from a discord conversation.

tagged: misc

preamble

i originally wrote this as a response to a conversation i had with some people on a discord server. we were talking about text editors and how that space has been nearly completely taken over by microsoft’s vscode. with the more recent developments around that, as noted by Geoff Huntley, i decided it’s (finally) time to ditch it proper.

i tested a couple different editors, and these are my observations.

VSCode (link)

been using it (well, vscodium, a fork that disables telemetry and other microsoft-y things) for many years, and i used to love it. however, it:

Lite-XL (link)

it’s neat, it’s fast, and it’s quirky:

Textadept (link)

it’s also neat, also fast, and even quirkier:

Sublime Text (link)

it’s cool, but it’s not for me:

Lapce (link)

still early in pre-alpha, but already pretty usable:

conclusion

bear in mind these are just my experiences, and i am definitely not a good person to speak about this nor are these objective at all, so i encourage you to try out the apps i listed for yourself (and more!) and see what you think. you might just find what suits you!

as an aside, i haven’t seen many people talk about the text editor environment, but maybe i haven’t looked hard enough. if you know any articles or conversations talking about this, or just want to suggest other text editors, feel free to reach out at either my mastodon or my email!

1

opens a dialog box at some point asking you to pay, but does not limit feature set.