I've been running this beta 3 version for years now and it's been rock stable. To the point that I sometimes wondered what the difference was with SublimeText 2.
This final v3 might involve a licence upgrade but if there's one dev team I happily support it's these guys, what an awesome product.
I'm not sure what to say about the belief some people have that 'we need releases twice a month' for a stable, high-performance product. I don't want or need product releases twice a month unless there's a good reason.
I feel like the regular releases crowd is mostly cargo cult driven by a desire to emulate the big web companies who are constantly - and often infuriatingly - tweaking their products for whatever reason.
From what I can see, this desire/need for constant tweaks arises mostly because web companies tend to ship very buggy products, and because there seems to be this belief that a company is going out of business if their web page that doesn't change often enough.
I use ST3 daily and have been using the beta since it came out. I don't have problems with it. Granted I'm not a poweruser of ST but I do use at a lot.
I love it. I could have stayed with ST2 for free but I chose to pay so that the devs could get the $.
random question, is there a xelatex compiler that works online? I only really use LaTeX for my CV (though I would like to write papers in it!) so it'd be nice not having to have that huge MacTeX install on my hard drive all the time.
It's funny. Personally, I only use about 10% of Sublime's functionality, yet I keep upgrading to new builds (even though there's nothing new that I need), and I plan on buying a license upgrade when 3.0 goes official.
I don't feel bad giving them my money because I use Sublime for 8h a day, and given the amount of time between major releases (5+ years?) the cost per year is ridiculously low.
Sublime is a powerful text editor. I switch to it 10-15 times a day to execute random plaintext editing. If I don't need Rich Text Formating, I tend to default to using Sublime. I can see why one would use it to write and edit legislation drafts.
The IT dept at the lobbying firm I was at set it up for me. Legislative writing requires certain formatting, and referencing to the US Code. I could hot key things and it made the formatting very easy. When writing amendments, it made it easier to do strike throughs and new language additions by color coding them, and inserting hyperlinks to reference bills and laws. I really wish I still had access to it because it was incredibly useful.
That's awesome of the IT department, and kind of outside the scope of what I'd expect their knowledge to be - customizing an IDE. Was that the "standard IDE" for the company or something? Maybe you just had a random Sublime expert on the team?
Probably the latter. That was not the standard at all. If anything, our "standard" was MS Word. This was a new idea when I lamented on the difficulties of using Word. The IT guys came up with this solution, and I absolutely loved it. Others stuck to Word, but Sublime was absolutely my go-to. Another minor, but critical point, I really loved the color scheme. Dark grey was much better than bright Word white.
Hah yes! I've always wondered why word doesn't have a dark theme. When I was a recruiter I was always working in word and outlook and it hurt my poor eyes. I wasn't allowed to install a blue light dampener either :( Luckily found settings on my monitor to cut the blues, but still.
The modern editors take "mod-ability" to the next level because of tighter integration with the graphical chroming. (E.g., it would probably not be very straightforward to have a minimap 30 years ago.)
Yeah but things like Magit and HELM and Hydra have existed for a much shorter period of time. The EMACS ecosystem has grown immensely in the last few years.
I'm a (more or less daily) Sublime Text user, in addition to a few other editors.
After reading through the thread, the developer's points seem to be rational, coherent and well-delivered. I can understand some of the frustration from users, but not the outright hostility towards the end of the thread. They only have so much bandwidth, and the responses feel very "patient" to me.
To be honest, I've been using Sublime Text since before work started on version 3 and I don't really understand why there is such a fixation on the update cycle. Unless I'm mistaken it's only two full time developers, and historically it's been only one. The dev releases feel very stable to me, though of course I can't claim my workflow is the same as everyone else's.
I can't think of any particular features the text editor feels like it's missing. They seem to be nailing it, in my opinion. I ascribe to the philosophy that perfection occurs when there is nothing left to remove, not nothing left to add - they are relatively slow with adding new features, but the editor is blazingly fast and consistently delivers the experience I want in an editor.
For what it's worth, my opinion here is colored by the fact that I don't really think about the development cycle of most of the software I use. I couldn't tell you what major point release I'm on for 1Password. I think it's 6 on macOS, but I'm not confident. I just update it when it gives me an alert. Similarly, I don't really know what version I'm using for JetBrains PyCharm or CLion, and I've never followed the development roadmap. All I typically know is that I'm on the most recent version for the desktop software I use, and if something seems buggy or odd I check the changelog and then maybe look into it.
I'd be genuinely interested in hearing why people seem to be disappointed with Sublime Text, and what features they wish it supported.
> I can't think of any particular features the text editor feels like it's missing.
Medium-term, I think there's a risk of Sublime falling away if it does not become a good client for the nascent "Language Server" ecosystem.
There are a few attempts at doing a client as a normal 3rd party package, but to be of the slickness that Sublime has established as its differentiator, I suspect it needs to added in-house.
The package referenced on there is a very new one. It remains to be seen whether it's possible for it to graduate to non-flakiness within the confines of Sublime's plugin API. Remember, a single LS Client needs to work well for ALL languages that have servers. It should be seamless.
Sourcegraph, who operate that site, took a run at doing a LS Client package for Sublime and it's been effectively abandoned for over a year.
Something that I didn't like about Sublime was the random radio silence.
They'd do a few regular beta releases, then just randomly _complete_ radio silence for months, a year or so - then, bam, another release, some "I'm not dead" activity on the forum from jon, then randomly silent again - maybe for a month, maybe a year - maybe forever.
The editor was good - although not free of bugs - but that complete lack of communication - did I just buy dead software? will there _ever_ be another release?
That makes it hard to have confidence that the software will continue to be supported - and hard to build a community around. The plugin ecosystem has definitely suffered a lot because of this stop-start cycle.
Bear in mind that the bugs that Sublime _does_ have often hit plugin authors hardest and they're the ones that need docs & help from the original developer, who's often been completely AWOL for months or years at a time.
This pretty closely matches my experience. I was trying to develop plugins for ST3 and it was a complete bitch.
Documentation is rare, often wrong, and the best you can do is try to find another plugin and dig through the source for that to determine how to implement something.
Or you can ask a question and... radio silence for months.
So I left.
I went to VSCode and Atom, both of which are more active and (total blessing for plugin developers) have source code available for viewing.
I really like Sublime. I think it's a great editor. I don't use it because I have better things to spend my time on than hoping a single dev gets the bandwidth to answer my question, or that I can hunt down some obscure plugin that happens to have the correct 'magic' that's not documented anywhere.
Same here. Other than games, Sublime was the last proprietary software I purchased, that was 2012. I used it for a few months and I had no issues that I can remember but the radio silence started to get a little worrisome. I started thinking I might be investing too much into the ecosystem and developing muscle memory I will have a hard time breaking. I don't like my primary tools having an uncertain future and a text editor is the primariest tool of all to a developer. I switched to Vim. The experience is what set me on the path to preferring free, open source tools where ever possible, the lesson was well worth $60.
It sounds like S3 is going to get a huge feature - is that why people are desperate for an update? Or have the user just gotten used to seeing something update every three days for any reason?
In my experience having switched from using one IDE to another a few times, the difficulty for me is usually that both IDEs do 90% of what I need perfectly (after a few days of tweaking), but the other 10% feels is missing and feels critical, and in particular, neither have the same 10% missing. So I kind of have to ask myself, "which critical features am I okay with giving up?" and I can't decide so I just stick with what I know and have muscle-memory for.
I'm trying VSCode now, but I still switch back to Sublime for SublimeGit. It's such an integral part of my workflow, and VSCode's built-in git is no substitute.
- You can easily see the status of each file (new, modified, or staged).
- You can easily stage all files, each file, or just specific hunks of specific files.
- You can stash and pop stashes.
- You can amend a commit.
- You can do all of that from the keyboard, without touching the mouse.
I imagine you can do many of those things with VSCode, but it's so effortless in Sublime. I haven't learned the same workflow in VSC yet, and since I do all of those things frequently, I'm really attached to SublimeGit.
In the same way, I use VS Code mostly now (for node stuff) but I still load up Emacs and use Magit whenever I need to do serious version control, meaning basically anything more than just "glance at the changes and commit everything."
I'm wondering if this is why Chrome and VScode run horribly funky on every ubuntu installation I've tried. Bad memory management with so many v8 instances running?
If they're frustrated with Sublime with practical reasons (i.e. performance, plugins, extensibility), I don't think Code or Atom would satisfy them any better. You could make the argument for vim or emacs there, but those have been around much longer than Sublime, I doubt Sublime's eating much into those users in the first place.
If they're frustrated with Sublime due to not being FOSS, nothing I guess. But again, those people would have largely switched over already.
The Electron runtime (JavaScript). I work on projects that load files that are tens/hundreds of thousands of lines. No Electron based apps can handle that without choking and crashing. Electron is decent for smaller files and it's got a great ecosystem, but they are definitely not optimized for performance.
VS Code is almost comfortable to work with, and has more plugin polish, but it's in this "slow enough to be annoying and will never be fixed as long as its based on Electron" plateau for me too.
Probably Electron. Even on VS Code (which is a fantastic Electron program), the Electron framework has it's limits.
One huge irk I have with Electron is the amount of bloat it gives to even the most well written programs. With the VS Code example from before, no matter how well it performs, I always feel like I'm eating a stuffed crust pizza when I use it. Electron gives it much more cruft than needed.
I am currently debating on whether or not to switch back to Sublime since I'm getting sick of people using Electron as an easy way of building "quality" software.
I like how visually look VS Code, not only the app but the syntax.
But in fact, I use both. I always use 2-3 different editors. Mainly because using 2 monitors is easier to switch between apps than between tabs/windows of a app! So I use sublime to code and VS Code to visually something else. Or to write random stuff.
I have the same setup before with TextMate + Sublime.
To be honest after more than 4.5 years of development I don't care anymore about Sublime. Meanwhile there are a plenty of alternative editors available with very simmilar functionality. So why pay a lot of money for a poorly maintained editor?
I'm not the op, but for me, it's not really worth $70. I use visual studio daily, and just use another editor for odd things - editing a value in a config file etc. 70 bucks is too much for yhatcfor me. Atom/vs code have way too much of a start up time for a quick one file edit, so I use notepad++
Well, you may feel that way, but you are contradicting a direct value statement. The OP stated unequivocally that 70$ was not worth it to them - that's not really for any of us to decide, we can only disagree that it's a lot of money for us.
Well, let's hope people don't pay for your/our products with the same reasoning in mind, that $70 for a professional tool they will use 10 hours a day throughout the year is "a lot".
It is a "LOT" compared to "free" products. Defining a "LOT" in software is really tricky but I really agree with the part about a tool you use quiet a lot :-)
While Sublime Text is a very good editor I do think $70 is a lot when you look at the free competition. VSCode and Atom did not exist when ST2 was released and ST2 offered the best out-of-box experience back then, now I am not so sure.
>I do think $70 is a lot when you look at the free competition
For a professional programmer it should be less money that they make in a day for a tool they use 365 days every year.
And whether there are free editors out there doesn't mean anything as to whether it's cheap or not. Vim and Emacs and 20 other free editors already existed when ST3 (or SlickEdit, or whatever) came out.
Perhaps I am unusual but even for a professional programmer $70 is still a lot when there are other free tools that are just as good. Why would I spend $70 on an editor rather than treat myself to a new game or a nice meal out instead and have a still-excellent experience using something like VSCode?
Yes Emacs, Vim, Notepad++, etc. have been around for years but they are/were no way near as simple to get to grips with or as smooth out-of-the-box. That is where Sublime Text really nailed it. It was simple and beautiful from the moment you ran it. It didn't need a tutorial to help you figure out how to exit ;)
Now we have Atom and VSCode (to name two) that offer that excellent experience out-of-the-box along with regular updates, built in Git integration, open source, etc.
The funniest thing is no editor had delivered the whole package.
1) emacs is crazily extensible but hard to use. Uses hacks to get the performance
2) vi(m) is extensible, fast but also hard to use
3) ST is easy to use, fast but not that extensible as emacs/atom
4)atom/vscode is extensible,easy to use but slow
>Why would I spend $70 on an editor rather than treat myself to a new game or a nice meal out instead and have a still-excellent experience using something like VSCode?
Because the game you'll finish in a few weeks and forget about and the meal you'll shit in the same day, whereas the editor you'll use for years on end daily.
Now, if you find another editor (free or paid) is better and gives you just as good or even a better experience, by no means, use that.
But if one feels ST3 is better, or even just a little better, then complaining about it costing 1/40th or less of a month's salary as if its any large factor doesn't make sense.
It's neither poorly maintained nor "a lot of money".
It's actually the piece of software I use for 6-10 hours each day for years that I've had the fewer problems or complaints about. And I'm using the dev 3 versions...
Recently I've moved away from Sublime. The irritating modal dialogs about updates and the new tabs package manager would create all the time were just too much. For most coding I've switched to VS Code, and for simple light editing I've gone back to Notepad++. VS Code really is fantastic these days (and I was originally a big skeptic of any Electron based editor)
I like Sublime Text and would be happy to pay around $15 to upgrade to v3 but anymore and I will stop and really think about what I am actually spending my money on. Yes Sublime Text is very nice but the world has changed with the arrival of Atom and Visual Studio Code (not to mention Visual Studio Community being a free for many people).
I use Sublime Text for personal projects I make no money from so obviously I don't want to spend out much money when I can get other excellent editors for free.
> Frequent high-quality updates, lots of communication
Genuine question: does this really make a difference in your day to day usage? I feel like once I've learnt the ~20% of features that are useful to me on a regular basis everything on top is marginal gains. Im really not that bothered by loads of new features.
Yup I can relate. I would change the "high-quality updates" to "lots of integration taken care by the community".
I really really do not want to spend time to figure out on my own how to integrate this or do that (unless I need to) and the myriad of plugins/packages available to Emacs and Atom is something that is insanely helpful if you need to do something quickly.
I don't really need any updates from sublime. It does everything I need it to, and I've never felt a lack of a feature. I'm looking at the new and highly touted "hot exit" feature, and I'm thinking "but sublime prompts you to save when closing the app, and honestly I haven't lost work due to forgetting to save in several years."
> lots of communication
Again, I'm not sure why I'd want communication from the creators of sublime.
> great plugin ecosystem
Any plugin I've wanted (linters, syntax files, git integration...) has been installable from a dropdown menu in sublime. Maybe if my plugin needs were more esoteric, I'd appreciate vscode more?
> open source
I dig that, philosophically. Although if that was a priority for me, I'd go with Atom, instead of something published by microsoft.
Again, I'm open to the idea that vscode could be better than sublime - but maybe it's only better to people who need more obscure plugins, or who really care about open source?
VSCode has out of the box debugger, git integration, higher quality of extensions, etc... Overall it feels more polished and professional.
But the most important thing is alive ecosystem - a lot of Sublime plugins are either dead or in maintenance mode, developers lost interest and moved to open source alternatives like Atom and VSCode.
P.S. Even though I moved to VSCode, I still love and respect Sublime.
This does not really affect one's day-to-day use of VSCode, but their comprehensive release notes (down to crediting contributors for key issues) gives me great confidence in the team.
I frequently point to VSCode as an example of a well-run open source project.
I'm not sure I understand the complaints. What will a "stable" tag offer that isn't available already via dev builds? Are there things that are limiting your productivity or effectiveness? How will formally calling it "stable" change your life as a developer?
I finally broke down and moved away from Sublime. I love it, but I couldn't justify the price. I'd rather invest in an IntelliJ IDE that I use every day and use Atom instead.
Sublime 2/3 has been very valuable for me. Don't know what all the fuss is about there being no roadmap or some other stuff. The dev team has never asked me for another dime other than the initial license fee. I've written so much code on it (and the code has made so much money for me, in return) that I'd gladly pay for Sublime 3 whenever it comes out.
Not entirely accurate on HN since, apparently, all banned users can continue to post, but their stuff shows up dead (thus, they are only invisible to people with "show dead" turned off) and most of them seem to be well aware they are banned.
Why don't they scale their development team with it's popularity? My initial guess would be greed and arrogance. If their priorities are shifting on a regular basis, that demonstrates to me a lack of mature leadership.
Because they don't have to. Sublime Text 3 has been rock solid for like 2 years now, and the competitors (VS Code and Atom) are like the same thing but slower and use javascript instead of python for plugins. There really isnt anything missing that they have to scramble and add people to help with.
Products have to be maintained, because operating systems update around them. New bugs happen. You need growth to fund the maintenance your existing customers expect.
That seems a very cynical view. What I see is a very stable editor with a good breadth of well thought out features. Im struggling to see greed, arrogance and a lack of mature leadership.
The narrative in my mind was that this single developer didn't want to split his profits by hiring more developers. I think it is pretty arrogant for a developer to assume they can maintain a multi-platform application the size of Sublime Text by their self. Constantly changing your mind and continually stalling a project is not a mature strategy. It takes discipline to project the correct goals and stick to them.
They don't seem like they need to. They have software that's stable enough to live on for 4-5 years between major releases. That, in itself, is huge value.
What else could they really add in besides a version bump?
> Why don't they scale their development team with it's popularity?
It could also be that they don't make as much as you think. After all, 70 USD per major release is not really that much. Assuming, a 150k per dev salary (and it appears there are two), means they have to sell 4200 licenses or so. Sublime 2 has been around for 5 years ago? So that means they need 20k licenses. This only takes care of the salary though and not the hosting expenses, office space etc.
> When 3.0 is released, upgrades will be available for $30, or $15 for users who have purchased recently
I will buy it again for the full price as a "Thank You!" to the developers. I have been using Sublime Text daily since 5-ish years and it has always been amazing. It's easily one of the best 50-60$ I have ever spent.
This "kaiser101" guy is an unfortunate e-jerk. He says: "I agree that there are only 2 people working on this product," as if that's something one could disagree with, and then goes on to say that people paying $70 - for Sublime 2, no less - have a right to know when the next stable release will come out.
I am using the dev build for my production work and it runs like a Swiss watch. The title of OP and the forum post is essentially a troll to instigate the developer(s) to come out and give a more definitive answer.
Sublime text is an amazing editor, I cannot even remember how many times MS reverted updates on code because of stability issues. I have never faced a single bug in sublime. It just worked and I applause the developer for being an "engineer" and not a hacker coder cracker who moves fast and brakes things.
Wow Sublime that's quite a throwback. I remember it back in it's hayday as people ultimately flocked from TextMate. And then the community flocked to Atom. Hopefully Atom won't see the same fate since they are backed by a commercial organization, GitHub.
They would avoid a lot of trouble if they change the version name:
Dev -> Beta
Beta -> Final
Final -> Legacy
The current beta versions are rock solid. If you have been sticking with the previous stable version, you have been missing a lot for no reason.
IMHO this is the same mistake the Gnome team is making recently: Calling the finished version "final" or "stable". "Final" means to me "doesn't crash and has no bugs (as far as possible)". It doesn't mean that it receives no more updates. On the contrary, if it gets no more updates I would call it "legacy" or "abandoned".
I didn't intend to use the term "final" as based on your definition, but rather was just trying to make it clear we were talking about graduating out of beta, since the term stable is somewhat overridden with Sublime Text.
We are definitely going to continue development of 3.0, so it won't become legacy any time soon. And yes, we do realize the beta period stretched on a tad too long. ;-)
Yeah, I guess the problem is now that people are not sure which version is supposed to be used for daily work, which version is still under development, etc..
But it is great to hear that development is continuing!
Sublime Text is the only text editor that never let me down. I don't remember it crashing, a single time! I also paid for a license. I don't see what else is there to improve.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadThis final v3 might involve a licence upgrade but if there's one dev team I happily support it's these guys, what an awesome product.
Same experience. OS X, lots of plugins (Python, JS, Go, JSON, etc).
I'm not sure what to say about the belief some people have that 'we need releases twice a month' for a stable, high-performance product. I don't want or need product releases twice a month unless there's a good reason.
I feel like the regular releases crowd is mostly cargo cult driven by a desire to emulate the big web companies who are constantly - and often infuriatingly - tweaking their products for whatever reason.
From what I can see, this desire/need for constant tweaks arises mostly because web companies tend to ship very buggy products, and because there seems to be this belief that a company is going out of business if their web page that doesn't change often enough.
I love it. I could have stayed with ST2 for free but I chose to pay so that the devs could get the $.
I love sublime.
Very relatedly, I kind of wish TeX Live would release less frequently -- the 4-GB-of-crap song and dance is a pain, even once a year.
It shouldn't be too hard to combine https://github.com/thomasWeise/docker-texlive and a linode server or something into a LaTeX CaaS, either, but I can't say I've ever done so.
I don't feel bad giving them my money because I use Sublime for 8h a day, and given the amount of time between major releases (5+ years?) the cost per year is ridiculously low.
After reading through the thread, the developer's points seem to be rational, coherent and well-delivered. I can understand some of the frustration from users, but not the outright hostility towards the end of the thread. They only have so much bandwidth, and the responses feel very "patient" to me.
To be honest, I've been using Sublime Text since before work started on version 3 and I don't really understand why there is such a fixation on the update cycle. Unless I'm mistaken it's only two full time developers, and historically it's been only one. The dev releases feel very stable to me, though of course I can't claim my workflow is the same as everyone else's.
I can't think of any particular features the text editor feels like it's missing. They seem to be nailing it, in my opinion. I ascribe to the philosophy that perfection occurs when there is nothing left to remove, not nothing left to add - they are relatively slow with adding new features, but the editor is blazingly fast and consistently delivers the experience I want in an editor.
For what it's worth, my opinion here is colored by the fact that I don't really think about the development cycle of most of the software I use. I couldn't tell you what major point release I'm on for 1Password. I think it's 6 on macOS, but I'm not confident. I just update it when it gives me an alert. Similarly, I don't really know what version I'm using for JetBrains PyCharm or CLion, and I've never followed the development roadmap. All I typically know is that I'm on the most recent version for the desktop software I use, and if something seems buggy or odd I check the changelog and then maybe look into it.
I'd be genuinely interested in hearing why people seem to be disappointed with Sublime Text, and what features they wish it supported.
Medium-term, I think there's a risk of Sublime falling away if it does not become a good client for the nascent "Language Server" ecosystem.
There are a few attempts at doing a client as a normal 3rd party package, but to be of the slickness that Sublime has established as its differentiator, I suspect it needs to added in-house.
From the Readme, here is a blog post[1] explaining what Language Server is.
[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/06/27/common-langua...
This page says that SL3 already has good support for language server through a plugin.
Sourcegraph, who operate that site, took a run at doing a LS Client package for Sublime and it's been effectively abandoned for over a year.
They'd do a few regular beta releases, then just randomly _complete_ radio silence for months, a year or so - then, bam, another release, some "I'm not dead" activity on the forum from jon, then randomly silent again - maybe for a month, maybe a year - maybe forever.
The editor was good - although not free of bugs - but that complete lack of communication - did I just buy dead software? will there _ever_ be another release?
That makes it hard to have confidence that the software will continue to be supported - and hard to build a community around. The plugin ecosystem has definitely suffered a lot because of this stop-start cycle.
Bear in mind that the bugs that Sublime _does_ have often hit plugin authors hardest and they're the ones that need docs & help from the original developer, who's often been completely AWOL for months or years at a time.
Documentation is rare, often wrong, and the best you can do is try to find another plugin and dig through the source for that to determine how to implement something.
Or you can ask a question and... radio silence for months.
So I left.
I went to VSCode and Atom, both of which are more active and (total blessing for plugin developers) have source code available for viewing.
I really like Sublime. I think it's a great editor. I don't use it because I have better things to spend my time on than hoping a single dev gets the bandwidth to answer my question, or that I can hunt down some obscure plugin that happens to have the correct 'magic' that's not documented anywhere.
It can't even print. I'm a paying user but that one still blows my mind.
- You can easily stage all files, each file, or just specific hunks of specific files.
- You can stash and pop stashes.
- You can amend a commit.
- You can do all of that from the keyboard, without touching the mouse.
I imagine you can do many of those things with VSCode, but it's so effortless in Sublime. I haven't learned the same workflow in VSC yet, and since I do all of those things frequently, I'm really attached to SublimeGit.
One is C++, the other are hogging memory like crazy with Electron and a whole DOM.
If they're frustrated with Sublime due to not being FOSS, nothing I guess. But again, those people would have largely switched over already.
- sublime allows projects to have multiple different folders of files, vs code forces you to use a single folder
- large file support is unparalleled (excluding less etc)
- reliability, in nearly a decade(?) of using sublime I've never lost edits in a file or corrupted one
- it's general purpose so I can open anything, whereas vs code/atom seem more IDE-like (I know they can open anything, it's just my impression)
#2 was addressed in the latest update, and works well in my experience (open a 130M text file and jump to end in <5s).
#1 is available in the current preview build.
(I agree in general about Sublime performance vs Electron -- Sublime is way more responsive.)
Atom is a slow, hog, non-starter.
VS Code is almost comfortable to work with, and has more plugin polish, but it's in this "slow enough to be annoying and will never be fixed as long as its based on Electron" plateau for me too.
One huge irk I have with Electron is the amount of bloat it gives to even the most well written programs. With the VS Code example from before, no matter how well it performs, I always feel like I'm eating a stuffed crust pizza when I use it. Electron gives it much more cruft than needed.
I am currently debating on whether or not to switch back to Sublime since I'm getting sick of people using Electron as an easy way of building "quality" software.
But in fact, I use both. I always use 2-3 different editors. Mainly because using 2 monitors is easier to switch between apps than between tabs/windows of a app! So I use sublime to code and VS Code to visually something else. Or to write random stuff.
I have the same setup before with TextMate + Sublime.
And last time I tried, working with large files was a pita on vscode.
For a professional programmer it should be less money that they make in a day for a tool they use 365 days every year.
And whether there are free editors out there doesn't mean anything as to whether it's cheap or not. Vim and Emacs and 20 other free editors already existed when ST3 (or SlickEdit, or whatever) came out.
Yes Emacs, Vim, Notepad++, etc. have been around for years but they are/were no way near as simple to get to grips with or as smooth out-of-the-box. That is where Sublime Text really nailed it. It was simple and beautiful from the moment you ran it. It didn't need a tutorial to help you figure out how to exit ;)
Now we have Atom and VSCode (to name two) that offer that excellent experience out-of-the-box along with regular updates, built in Git integration, open source, etc.
1) emacs is crazily extensible but hard to use. Uses hacks to get the performance 2) vi(m) is extensible, fast but also hard to use 3) ST is easy to use, fast but not that extensible as emacs/atom 4)atom/vscode is extensible,easy to use but slow
Because the game you'll finish in a few weeks and forget about and the meal you'll shit in the same day, whereas the editor you'll use for years on end daily.
Now, if you find another editor (free or paid) is better and gives you just as good or even a better experience, by no means, use that.
But if one feels ST3 is better, or even just a little better, then complaining about it costing 1/40th or less of a month's salary as if its any large factor doesn't make sense.
I think usually their dev/release cycles work pretty well and, to me at least, ST3 has been very stable for my usecases.
It's actually the piece of software I use for 6-10 hours each day for years that I've had the fewer problems or complaints about. And I'm using the dev 3 versions...
I use Sublime Text for personal projects I make no money from so obviously I don't want to spend out much money when I can get other excellent editors for free.
Genuine question: does this really make a difference in your day to day usage? I feel like once I've learnt the ~20% of features that are useful to me on a regular basis everything on top is marginal gains. Im really not that bothered by loads of new features.
I really really do not want to spend time to figure out on my own how to integrate this or do that (unless I need to) and the myriad of plugins/packages available to Emacs and Atom is something that is insanely helpful if you need to do something quickly.
I don't really need any updates from sublime. It does everything I need it to, and I've never felt a lack of a feature. I'm looking at the new and highly touted "hot exit" feature, and I'm thinking "but sublime prompts you to save when closing the app, and honestly I haven't lost work due to forgetting to save in several years."
> lots of communication
Again, I'm not sure why I'd want communication from the creators of sublime.
> great plugin ecosystem
Any plugin I've wanted (linters, syntax files, git integration...) has been installable from a dropdown menu in sublime. Maybe if my plugin needs were more esoteric, I'd appreciate vscode more?
> open source
I dig that, philosophically. Although if that was a priority for me, I'd go with Atom, instead of something published by microsoft.
Again, I'm open to the idea that vscode could be better than sublime - but maybe it's only better to people who need more obscure plugins, or who really care about open source?
but even if it didn't do anything more than Sublime, it's free.
But the most important thing is alive ecosystem - a lot of Sublime plugins are either dead or in maintenance mode, developers lost interest and moved to open source alternatives like Atom and VSCode.
P.S. Even though I moved to VSCode, I still love and respect Sublime.
I frequently point to VSCode as an example of a well-run open source project.
$70 dollars or so every 4-5 years?
For farmers yes. Not for developers in those countries -- which can make $30,000 - $50,000 in the international market.
I wonder if they could look at staggered pricing system; where you can get:
N-1 release at £X; N-2 release at £(X-0.1*X) etc.
Where N is devel release channel.
That way people in N-2 will know what is coming and approx when.
People who want 'clarity' for the sake of it can pay less and STFU?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban
Not entirely accurate on HN since, apparently, all banned users can continue to post, but their stuff shows up dead (thus, they are only invisible to people with "show dead" turned off) and most of them seem to be well aware they are banned.
What a terrible thing to say!
Not everything always needs growth.
What else could they really add in besides a version bump?
It could also be that they don't make as much as you think. After all, 70 USD per major release is not really that much. Assuming, a 150k per dev salary (and it appears there are two), means they have to sell 4200 licenses or so. Sublime 2 has been around for 5 years ago? So that means they need 20k licenses. This only takes care of the salary though and not the hosting expenses, office space etc.
I will buy it again for the full price as a "Thank You!" to the developers. I have been using Sublime Text daily since 5-ish years and it has always been amazing. It's easily one of the best 50-60$ I have ever spent.
I am using the dev build for my production work and it runs like a Swiss watch. The title of OP and the forum post is essentially a troll to instigate the developer(s) to come out and give a more definitive answer.
Dev -> Beta
Beta -> Final
Final -> Legacy
The current beta versions are rock solid. If you have been sticking with the previous stable version, you have been missing a lot for no reason.
IMHO this is the same mistake the Gnome team is making recently: Calling the finished version "final" or "stable". "Final" means to me "doesn't crash and has no bugs (as far as possible)". It doesn't mean that it receives no more updates. On the contrary, if it gets no more updates I would call it "legacy" or "abandoned".
We are definitely going to continue development of 3.0, so it won't become legacy any time soon. And yes, we do realize the beta period stretched on a tad too long. ;-)
Yeah, I guess the problem is now that people are not sure which version is supposed to be used for daily work, which version is still under development, etc..
But it is great to hear that development is continuing!