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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

> Those $70 are definitely worth every penny.

Same here, buying an ST license is probably the single best SW-related purchase that I've ever done. ST3 works so flawlessly, it's just ironic that it's still technically a beta version. It is actually much less buggy than many "final version" competitors ;-)

On a side note, it is notable how, despite being a closed-source program, ST was able to generate a large ecosystem of open-source plugins; that is not something that happens every day (Jeskola Buzz comes to mind as a similar case: also closed source and with a large open-source plugins ecosystem, but I'm not sure how many people on HN are familiar with tracker-style music software, LOL).

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ST bootstrapped its ecosystem by directly and shamelessly cloning every one of its original features from the TextMate editor, and just copy/pasting its entire ecosystem, without contributing anything back. For years there was no special support for actually working on custom features from within Sublime Text, so if you wanted to create new language grammars or syntax highlighting modes etc. you needed to do it from within TextMate. Sublime users would come to the TextMate IRC channel to complain about particular language bundle features that were buggy in the not-quite-compatible environment of ST, and ask TM users to fix it for them. Kind of comical really.

Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool. My impression is that the Sublime programmer didn’t really understand the underlying philosophy behind many of the features he cloned, and kind of screwed up a bunch of the subtler details. (This isn’t really surprising; I’d say it pretty much always happens when anyone just copies something that exists; they seldom perfectly understand the context or ideas of the original creator, so the copy is always at least a bit degraded/distorted, with less clarity of vision.)

Sublime does have the advantage of working on more platforms though.

Can you give some examples of what those features are?

I tried both TextMate and Sublime Text and find ST to be much better for what I do (web, Python and text editing).

Copying or not, "badly designed" or not, in the end Sublime Text is blazing fast even on a big files, extensible with the help of Package Control and has some native features (like multiple cursors) that make the difference.

I switched to ST2 after about 20 years of VI(m). I happily paid the money to NOT have to deal with 50 different plugins designed to get VIm to, essentially, work like ST, with the side bar and tabs. I switched to Mac as my primary desktop not long after, and looked at TextMate. I WANT to support the Apple "ecosystem" in ways like using a "Mac" text editor, but I still work on Linux (and Windows). Not having cross-platform capability is a deal breaker for me, and ST is just as good as VIm in this regard.

> Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool.

Do people still actually use TextMate? Judging by their website [1], for example the screenshots taken under an ancient version of OS X, I thought it'd been abandoned years ago. The last post on the blog is in October 2014.

[1]: https://macromates.com

[2]: http://blog.macromates.com

Tons of people still use it and it's being very actively developed. Check out the GitHub: https://github.com/textmate/textmate

It's constantly being updated.

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