Comment by dsacco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsacco | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a (more or less daily) Sublime Text user, in addition to a few other editors.

After reading through the thread, the developer's points seem to be rational, coherent and well-delivered. I can understand some of the frustration from users, but not the outright hostility towards the end of the thread. They only have so much bandwidth, and the responses feel very "patient" to me.

To be honest, I've been using Sublime Text since before work started on version 3 and I don't really understand why there is such a fixation on the update cycle. Unless I'm mistaken it's only two full time developers, and historically it's been only one. The dev releases feel very stable to me, though of course I can't claim my workflow is the same as everyone else's.

I can't think of any particular features the text editor feels like it's missing. They seem to be nailing it, in my opinion. I ascribe to the philosophy that perfection occurs when there is nothing left to remove, not nothing left to add - they are relatively slow with adding new features, but the editor is blazingly fast and consistently delivers the experience I want in an editor.

For what it's worth, my opinion here is colored by the fact that I don't really think about the development cycle of most of the software I use. I couldn't tell you what major point release I'm on for 1Password. I think it's 6 on macOS, but I'm not confident. I just update it when it gives me an alert. Similarly, I don't really know what version I'm using for JetBrains PyCharm or CLion, and I've never followed the development roadmap. All I typically know is that I'm on the most recent version for the desktop software I use, and if something seems buggy or odd I check the changelog and then maybe look into it.

I'd be genuinely interested in hearing why people seem to be disappointed with Sublime Text, and what features they wish it supported.

Something that I didn't like about Sublime was the random radio silence.

They'd do a few regular beta releases, then just randomly _complete_ radio silence for months, a year or so - then, bam, another release, some "I'm not dead" activity on the forum from jon, then randomly silent again - maybe for a month, maybe a year - maybe forever.

The editor was good - although not free of bugs - but that complete lack of communication - did I just buy dead software? will there _ever_ be another release?

That makes it hard to have confidence that the software will continue to be supported - and hard to build a community around. The plugin ecosystem has definitely suffered a lot because of this stop-start cycle.

Bear in mind that the bugs that Sublime _does_ have often hit plugin authors hardest and they're the ones that need docs & help from the original developer, who's often been completely AWOL for months or years at a time.

This pretty closely matches my experience. I was trying to develop plugins for ST3 and it was a complete bitch.

Documentation is rare, often wrong, and the best you can do is try to find another plugin and dig through the source for that to determine how to implement something.

Or you can ask a question and... radio silence for months.

So I left.

I went to VSCode and Atom, both of which are more active and (total blessing for plugin developers) have source code available for viewing.

I really like Sublime. I think it's a great editor. I don't use it because I have better things to spend my time on than hoping a single dev gets the bandwidth to answer my question, or that I can hunt down some obscure plugin that happens to have the correct 'magic' that's not documented anywhere.

Same here. Other than games, Sublime was the last proprietary software I purchased, that was 2012. I used it for a few months and I had no issues that I can remember but the radio silence started to get a little worrisome. I started thinking I might be investing too much into the ecosystem and developing muscle memory I will have a hard time breaking. I don't like my primary tools having an uncertain future and a text editor is the primariest tool of all to a developer. I switched to Vim. The experience is what set me on the path to preferring free, open source tools where ever possible, the lesson was well worth $60.

> I can't think of any particular features the text editor feels like it's missing.

Medium-term, I think there's a risk of Sublime falling away if it does not become a good client for the nascent "Language Server" ecosystem.

There are a few attempts at doing a client as a normal 3rd party package, but to be of the slickness that Sublime has established as its differentiator, I suspect it needs to added in-house.

that's very interesting, I was starting to feel bad about "wasting" my time reading a vent but this comment made it worth. Thanks.

From the Readme, here is a blog post[1] explaining what Language Server is.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/06/27/common-langua...

http://langserver.org/

This page says that SL3 already has good support for language server through a plugin.

The package referenced on there is a very new one. It remains to be seen whether it's possible for it to graduate to non-flakiness within the confines of Sublime's plugin API. Remember, a single LS Client needs to work well for ALL languages that have servers. It should be seamless.

Sourcegraph, who operate that site, took a run at doing a LS Client package for Sublime and it's been effectively abandoned for over a year.

> I can't think of any particular features the text editor feels like it's missing.

It can't even print. I'm a paying user but that one still blows my mind.

there is a (very basic) plug-in for that

I wish Sublime has Goto Definition. But other then that, it's my favorite text editor.

I'm hellbanned so you probably won't see this, but it's already there! The default key is F12.

Find it hard to sympathise with complainers as one of the dozen full time Textmate users.

I've never used it but the reasons for me are, open source and price.

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