Hacker News Reader

Comment by Philipp__ | Hacker News Reader

If Sublime only had definite release! It's wonderful GUI editor! I stopped using it years ago when I switched to Vim and Emacs, but if it gets released I will buy it for sure, at least to have it on my work machine.

I like editing text in it, everything is so smooth and well looking, and it doesn't feel bloated. And I just hate all those Electron based editors, no matter how much incrementally they get better from month to month, they never even came close to Sublime's swiftness and polish. I tried VSCode last month, for few hours and uninstalled.

And people are often relaying on metrics and public opinion of usage of certain tool. Look, on latest StackOverflow Dev Survey Notepad++ was way ahead of everyone, it tells you something.

View on HN

Release or not release is just a name. You shouldn't let that be a factor. In my experience it is absolutely stable and as bug free as software can be.

However, I'm not sure how well maintained it is. I fear all the time that the author, jps, has quit, but then every few months he has a development sprint and releases a new version.

I'd rather have it permanently called "beta" but a minor update every month, than one version declared finished, with rare or no updates afterwards.

Didn't they hire wbond "recently" (like a year ago) ?

wbond is the author of Package Control for ST and I think he lurks here sometime.

That's true. Sublime 3 never felt like "beta" software. But as somebody said below, I am afraid of people quitting and leaving it to die slowly (like TextMate died) and that's the reason why I was hesitate to buy it for so long. Nobody guarantees if the developers drop the ball for some hypothetic reason thing will go open source, even that is not guaranteeing anything (again TextMate's case).

> like TextMate died

Textmate is still in development and has a good few releases a year. Last commit was a month ago but I think Allan likes to work a few months then have a few off.

It's still in my dock. It feels great on macOS and it is lightweight.

If you like it, and you're afraid that it will be abandoned then don't hesitate to pay. I'm sure money is an incentive to keep working on it. I paid for S2 and S3 and I'm happy to have done so.

You can see my response comment below. But what has been holding me the most are Vim and Emacs, since I've used them exclusively for last 4 years.

A week's worth of Starbucks. For software you have probably used a lot already.

I am student, and not from rich enough country. We don't even have Starbucks. But I don't want it to be excuse. With this new update, Sublime feels fresh again, and I think it will be worth investing into.

That's true. I've been using Sublime for years and I've never had a bug or a crash. It pretty much perfect. And it's blazing fast.

I actually even use its fuzzy search to search my harddrive sometimes. Because I haven't found an easy app for Linux that works like Search Everything on Windows.

> I haven't found an easy app for Linux that works like Search Everything on Windows.

https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert

Wow this looks really cool! I didn't know it before... There is another one that i'm using: tracker, but it's less cool.

That's not quite like Search Everything, which is just a tool for searching files by name.

In that vein though, see also Synapse: https://launchpad.net/synapse-project

True, but searching by name it's one of the main features of Albert and it's certainly more convenient than using ST to search your computer.

s/Albert/Alfred

Have you tried 'locate' ?

how about the command line tool 'locate'?

I use Synapse on Linux, it does the job. No fuzzy matching, though.

> Release or not release is just a name. You shouldn't let that be a factor.

I disagree. The name is the developer's way of telling you whether the software should be considered ready for general use. As long as it's called "beta", I'm not going to second guess the developer's judgement; I'll wait until the release version of ST3 before upgrading from ST2.

Yup, remember Gmail ? It took years to go out of beta, didn't see anyone complain or worried.

On the contrary, I still miss the speed of ST but the price-vs-feature ratio on VSC is too high for me to ignore anymore. No way the boss will shell out $70 per license if/when ST3 is ever released (now that half our team has dropped it anyway). Guess what you said about not relying on "public opinion" includes your own.

Well price-vs-feature ratio is debatable. The thing is that VSC has many IDE-like features, that I don't want in text editor. So everything comes down to a personal preference. And I don't know if somebody will finance piece of software for you, I mean they can, again depending on situation, but I don't turn off the possibility of me personally paying for piece of software that I like.

How so? VSC is approaching 1:1 feature parity with ST at a $70 price reduction. Some features you need extensions for in ST are included with VSC OOTB.

I am a big vscode user, have a couple of contributions too. But because of perf, sublime feels light weight. Opening up minified and large packaged js files larger than 100 MB, sublime shines.

I still have a licence and want to support the excellent work. There's a ton of features in VSC that were inspired from sublime. Minimap being one.

>VSC is approaching 1:1 feature parity with ST at a $70 price reduction.

Speed is a major feature.

And battery/memory efficiency is too.

And, on principle, I'd pay to NOT have to use an Electron app.

That said, I've used VSCode from time to time.

Well it depends what you define as editor features. Debugger isn't part of editor, at least for me, nor is git integration like VSC has. But speed of opening and editing big files, swiftness in searching and replacing even chars in source code and so satisfying scrolling and good minimap for code navigation are defining factors of text editor.

I don't want Sublime to be IDE, I have programable environment called Emacs for that. Integrating everything into editor is cool, to the point where you ask yourself "why am I doing all this?" and erase everything and just start writing code, not code for the editor. Again, this is my _personal_ experience, so take everything with grain of salt. I know your case is different, but I think you can see the reasoning behind my words.

Yikes, if $70 too high for developer productivity it seems someone isn't doing the right equation when you consider developer salaries cost in lost hours.

I feel the issue isn't the $70 which isn't a big deal (or shouldn't be) but more the point that other editors like VSCode are available now and have the backing of a big company like Microsoft. The biggest criticism of Sublime is that it often feels like it has been abandoned. It goes 6+ months without a peep from the developer. This can make people uneasy.

I prefer Sublime over VSCode, Atom, etc. but at the end of the day VSCode is free and still very good. Perhaps not quite as fast as Sublime but it also offers other features out of the box which Sublime doesn't so there is a trade off. Is Sublime "better" than VSCode to justify $70? That is something that can only be answered on a case by case basis I think.

I find this weird. I've been using sublime text for maybe 5 years and it has only crashed once. And it was fault of a plugin, not the editor itself.

Sublime Text has been feature complete (for my liking) for a lot of years now. The only thing I wish it had is an integrated debugger but it's not a deal breaker for me.

I've tried to jump ship to open source alternatives (atom and vscode) but they feel sluggish to me. Most people will be happy with their performance but I've been spoiled by Sublime Text and the slightest delay feels sluggish to me.

It goes 6+ months without a peep from the developer.

There was a time when that was the case, but for quite a while now we've been seeing frequent releases.

The last update before the one today was in September 2016.

Not sure I understand this method of comparing value.

The way I think about it is: How many hours of time does Sublime save me per year relative to another editor. Even just 1 hour makes it worth it.

> No way the boss will shell out $70 per license if/when ST3 is ever released

That's crazy. My computer was waiting with a license for ST3 when I arrived at my first day of work at my job. Everyone's is, and if you prefer Atom or VSCode, they don't care if you switch.

> No way the boss will shell out $70 per license if/when ST3 is ever released

Yeah this is how it always goes. The 'almost as good but totally free' alternative almost always wins in the long run. Even when the cost isn't an issue it's just inconvenient to buy anything in most companies. Most people don't have expense accounts, company credit cards or simply don't want to deal with the hassle of paying out of pocket and getting reimbursed.

Well, it still has some annoying issues: https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/392

So I have to use Kate for non-Latin text. But it still miles better than VSCode/Atom.

Haha true, try to open the console with a non-US keyboard, good luck.

I use a US keyboard now so I had forgotten :)

If you're using Vim / Emacs, people should consider giving an equal amount that you'd pay for a ST licence to Vim / Emacs instead. Even better, if you're a company then pay the equivalent of what Visual Studio costs.

Notepad++ just works and is great. It's lean and has a common UI, has syntax highlighting and auto-complition. The Texteditor that comes with Gnome is similar. Same with Nano, it just works and has a good enough UI.

My biggest problem with Notepad is performance. It absolutely chokes on large files.

Gedit doesn't perform as good on large files as Sublime. And nano is missing syntax highlighting for a lot of languages out of the box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com