Sublime Text is a native text editor that has stayed fast for well over a decade while everything around it grew heavier. It opens instantly, handles files of hundreds of megabytes that make other editors stall, and responds to input without the latency that has quietly become normal elsewhere. Written in C++ with a custom UI toolkit, it does not carry a browser engine, and the difference is immediately noticeable.
Two features became industry standards because of it. Multiple cursors let you place carets at many positions and edit them all at once, which turns a repetitive change across fifty lines into a single action. Goto Anything, on a single shortcut, fuzzy-searches files, symbols and lines together, so navigating a large project happens by typing a fragment of a name rather than browsing a tree. Both have been copied everywhere, and both still feel most direct in the editor that introduced them.
Project-wide search and replace with regular expressions is genuinely fast, fast enough to be the reason some developers keep it installed alongside their main editor purely as a search tool over large codebases. Package Control provides a substantial ecosystem of plugins written in Python, covering language support, linting, formatting and version control. Syntax definitions, key bindings, snippets and themes are all plain files you can version.
The licensing is unusual and worth understanding. Sublime Text can be evaluated for an unlimited period: it never stops working, it simply shows an occasional reminder to buy. A licence is a one-time purchase covering three years of updates, after which the version you have keeps working forever. No subscription, no account, no telemetry decision.
The realistic assessment: Sublime is a text editor, not an IDE. Language-server support exists through a plugin and is decent, but debugging, integrated test running and deep refactoring are not what this is for, and the assistant features now standard elsewhere are absent. Development is steady but unhurried, with long gaps between releases, which reads as stability or stagnation depending on your temperament.
Who it suits: developers who value speed above all, anyone working with very large files, and people who prefer to own their software outright. Who should look elsewhere: developers who want an integrated debugger, deep refactoring or model-assisted editing.