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Comment by klum | Hacker News Reader

The creator of Sublime Text tends to go silent for long periods between stretches of activity, which always makes me wonder about the future of the project. It's a shame, since ST is a well-thought-out editor with great attention to detail, and of course the speed argument (compared to Atom and VS Code), while beaten to death, still holds true.

Of course, it's up to the author himself to choose how he communicates, most likely the current method is working out just fine for him :). And the editor works very well, and the updates eventually return. Just saying that some occasional communication regarding the future of the project, or the current development model ("I spend half the year perpetually wasted in Ibiza, radio silence expected"), would be nice!

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I've been very active on the forum, Discord, IRC and the Packages repo on GitHub. I don't think the stereotype of Sublime HQ being radio silent holds true any longer.

We don't, however, make blog posts or tweets saying "we're still working on the next build." However, whenever anyone asks on the forum (twitter, etc) I'll be happy to tell you we are still working on the next build! :-)

>I've been very active on the forum, Discord, IRC and the Packages repo on GitHub. I don't think the stereotype of Sublime HQ being radio silent holds true any longer.

Yeah, it's the blog posts/tweets stuff that might be needed.

Because most devs don't bother checking the forums (much less irc).

In fact, and this is 100% true, I just spoke to a guy in the next office asked him enthusiastically "did you get the new ST update?", and he looked at me quizzically: apparently he still uses ST2 (which has bought 2 years ago or so) and didn't even know there was a ST3 out at all.

(which motivated me to post this thread on HN)

What this is already the release build?

Not sure what you're asking. If you mean if this is a major release, then no. It's a new dev build for the ST 3 series.

It is however "major" in features.

Your co-worker is technically correct, the last release of ST was version 2 in Sept 2016.

That's the worse kind of correct. Have been using ST3 trouble-free for 2+ years, and all new development happens there anyway.

The ST page _still_ says "Sublime Text 3 is currently in beta. ". This leads the cautious and uninitiated user to install ST2 instead.

I used ST2 for years after everyone else was using ST3, before I realized that ST3 was basically what everyone else is using -- which I mostly only realized as more and more packages were available only for ST3 and not ST2.

I have no idea why the author still calls ST3 beta, but I am curious.

Thanks for the reply! I'm sure you're right about the stereotype not holding true, I haven't really been following things closely.

I also understand that time spent convincing people all over the internet that you're still working on the next build may be better spent... well, working on the next build :)! What I had in mind was more along the lines of "what's happening to Sublime Text in the long term", though that may not even be relevant.

If there is a public roadmap, that would be nice to see.

> We don't, however, make blog posts or tweets saying "we're still working on the next build."

Why not? I think it would definitely be in ST's best interest to be more engaged with the community. It's only natural for users to worry that ST will go the way of TM, and nipping those concerns in the bud seems to make eminent business sense.

Ignoring all the other rather skeptical replies, thanks for all the work you're doing! It's the most beautiful of all the editors I've used and works perfectly across all platforms.

I don't even really see the problem with the demand for new updates. If ST3 stopped now, it's still got an awesome set of plugins and it will remain an awesome editor.

I had one issue with a recent release, that was answered quickly via the Github and dealt with in a day or so. So I can verify that @wbond is true with what he says.

That is exactly the reason why I haven't bought a license yet. I consider the license an investment in Sublime's future. Since I don't have to pay, buying a license is more of a donation in order to show support. But the communication seems a bit too sparse/erratic for me to have much trust in this project. The time spans between updates, blog posts, or even tweets are simply way too long.

I also consider the existence of http://docs.sublimetext.info a bad sign. The way I perceive this: At some point, an enthusiastic user was so fed up with the sub-par documentation that they decided to take matters into their own hands, and create a better documentation. But instead of working with the community, the Sublime project people/person just... did nothing? Was there any communication? I don't know. Why not provide the documentation on github and accept PRs? The Sublime project should push for docs.sublimetext.info to be merged into the official documentation.

Same with https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues. Why is the bug tracker "community run"? What does that even mean, considering the "community" can't fix any bugs? I absolutely cannot understand why the author of the software doesn't seem to participate at all in the bug tracker. Here's a quote from https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/594 (from 2014, so I don't know whether it is still true) > Unfortunately, the only thing I can say is it'll get fixed if Jon Skinner sees it as a big enough priority. Our intent in creating this unofficial Issues page was to have a curated place where known issues can be collected together and triaged, and he can use it as he sees fit to fix bugs in upcoming releases. Without a more direct feedback mechanism, this is the best we can do, at the moment.

What I'd also like to see is a road map for the future with regular (2-4 weeks) status updates.

> The time spans between updates, blog posts, or even tweets are simply way too long.

Is there a lot that you think ST still needs? As long as bugs are fixed, I'm happy with the functionality of the software today. The software feels done to me.

Integrated debugger similar to VSCode.

Sublime Text is just my text editor. If I want an IDE, I use an IDE (Visual Studio and PyCharm).

IMHO, Sublime Text should fight feature creep.

The community aspect of ST is a result of the product being somewhat unique in its positioning as commercial product, but also one that is 'free' for use as long as you can put up with the random nag window. The community aspect represents all the people who have never paid a cent for the product finding a different way to give back. Even paying for it costs a fraction of similar commercial software (although this is admittedly a harder argument to make).

Sounds like you want to reward PR over progress and development work. Writing PR and responding to the same questions over and over sucks time away from actual work.

If your point was that they don't respond to questions or are hard to reach, it would make more sense to me, but they seem very responsive.

The trend in software is definitely towards a lot of tooting one's own horn over substance. I don't think that's a good thing that we should be rewarding.

> I consider the license an investment in Sublime's future.

I'm exactly the opposite. I consider the license as compensation for work already done, I operate under the assumption that the vendor will have made enough to not care to work on it further.

Completely agree. What is there today is well worth the license fee even if there's never another update -- though this isn't one of my concerns as Sublime is so much more usable / lightweight / snappy vs Atom. [For it to be sunset, there would have to be a better alternative out there, and for the general case of multiple languages, I don't believe there is.]

Also packages are well separated from the Sublime releases so even in the case that there isn't another update, the ecosystem is still active. That said, I do wish the internal Python for plugins would receive a version bump though.

To take the opposite position: I'd _happily_ pay $100/year to ensure Sublime continues as an ongoing business.

I've already bought my ST2 and ST3 licences and honestly just looking for a way to pay more if it would ensure continuity.

Are you aware that the unofficial docs site was created in 2014?

There's an official docs site as well now that's actually pretty good. I haven't referenced the unofficial docs in some time.

https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/

The official site says at the top

> The following pages contain the official documentation for Sublime Text 3. The Sublime Text Unofficial Documentation is an excellent supplementary resource, with a huge amount of information not covered in the official documentation.

Certainly true. My intent was to say that after a year or so of using Sublime the need to consult the unofficial docs was minimal. The unofficial docs are more like training wheels than a necessary reference in my experience.

I changed my mind and just bought a license. Bringing multi-cursor editing into the world is easily worth $70 (I think Sublime was the first?). And it's not just Sublime Users that benefited from this.

I just exported a text file that looked like this:

  Col1 title|Col2 title|Col3 title|...
  1||asdf|...

With multi-cursor editing it almost trivial to transform it into this:

  Col1 title: 1
  Col2 title: 
  Col3 title: asdf
  ...

That may be possible in VIM using macros, but would require way more fiddling.

Total Commander isn't updated for a long time now and still one of the most useful windows file manager out there.

With ST we see slow but constant development, personally I don't care if the author is not a Twitter addict.

Total Commander released version 9 last dec, the first beta for version 9 was available a few months before in june. The previous version before that was 8.52 that was released in Sep 2015, so less them a year between the last two released. This hardly count as not updated for a long time.

Oh, my bad. I never noticed it was updated for a long time. Probably the lack of online checks.

Just saw that version 9 have automatic online check, its default is disabled, but when you check for updates the first time (in the help menu) it will offer to do it automatically.

4 months is a "long time" nowadays?

In this day and age, I think 4 months is pretty long, yeah. But that's just my personal opinion.

I think Chrome and Firefox has the right idea, with updates every 6 weeks.

>In this day and age, I think 4 months is pretty long, yeah.

Most commercial desktop software, and even web services like Gmail, go on for years on end without an update.

Browsers are always adding crap (like Firefox's nth cosmetic update), they should be stabler too. Once every 6 months or so at worst.

Are you sure Gmail isn't updated often? I feel that they do update it regularly but they don't feel the need to advertise anymore.

>>Most commercial desktop software, and even web services like Gmail, go on for years on end without an update.

Yes, and I'm saying that's too long. I don't like waiting months or years for fixes or new features.

I also stated that this is my personal opinion. Not sure why people are downvoting.

I'm finding it hard to see where people are coming from with this complaint, though you're in good company so I assume there's something to it. But what features? What bugs?

Sublime seems to have a well-defined aim and to be resistant to feature creep. It's doing a good job of meeting that aim, so I'm happy with it only changing as needed to keep up with like, high DPI monitor support or other things that would actually make it unusable.

One reason for the 6 week update cadence that Firefox uses was to increase stability by reducing the pressure to include a feature in a release even if it's half baked. If not shipping at release time meant that the feature would be delayed for six months or a year while competing browsers pull ahead, there's a lot of pressure to just go ahead and release, even with known issues.

The approach, in my mind, has had mixed success, but has been a net positive overall. The biggest weakness is that it can be hard to maintain large architectural changes on a branch, which means there's still pressure to ship them in some form. (Though ideally with a configuration option to disable them by default.) Most things aren't like that, though, and for changes with a more controlled scope the six week cadence works very well.

Instead of writing blog posts as a vital sign, maybe it would help to offer some regularly updated pre-defined "bundles" of ST together with package sets for a certain audience (JS/TS/Python developer, etc.). Many packages have a higher update frequency, so even when there is no new ST build it would make sense to also update such bundles on a more regular basis (I know packages are updated automatically -- but this would give a better impression regarding the activity and the size of the ST community for new users).

I imagine the introduction of something like "Sublime Text distros" in package control, which would provide ST users something akin to the different Eclipse flavors (or the various .vimrc settings available online) could be quite useful. While the package control setup is already pretty straightforward, it is still rather confusing for new users that they have to manually install such a 'basic' feature (and Atom, for example, is much more polished in that regard).

> While the package control setup is already pretty straightforward, it is still rather confusing for new users that they have to manually install such a 'basic' feature

If that confuses you, why bother trying to code at all?

By that logic, it's not worth bothering to improve the usability of any dev tools.

Yes, it's simple, but it's on almost every installation of Sublime Text, and moreover, package management is a baseline expectation in modern editors, so having it built-in makes a lot of sense.

There's a command to "install package control" with the newer versions of ST3 that doesn't require manually copying and pasting a script into the console. It's a big improvement and still allows users who don't want package control to not have it.

Why wouldn't they ? I think package control should be built in.

Some people just don't want to install packages and prefer to keep the editor as is. And i can't blame them, the only packages I install are my usual theme and Emmet.

Ah cool, I didn't know about that. Thanks!

What speed differences are there in ST compared to VScode? I only open small projects in them, but I don't notice any difference between them.

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