HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's up with Sublime Text?

3 points by tzaman ↗ HN
Hey, I've been using Github's Atom for about two months now and I really, really tried to like it. I used it pretty much in the same manner as I did Sublime Text prior to testing Atom (Rails + Angular dev), enabled Vim mode, installed similar plugins, etc.

After a month, it pretty much boils down to one difference in my experience: Speed. Atom is significantly slower in everything, opening files, projects, to using plugins.

To get to the point, I've been checking if Sublime was updated recently, and to my amazement, it was! The question is why do you think it gets updates so infrequently (and far apart)? Is it lacking sales? Resources? Motivation?

11 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] thread
farawayea
The thing Atom has going for it is not being developed as someone's hobby project and being an open source project.

Sublime Text is still being developed by one guy. Sublime Text will cease to exist if that dude stops developing it.

tzaman
Yeah, which is quite sad, because it's an awesome editor (and a worthy successor of TextMate). It would be amazing if the dude decided to open source it if he wasn't interested in it's further development.
rexpi0
Well, it's one developer for now, but back in July they mentioned that they would expand the team of developers after 3.0 is released. http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16517
farawayea
It's been one developer for a very long time and the guy has been very unprofessional with the way he was handling support and bug fixes for Sublime Text 2.
yen223
Software doesn't stop working when people stop developing for it. Sublime Text 2 as it currently stands is a decent tool.
farawayea
That's correct, but bugs don't go away either.
swah
But many of them have workarounds :)
jcanyc
HN please buy Sublime Text licenses if you're using the product. No excuses, they are way more than fair about offering out a usable honesty based trial.
s9w
Sublime is more or less in the same state it was for a long time now. Closed source and with a single developer that hardly qualifies as active. Combined with a Forum of intense fanboys and some kind of "salesperson" - both with no connection to reality. There were two (?) recent updates, but not significant and already there were talks about Sublime 4 being a thing. Version 3 was already mainly a number change, as will 4 be with the obvious money grab. So there's just hoping for a wonder to happen.

There's obviously something wrong with the dev, be it loss of motivation or whatever could strike a single human being. That's pretty much expected and the reason this Project needs to be open sourced or stand on more stable foundation (more devs). They need to understand that a closed source editor without active development is a death sentence. People are hesitant to use it because of its unknown future, which hurts the userbase and the ecosystem (packages etc).

Which is a shame, because Sublime could easily be the best editor IMO. Emacs is primitive, as is Vim to a lesser extend. Atom, while interesting and with potential, is unusably slow. Sublime is modern, blazingly fast, is reasonably customizable, has intuitive controls and could be the unchallenged #1 if the dev just got some sense

jere
>After a month, it pretty much boils down to one difference in my experience: Speed. Atom is significantly slower in everything, opening files, projects, to using plugins.

So then my question is why is Atom so much slower?

johncoltrane
nodejs backend, client/server architecture, runs in a webkit instance. Pretty much what you'd expect from web guys writing a desktop application.