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Comment by markcerqueira | Hacker News Reader

> On this day and age many don't want to pay for tools.

Strange logic: if everyone followed that train of thought, we'd all settle for whatever quality tools are available so long as the price is $0. I'd much rather pay for a valuable tool than use a subpar free tool.

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It's a common fallacy to associate quality with price. Generally yes, but not always. Sublime Text certainly isn't 70 dollars better than Atom or VS Code.

It was for many years (because the others didn't exist)

Maybe not $70.. but I always find myself going back to it.

Eh but it existed for long before Atom and VS code. (disclaimer I paid the $70 and felt it was well worth the money at the time, these days yeah maybe I wouldn't but I still do find myself using it a lot)

Edit: To expand, sublime is still by far my favorite TEXT editor. I just don't find doing everyday text editing tasks in VSCode to be pleasant at all, its an amazing IDE though!. Atom is much better for the task but the responsiveness and large file handling capabilities of sublime makes it the clear winner. If you already paid the $70 for a licence back when atom didn't exist anyways...

That depends on how valuable your time is.

Are you working on a project that makes money? Will a productivity tool increase your productivity by half a percent? Then that tool is worth hundreds of dollars. If not thousands.

I see you haven't abused multicursors.

VS Code has support of multiple cursors. See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/editingevolved#_mu...

I remember, it was less powerful when I tested it few month ago. Went back to sublime (even though I use idea at work).

VSCode and Atom both have multicursors.

Much, much less powerful fotms of them.

I think it depends on how much you treasure battery life. Electron based apps suffer from poor battery life due to the Chromium unpinning. JS is resource intensive compared to C++. You can probably get an extra 20-35% battery life out of Sublime vs Atom. If you don't have the ability to plugin while out, it might be worth the piece of mind.

For me, it is. Some of the main points that makes it worth money to me are the plugin ecosystem is huge, the editor is fast, its layout management (panes in columns/rows) is incredible, and it was the first editor I had that gave me multi-cursors. I like where VS Code is going and I try to use it when I can, but most of the keybindings and shortcuts I have memorized are for Sublime and IntelliJ based IDEs.

The only thing you listed that sublime uniquely offers is that it was your first and you prefer their key bindings.

I wasn't only associating quality with price, but also pointing out that many of the 2016's Emacs and vi users would not use them if they were only available as commercial software.

Regardless of their quality, because the actual IT generation wants to earn money with tools they got for free (beer), while other professions people do pay for their tools.

> Regardless of their quality, because the actual IT generation wants to earn money with tools they got for free (beer), while other professions people do pay for their tools.

You seem to feel strongly enough about this to repeat it nearly word-for-word in multiple comments. Trust me, every profession wants to pay less for its tools. And no one, in IT or out, is choosing their tools "regardless of quality".

I feel strongly about it because this mentality reduced the market of selling software tools to a niche, to the point that to earn money selling tools, we have to sell them to enterprise customers, the only ones willing to pay for software.

This is why most companies selling such software tools have switched their basic versions from "trial during X days/trial license" to free (beer), while trying to seduce developers to eventually pay for the full version.

It is not a strange logic and I am not talking only about quality.

I am talking about IT being one of the few professions in 2016, with individuals that expect to earn money while using tools produced with the effort of others for free (beer), while not giving anything back (not even bug reports, unless their own customers press them against the wall).

So the question isn't about the quality, rather how many Emacs and vi users would have actually payed for them, if they were only available as commercial software?

Vim is charity ware actually or at least that's how it was qualified when I started using it. Most of the long time vim users I know have donated several times. Vim and Emacs also have shit loads of plugins, which can make them behave just like Atom or VSCode so as usual I think it's just a matter of preference.

I am yet to know anyone that gave any money to Vim.

Would those shit loads of plugins exist if people had to pay for them?

Thats a nice way to start a flame war: hinting that vi and emacs are subpar tools.

That's you. What about the other 7bn people?

I'm sure if you look, you'll find someone that has a differing opinion. This doesn't make one opinion more valid than the other.

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