SubEthaEdit 5 is now free and open source | Hacker News Reader

SubEthaEdit 5 is now free and open source

rant.monkeydom.de

367 pointsschwuk29 comments

Oh nice. I forgot SubEthaEdit existed but it was first text editor on macOS before the TextMate hype in the early Rails days :-) While I support the right to release commercial products, I think it's very noble to open source things after a certain time, if only for the purpose of history and preservation.

BBEdit was probably the first editor for Mac OS X, though SubEthaEdit may have been first one native to OS X.

You're right. I went back and it appears I missed out the word "my" in "it was first text editor" without noticing :-D

BBEdit dates back to 1992, and I believe Tex-Edit is even older. CodeWarrior and BBEdit were both Carbonized for OS X very early (because developers needed them for bringing up other apps). I don't remember SubEthaEdit coming out until at least 10.2 (ISTR it had a different name for first release also)

every time i see an old commercial editor get open sourced, i feel a moment of sadness that [aurora](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/aurora.html) never went that route.

I remember being at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in the early 2000s. Lots of UNIX-loving people had just bought their first Mac laptops and basically the whole room was taking notes in a single SubEthaEdit doc via BonJour[1]. Some people were typing verbatim notes from panelists, others were going back and fixing typos and spelling, still others were researching topics that had been mentioned, contextualizing them, and adding links.

In the end we all had a clean, detailed, copyedited document. It was a pretty amazing experience. I was sure I'd just witnessed the future of collaboration for lectures and conferences[2].

[1]At the time, SubEthaEdit was called "Hydra" and BonJour was still "Rendezvous". [2]I guess the actual future turned out to mostly be scrolling though Twitter. c'est la vie.

Danke! -- MIT is a nice licence. Hope it works out well:

>>What are my hopes for the future?

  - Attract contributors to ensure a long term thriving ecosystem

  - The free availability both in and out of the App Store should reduce the barrier to entry to the collaborative use cases in education, pair programming, etc, leading to good bug reports and use cases that are worth investing some future development in

  - Support for more languages, modes and contributions thereof

  - Longevity of SubEthaEdit as a product<< (edited formatting, thanks davemp)

- Attract contributors to ensure a long term thriving ecosystem

- The free availability both in and out of the App Store should reduce the barrier to entry to the collaborative use cases in education, pair programming, etc, leading to good bug reports and use cases that are worth investing some future development in

- Support for more languages, modes and contributions thereof

- Longevity of SubEthaEdit as a product

———

Formatted for mobile users.

I remember using SubEthaEdit at university for collaborative note taking in lectures back in 2003ish and it was like absolute wizardry.

Really excited to see it open sourced. What a fascinating piece of software history.

(Also: Carcassonne for iOS remains the best board game port I've ever played)

yes I felt the exact same way in the same year

I have a bought licence of subethaedit, from years and years ago. I still use it, but I never upgraded since I had to re-buy a licence to do so!

Glad I waited. I still love the coloured changes for modified text in a document (that stay on after saving!), it's really really handy when working on a longish file to have quick visual clues when scrolling back/forth. I wish more editors had that.

yes, VS does this by default too and it's nice.

lots of editors have plugins (like git-gutter for sublime) that do this with VCS integration: highlight lines that were modified since last commit. for me, this is even better because it remains not just after saving the file but even after closing the file/editor and re-opening it.

combined with a minimap like sublime's which also shows the gutter annotations, i can navigate a many-thousand-line file with lightning speed.

I still fondly remember when I first used SubEthaEdit.

Seeing collaborative editing working so seamlessly was just magical.

Language server protocol support would rock.

Oh, wow. Nothing in here that obviously wouldn’t work on iOS.

I'm not meaning to take away anything from this announcement, which I think is great. But what options are there for collaborative coding in Sublime? (I don't use Atom)

Having tried Floobits, the experience was ok. But I do a lot of pairing online with 0 day beginners, and need something as little setup as possible. ie. The students are able to install Sublime and Packages. Having to sign up for Floobits is just another step I'd like to avoid.

I suppose I'm looking for a service (paid or otherwise) that provides urls which would relay the keystrokes between editors facilitated by a Sublime package. Does anything like that exist?

I know that this doesn't make use of Sublime, but you could give Cloud9 a shot. I've used it for pair programming and it's actually pretty nice on that front, especially if you're just helping beginners understand things because you end up sharing the entire environment, not just your IDE.

https://docs.c9.io/docs/share-a-workspace

Sorry I can't help on the Sublime side - I've tried Floobits with moderate success, but understand your need for something that's more "plug and play".

Not the answer you're looking for, but have you tried Visual Studio Code with VS Live Share (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliv...)? It works really well for pair/swarm programming.

And the event-stream implementation will blow your mind.

Are you referring to the backdoor or is it actually a mind-blowing implementation?

Why bring collaboration to Sublime instead of using any of the other editors that already supports it!? Is there for example some things that Sublime does better then the others!?

sublime is still much faster and more stable than anything else... the only time i switch to a jetbrains editor is when i need something heavy like java or android or flutter...

for example: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/63542 just look at the difference between sublime and vs code.

the new ui in vs code also made things slower: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60419

Great story, and happy to see SubEthaEdit live on as open source software. Its main collaboration use case is still relevant and unique today. I'm glad they were at least able to get the technology integrated into Coda, and that they were able to make a modest revenue from that.

Unfortunately, as a primary code editor, it was never for me as an avid user of TextMate (and reluctant of Xcode) in the early days, before I finally learnt vim and never looked back around 8 years ago or so.

This looked quite cool, 15 years ago. But if you never owned a mac.. too bad :P

I mean, I've always been around a high density of Macs and later MBPs (from ~2008 on) but I've also never seen people really use it. I guess it's because most coworkers in the office had the project's/company's standard IDE.

I’ve always loved this product. I rarely used it for the live pairing ability but loved its simplicity, highlighting and overall light feel as an editor. Definitely time to revisit SubEthaEdit.

Sorry folks but Ford Prefect was a couple of decades early on this one.

I'm so glad this editor has lasted this long. I haven't used it in years but now that it's free im gonna replace the default system text editor with it.

SSAAS (SubEthaEdit5 Server As A Service) can now be a thing!

Brushed metal ... brushed metal everywhere.

its got a dark mode, if you have 10.14.+

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