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Comment by tuananh | Hacker News Reader

$80 for something we make a living on is very reasonable.

There's a real danger I think in relying on a proprietary software program for something so key as text editing. For many developers, their editor will be with them for their whole career. Proprietary software has a tendency to not stick around.

I hope to see Sublime eventually released under a free software license. I'd donate to that project.

I'm not sure I've seen a text editor that was revolutionary enough that I would consider myself crippled if it didn't stick around.

Editor no, IDE yes.

I'd be able to function without intellij ultimate but it would be incredibly painful and I'd permanently be slower.

Emacs? I'd either implement my own version / maintain my own fork or stop using computers.

I have a feeling that emacs/vim in some form are going to stick around longer than I'll care about using computers to edit text, so it wasn't even on my radar :)

Oh if I didn't know that I wouldn't be able to sleep :)

Me too. I wouldn't be able to do a lot of things quickly or well without Emacs.

I used to think that, until I discovered the IDEA suite (PyCharm, PHPStorm, etc). And many devs use Windows as well. The OS is no less important than the text editor.

I still use VIM often enough to stay proficient with it, mostly via SSH, but I'll happily use the closed source IDEA editors when they are available.

> The OS is no less important than the text editor.

Depends what you're doing, I suppose. If you're doing web development, Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, etc... I don't think being on any particular OS is more important than your tools.

Assuming that the tools run on any OS. Mac users especially seem to rely on tools available only on that platform.

It's not that hard to switch, especially for a developer that lives in the software. It might take a few days, but if your brain is still fairly plastic, you will adapt.

If you are like my parents that can't get on the internet if the browser icon disappears from their desktop, then there might be a problem.

Something I've realized is a lot of our habits transfer over from app to app. Most authors of new software make sure to follow the standard OS text editing conventions, and windows, linux & macos are all fairly similar.

When you use emacs or vim, which import their 1970s / early 1980s OS conventions with their keyboard shortcuts, you realize you can be dropped into a very foreign 'defaults' context, and they can conflict.

I must be like your parents. My brain feels hard wired to Emacs.

Just out of curiosity, are you okay with that?

It's not like Sublime Text will suddenly stop working when the developers no longer release any updates.

Probably not suddenly (unless there's DRM) but over time as other things change, sure. For instance there are plenty of Windows programs from the past, shareware or paid, that simply do not work on Windows 7 (let alone 10). Since they're proprietary nothing can be done. You might be able to emulate or use a VM and get it to run but not as a first class citizen.

I suspect you're correct for Windows. For GNU/Linux and for Mac OS X, I wouldn't expect them to work after 2-3 years.

It's easier to switch to another text editor than it is a search engine.

Given the plethora of alternatives, I feel that danger is largely overblown.

Not when Atom is pretty much the exact same thing but open-source and free.

the exact same thing, slowed down to a crawl.

I use Atom, and it is not "pretty much the exact same thing".

Then use Atom and don't comment The parent comment is valid for every software in the world, if you make your living with a 80$ software and you don't want to pay for it, you have big issues

Parent has a point. (Legitimately not paying is a reasonable choice.)

It's not "pretty much the exact same thing". ST is much faster and can handle very large files (say, CSVs in the hundreds of MBs) (as an aside, VS Code is much more performant than Atom)

Editing large CSV files is something I do infrequently enough that I'll just use vim or whatever when that need arises. No need to choose my code editor based on that niche use-case.

Open source, free and awful.

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