It's where I write all of my personal notes, blog posts, and it's where I wrote both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters".
At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that's been Visual C++, Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and most recently VS Code.
That doesn't mean to me that I want Sublime to turn into an IDE. I like that it's lighterweight than that. It's the perfect sweet spot for me of rich enough to handle piles of notes and documents and small scale code editing, but not so huge and cumbersome that it gets in my way.
Are people just working on more complex software than I am so you need the build steps hidden behind a UX, or am I missing some killer IDE feature that I don't even know about?
EDIT: It probably helps that I'm a vim die-hard and couldn't imagine clicking on something to rebuild the program! And Sublime's Vim support is better than any real vim program I've ever used, much less the half-hearted versions available in the IDEs I've tried. Maybe that's the main disconnect, and y'all just prefer having dropdown menus?
I really don't understand this question. It is like asking "What is it about SolidWorks that you find so useful"
1. Debugging right in the code, rather than in an ugly terminal copy of the code next to it (sounds nice!)
2. Better semantic features in language-specific IDEs (autocomplete, refactoring, etc).
Certainly those things sound nice, but I hope you see how they’re not essential!