I'm the opposite - bought a license years ago but don't actually use it for much except plaintext.
In my experience the core editor is fast and rock solid, but I think every single extension I've tried has been somewhere between glitchy and completely broken, and debugging/fixing them has soaked up more time than they'd save if they worked perfectly.
Part of the problem may be that extensions seem remarkably keen to take giant dependencies. I think one wanted a full node.js install to do JS linting.
Atom is finally getting to the point that I feel it's competitive with ST. If you haven't lately, give it a try. There is a huge ecosystem of excellent plugins, too.
For plaintext/markdown/HTML/JS/CSS I basically use vanilla Sublime as a better Notepad. It's not ideal; I bought WebStorm a while back but never got around to trying it.
For statically-typed code, a text editor can't compete with a refactoring IDE (e.g. VS or Eclipse) IMHO.
All the ones I use (cppcheck, jshint, jsxhint, ruby, clang) require that you have the toolchains already installed. Seems like a pretty consistent design. Those are the official linters [1], though.
Edit: Checked a bunch of the others, including those for Lua, XML and Python. None of them come bundled with the underlying tool.
> seems to drag a full install of whatever the popular implementation of the language is.
This is the biggest problem with sublime plugins. dependencies. It is also 100% why I refuse to add non-python dependencies to any plugins I write (which has really just been JsFormat thus far)
In my experience the core editor is fast and rock solid, but I think every single extension I've tried has been somewhere between glitchy and completely broken, and debugging/fixing them has soaked up more time than they'd save if they worked perfectly.
Part of the problem may be that extensions seem remarkably keen to take giant dependencies. I think one wanted a full node.js install to do JS linting.
Or maybe I've just been unlucky/incompetent.