I didn't see the original title, but I still thought it might be a parody of TM2.
The TextMate saga is a big part of the reason why I have become reluctant to make any non-OSS tools part of my daily life. (Although I might not say that had I not seen the vim light.)
Hang on, they have a single developer who is also the director? Yet they sell the IDE for a hefty sum with a healthy amount of "known" users https://sublime.wbond.net/stats - if they even have 10% of these are paying customers they should be able to afford more staff.
Sublime must be the most mismanaged profitable company.
They don't enforce paying for the editor. Those users may or may not be actually paying. You're right that it does seem like they could afford more staff. But its also pretty clear the guy who created it wants to write code and not deal with the other parts of being a "company" (see lack of public responses/updates). He created it, so he can market it/develop it as he sees fit.
I admire what he's done, and respect his choice if he's really not expanding because he likes to code and doesn't want to deal with running a business. But I also now use Vim because I didn't trust Sublime's future.
I don't think it's anywhere near 10%. Even of those who pay, those numbers would be inaccurate. I have an ST2 license, but I've used it on many machines without putting in my license, and I've probably reinstalled it a dozen times on my main machine (I've had 3 machines since I've had the license, and each machine has been wiped 2-3 times each). So are they limiting "users" to registered accounts, or some other metric?
I think that the number of paying customers will be in the 2-5% range. Sublime Text is fully featured for "free", it's a trendy editor, and has a large international following.
Plus this is the raw number: I know that I have a license, and I have it installed on a number of computers and VMs. I assume that I'm not alone in taking advantage of this.
So sure, if he has sold 50k licenses then that's $3.5m, and for that sum you expect active development (its like 580k/year), I doubt that he's pulling in millions a year..
The synopsis seems to be that development is continuing, there are long term plans, but that development is slow and will probably continue that way at least until 3 is released (which there is no date given for).
So basically nothing has changed :)
[Edit: Title fixed to be less link-baity. Thanks!]
I think the biggest problem with information from the Sublime office is that it's "just words". My take on this situation is that perceived activity were driven by software updates and presence in the forums. Both stopped a fair while ago (well, one release the last 6 months: http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev).
The forums unfortunately also deteriorated to bickering between the "you're paying for future promises" and "you payed for a working editor up to date". Why people bicker at all is beyond me, but I guess both camps has enough opinion to engage.
All in all, Sublime Text is excellent software – just as
TextMate was (is, if you prefer) – before the business of "one man bands" most likely removed fun from the equation.
I use to mock textmate users over the very same thing. Yet I never felt Sublime is as closed and distant as TM. So I like it and use it, paid for it, totally worth it, however it seems it is going the way of TextMate.
Which makes me worry I will have to continue to use Vim for next decade. Vim is great, but we need to find something better.
I think, if I were author, I would try to find a way to incorporate what makes editors like Vim awesome, what makes Emacs awesome is already implemented several times. This other part is still elusive and could benefit innovation.
The finesse of Sublime Text is admirable (considering it's mostly 1 guy's work). However the ratio of open/closed bugs on Github isn't too comforting. I hope they expand the team soon.
After paying for Sublime Text 2 and saw how it is abandon almost right after the released, I'm not ashamed to say that I'm just going to keep using Sublime Text 3,4,5,...N in trial version mode. I love it, but I'm not going to pay for beta App. And if I paid for promised of released app, you'd better makes me feel like you are abandoning me right away.
I'll gladly pay when I see that they updates some minor version for a while after release.
Honestly, at this point the only things actually keeping me using ST over Atom are (1) the SFTP plugin, (2) per-project settings, and (3) click-and-drag multiple cursors... and Atom plugins have already started making headway on 1 and 2.
I doubt they'll ever get the performance of ST though. I use ST3 daily and have tried Atom a couple times, it's just not fluid enough to feel comfortable with.
Atom is too slow to be useable in real world projects. It's fine for hobby coding a few files. But try opening anything larger: it's painfully horribly slow. This is not something that can be fixed; it's because they are using a browser to render the code. Therefore Atom has no chance of replacing Sublime Text. Sorry.
At least 3) is adressed with Chocolat, an other text editor for Mac OS.
I've came to like it while pondering dropping 70$ on ST when i got Chocolat for free in some kind of software bundle (can't recall which), so there's that..
As a paying customer of ST2, "meh". ST3 was not a compelling upgrade, and, IMHO it's about time Jon open-sources this editor. A significant amount of its value is in the extensibility system and package discovery is basically owned by Package Control.
This is a community project, stop being a bottleneck.
Last I tried Atom it's quite a long way from offering any significant advantage over ST and has it's own risks due to not having a clear revenue model. If the ST devs believe that they can sell 100K licenses over say 5-10 years at $60 each then that sets the kickstarter goal in the region of $6M without offering any rewards for backers which seems like a pretty unrealistic target.
Well, if his customers get frustrated and move to another platform, he may have won the battle but lost the war. This is exactly what happened to TextMate; development was fast, at first, but then it slowed to a crawl and ST took over the market. I love ST{2|3} and am a fully paid member and I don't find it lacking in any respect. However, bit rot is a very real phenomenon and projects that can't keep up with the times are doomed.
Besides, going open source doesn't mean that you lose the keys to the kingdom. There are plenty of open source projects that make money; Linus is gainfully employed and he gives everything away. I'm sure there are ways to monetize ST beyond charging for binaries.
It baffles me why the ST company don't communicate better. I'm a huge supporter of Sublime Text because it enables me to be hugely more productive. Everyone I know who uses it can never go back.
BUT! It's run as if it was a hobby project coded in mom's basement. He surely must be earning enough money to get more people on board.
They haven't responded to emails sent more than one year ago.
I don't think it will survive after Atom becomes popular and stable.
He had a lot of customers at some point. That's when he should have brought in more people to do things right. He chose to do it all on his own, get himself burnt out and completely stop communicating.
I don't see a future for this project if it doesn't get open sourced. The main problem is there's absolutely no support once he releases a stable ST version. You never have anything stable they support.
Already planned for Sublime text 4? Probably another rewrite? I assumed the same faith of Sublime Text 2 is happening with Sublime Text 3 after its release, then. Dead project after people paid to make it released.
Really, how many version does he need to reimplement the same features again and again?
I'm all for him getting my money more than once for Sublime Text. But is it really that hard to at least evolve the Same editor instead of rewriting it over and over just so he can get another round of money?
> Already planned for Sublime text 4? Probably another rewrite? I assumed the same faith of Sublime Text 2 is happening with Sublime Text 3 after its release, then.
Which is exactly why I'm still running the evaluation license of ST 3; I paid for ST 2, but shortly after it got out of beta it was pretty much abandoned in favor of another years-long beta period for ST 3. I'm not falling for that one again.
Likewise I fell into the 'early access' trap for Steam games, where a developer gets rich without any obligation to deliver. It worked (and was successful) for Minecraft, but other games have yet to deliver.
There have always been three text editors: Vim, Emacs, and the closed source Mac editor de jour. I used to think that if only that closed source editor would go open source, it could enter that timeless transcendance of Emacs and Vim.
But now Textmate is open source, and now there is Atom, I am not so sure any more. Neither Textmate nor Sublime Text, nor Atom seem to be able to stand up to the two old ones in term of development community and community involvement.
Maybe it is a question of novelty. Vim still has unmatched key bindings. Emacs atill has unmatched total flexibility. Textmate had snippets (which now everyone has), Sublime Text has multiple cursors (which is maybe not a big enough improvements over macros to matter). Light Table seemed interesting, but probably too narrow in scope. My hope is that Atom's openness will finally allow it to transcend its brethren. But I don't see a compelling reason for that yet.
Also what makes Vim and Emacs timeless is that they run everywhere. Command Line and Windowed, over SSH or on your machine. This is something no other 'modern' text editor even tries to match.
Do you edit very large files? The regex engine and UI update speed feels incredibly slow to me when making complex changes across thousands of lines in a 200MB file, while vim or grep/awk/etc have no such problem.
What else does Sublime Text do that is new? I guess you could count the minimap. The command palette, code navigation, configuration files, package management, speed, plugins, snippets, all have been implemented and widely used in both Emacs and Vim for years.
I would be pleased to be proven wrong here, but how exactly did it "change the game entirely", and how exactly is it a "next-generation editor"?
The true killer feature of Sublime Text is the fact that it runs flawlessly on the 3 major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux).
I know people will scream that Emacs (and vim) have windows ports, but they are utter crap compared to running them under a Unix. I can tell that from experience. Emacs on Windows is unbearably slow: it took 10 times as much to start as on the same host, same SSD, when it is run under a Linux VM! It also relies heavily on standard Unix tools (wget, grep, ...), whose ports for Windows are extremely outdated to the point that they are unusable (Emacs 24's find in file relies on features not provided by the standard non-CYGWIN grep). There only solution is to use CYGWIN, which is a mess: it's extremely slow, behaves weirdly (wrt path names, notably), and it doesn't play well if you already have a standard MSYSGit installation for your git needs. (I have tried using Emacs at least 4 times already, and I have never managed to stick to it, for these kind of reasons.)
I love ST. It boots fast, is gorgeous, modern (unlike Emacs, you can have your cursor outside the region you are viewing!), trivial to configure (with auto-reload of config files), has sane defaults and great support for most languages out of the box, it has a great community, and a nice language choice for moddability. It might have been born has an OS X éditeur du jour, but I'd say it's more of a blessing for Windows developers where good, modern editors are rare.
This is one of the many things I love about ST. I create in both Linux & OS X and ST just works wonderfully. I've never worked with a cross platform program that works as well as ST; everything from the keyboard shortcuts, to the look and feel of the GUI is a thing of beauty.
> Emacs (and vim) have windows ports, but they are utter crap compared to running them under a Unix. I can tell that from experience.
I don't think you have much experience with Vim on Windows. I use Vim on Windows every day for years (terminal and gVim) and the experience is the same or better than mac/unix, except for the lack of a good POSIX shell (which is a problem for every Windows text editor).
> you can have your cursor outside the region you are viewing!
That means you're using the scrollbar. It would be nice if Vim added a jumplist entry when the scrollbar was used though...
73 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadThe TextMate saga is a big part of the reason why I have become reluctant to make any non-OSS tools part of my daily life. (Although I might not say that had I not seen the vim light.)
The race for 2020 President of the US is in the works too, if your bar is "someone is thinking about it what it might be like."
[original title was "Sublime Text 4 In The Works"]
> Sublime Text 3 is currently in beta. The latest build is 3059.
Yep. Which makes this announcement extremely odd.
http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev
Sublime must be the most mismanaged profitable company.
I admire what he's done, and respect his choice if he's really not expanding because he likes to code and doesn't want to deal with running a business. But I also now use Vim because I didn't trust Sublime's future.
It is unusable without a license.
Popups cause a huge break in my concentration especially when I am coding so it is unusable to me.
But I still find it usable since it's not arbitrary pop up during typing or navigating.
Plus this is the raw number: I know that I have a license, and I have it installed on a number of computers and VMs. I assume that I'm not alone in taking advantage of this.
So sure, if he has sold 50k licenses then that's $3.5m, and for that sum you expect active development (its like 580k/year), I doubt that he's pulling in millions a year..
The synopsis seems to be that development is continuing, there are long term plans, but that development is slow and will probably continue that way at least until 3 is released (which there is no date given for).
So basically nothing has changed :)
[Edit: Title fixed to be less link-baity. Thanks!]
The forums unfortunately also deteriorated to bickering between the "you're paying for future promises" and "you payed for a working editor up to date". Why people bicker at all is beyond me, but I guess both camps has enough opinion to engage.
All in all, Sublime Text is excellent software – just as TextMate was (is, if you prefer) – before the business of "one man bands" most likely removed fun from the equation.
Which makes me worry I will have to continue to use Vim for next decade. Vim is great, but we need to find something better.
I think, if I were author, I would try to find a way to incorporate what makes editors like Vim awesome, what makes Emacs awesome is already implemented several times. This other part is still elusive and could benefit innovation.
Don't see much of a reason to buy 4 either - 6-8 seems like the sweet spot. /s
I'll gladly pay when I see that they updates some minor version for a while after release.
I believe Atom will run laps around ST before 4 development is even started.
I've came to like it while pondering dropping 70$ on ST when i got Chocolat for free in some kind of software bundle (can't recall which), so there's that..
This is a community project, stop being a bottleneck.
Use Kickstarter to open source it and you both cash in and do the community a favour.
Besides, going open source doesn't mean that you lose the keys to the kingdom. There are plenty of open source projects that make money; Linus is gainfully employed and he gives everything away. I'm sure there are ways to monetize ST beyond charging for binaries.
They're not going to get any more money from me.
BUT! It's run as if it was a hobby project coded in mom's basement. He surely must be earning enough money to get more people on board.
I don't think it will survive after Atom becomes popular and stable.
He had a lot of customers at some point. That's when he should have brought in more people to do things right. He chose to do it all on his own, get himself burnt out and completely stop communicating.
I don't see a future for this project if it doesn't get open sourced. The main problem is there's absolutely no support once he releases a stable ST version. You never have anything stable they support.
Really, how many version does he need to reimplement the same features again and again?
I'm all for him getting my money more than once for Sublime Text. But is it really that hard to at least evolve the Same editor instead of rewriting it over and over just so he can get another round of money?
Which is exactly why I'm still running the evaluation license of ST 3; I paid for ST 2, but shortly after it got out of beta it was pretty much abandoned in favor of another years-long beta period for ST 3. I'm not falling for that one again.
Likewise I fell into the 'early access' trap for Steam games, where a developer gets rich without any obligation to deliver. It worked (and was successful) for Minecraft, but other games have yet to deliver.
I do the exact same thing. I might pay for ST3 if the developer can convince me that he is going to put some update in ST3 after it is released.
But now Textmate is open source, and now there is Atom, I am not so sure any more. Neither Textmate nor Sublime Text, nor Atom seem to be able to stand up to the two old ones in term of development community and community involvement.
Maybe it is a question of novelty. Vim still has unmatched key bindings. Emacs atill has unmatched total flexibility. Textmate had snippets (which now everyone has), Sublime Text has multiple cursors (which is maybe not a big enough improvements over macros to matter). Light Table seemed interesting, but probably too narrow in scope. My hope is that Atom's openness will finally allow it to transcend its brethren. But I don't see a compelling reason for that yet.
It is a lightning fast next-generation editor. It changed the game entirely when released, and still nothing comes close.
I would be pleased to be proven wrong here, but how exactly did it "change the game entirely", and how exactly is it a "next-generation editor"?
I know people will scream that Emacs (and vim) have windows ports, but they are utter crap compared to running them under a Unix. I can tell that from experience. Emacs on Windows is unbearably slow: it took 10 times as much to start as on the same host, same SSD, when it is run under a Linux VM! It also relies heavily on standard Unix tools (wget, grep, ...), whose ports for Windows are extremely outdated to the point that they are unusable (Emacs 24's find in file relies on features not provided by the standard non-CYGWIN grep). There only solution is to use CYGWIN, which is a mess: it's extremely slow, behaves weirdly (wrt path names, notably), and it doesn't play well if you already have a standard MSYSGit installation for your git needs. (I have tried using Emacs at least 4 times already, and I have never managed to stick to it, for these kind of reasons.)
I love ST. It boots fast, is gorgeous, modern (unlike Emacs, you can have your cursor outside the region you are viewing!), trivial to configure (with auto-reload of config files), has sane defaults and great support for most languages out of the box, it has a great community, and a nice language choice for moddability. It might have been born has an OS X éditeur du jour, but I'd say it's more of a blessing for Windows developers where good, modern editors are rare.
I don't think you have much experience with Vim on Windows. I use Vim on Windows every day for years (terminal and gVim) and the experience is the same or better than mac/unix, except for the lack of a good POSIX shell (which is a problem for every Windows text editor).
> you can have your cursor outside the region you are viewing!
That means you're using the scrollbar. It would be nice if Vim added a jumplist entry when the scrollbar was used though...
ST4 hasn't been announced yet, just that it's something they want to do - which is great! I look forward to the August releases.