Hacker News Reader

Comment by glenneroo | Hacker News Reader

Also maybe worth mentioning that Sublime costs $80 as opposed to VSCode, Emacs and Vim being free... of course any working developer/shop should be able to afford that if the editor experience truly is (forgive the pun) sublime.

I tried Sublime Text a couple years ago.. and gave up with trying to get all the plugins I needed up and running, on the other hand, I really hate using Visual Studio or VSCode, I constantly run into annoying bugs, crashes, and incompatibility issues with plugins. I have to restart Visual Studio 2017 at least thrice daily to get around minor things like "build project" no longer running fully. Perhaps its just Nostalgia speaking, but I almost miss the days of Visual C++ 6 (using Visual Assist)... it may have lacked features, but at least it never crashed.

View on HN

I am a lurker and don't have a account or comment on Hacker News.

Sublime is created by a small software shop and they need money to run the shop while Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company. Microsoft can afford to give away free software for some goodwill from developers.

Its kinda a unfair comparison.

I can appreciate their need to charge but the $80 for personal use is rather prohibitive. It is a bit odd they differentiate a personal and business license yet charge the same for both. I'd buy a copy for personal use if it was more reasonable since I do like how it works but I just stick to xed for simple editing and IDEs like vscode for more in-depth work instead.

$80 is a lot for personal use, but how many personal users actually pay it? It's not difficult to ignore the occasional nag message, so people who can't or don't want to pay aren't forced to.

That just looks a lot for personal use. I know people who click on a message and spend that kind of money each month for coffee during lunch break.

For me personally, that price is nothing. I would pay twice as much and each employer had to buy it if they wanted me happy in text editor regard.

Is $80 that much for something that you use oh so often?

It's roughly one week of food where I live; so not free, but something I would afford if it brought a net improvement to my work.

I think $80 is very reasonable for a great tool like Sublime (for work) if it suits your needs.

To be honest... yes, it is rather much. You are in the price range of full fledged IDEs, whole operating systems, and office suites just for a text editor, even though it is quite a good one. As the sibling comment mentioned, I'm sure many personal users just use the unregistered version to the point that they'd probably make quite a bit of extra revenue if they offered a more attractive price point for those users.

On a separate note, a friend described their backwards approach of validating licenses on every launch of their app, which creates a de facto 'telemetry' system since license hash is submitted to their servers and they obviously have access to other info such as IP.

So even though I quite like the software, I've discontinued use due to the high cost and also due to the inability to opt out of external communications that'd allow them to keep tabs on you and your usage. To be fair, I was not keen on Microsoft's telemetry in vscode but that can be disabled and even better, vscodium removes it completely.

> I've discontinued use due to the high cost […]

I’ve given away 30+ SublimeText licenses in the last 5 years, mostly to students.

If you cannot afford paying $80 for a license, ping me via email and I’ll buy one for you.

My email is 0x636978746f7264732f61742f676d61696c I’m looking forward to talk with you.

Hex encoding your email address is genius. Don't think many spammers will be picking that one up!

That is quite generous but I don't know that it'd sit well having someone else pay for me for what I consider too much to use. I suppose it's all just my principles since I could just use it in an unregistered state as many personal users likely do. I like supporting software like this... I just can't justify the cost, particularly since it's just for my own use.

I've requested a license and received one within minutes. There's nothing more honorable than keeping your word! Awesome and thanks!

I have been wanting to buy a license to get rid of the license nag pop up, but wasn’t sure if development was ongoing since it had been quite a while since the last release. Also, I figured Sublime Text 4 might be coming down the pipeline soon.

If I buy a license, does that cover potentially upgrading to the next major version? If not, is there a roadmap for version 3?

You are a Genius and Honest, Thank you man :)

I didn't believe he was serious, but he is. He actually delivered.

It's more than a monthly salary in many places.

Monthly salary of software developer?

I meant in general. Just to highlight that there are different perspectives of what that amount really means to some people.

A $5 coffee is more than a monthly salary if you pick the right places.

One of my previous employers, millioniar (in euros), was too cheap to buy a license... Myself, 1/10000 of a millionaire bought several licenses, one for myself and a few for internet coding friends

Expensive is very much subjective

It is unfair. However, unless you have a principle of ignoring freely (free as in beer and code in this case) released software from bigger companies it's a comparison that will be made.

PS - I understand what you're saying, but I thought it was funny you claimed you don't have an account on a website that requires registration for commenting. Welcome to HN!

I hope that you are aware that VSCode is not free software.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're confusing the release binaries with the source?

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#why

99% of the end users only care about the product, not how the developers are making ends meet.

If you think $80 dollars is too much for a tool that you can expect to use for 5+ years without issues (I'm at 5 years with Sublime currently), I don't know what to tell you. If you work a trade, you should expect to invest in high quality tools (a laptop, maybe a second monitor, etc.).

Granted, if I knew how to as productive as I am with Sublime Text with Vim or Emacs, I would switch over in a heart beat.

He didn't say it was too much, only that it was more than other comparable editors. If all else is equal, why wouldn't you take the cheaper option?

Vim and Emacs may work for GP's workflow, but I can't say the same for me (at this time). In that context, I would say that cheaper doesn't always mean better (I prefer to be productive than bill for learning new tools unless that is part of the project).

I tried working with Vim exclusively when I started my job ~2 years ago, and my terminal would hang quite often that I had to abandon it (I use ConEmu which is free, but hangs quite often).

I also work on a Windows machine and do not want to use the windows command line, I prefer git-bash/mingw32.

I'm currently using Windows with WSL + wsltty + tmux + terminal vim with no issues.

Things are really fast and stable. I often have 10 Vim instances open across half a dozen tmux sessions. Each one takes up about 8mb of RAM with ~40 plugins doing everything I could ever ask for in a code editor. The only time they get closed is when Windows decides to reboot but then I can automatically restore the tmux sessions with 1 hot key.

I switched to Vim last month after I found VSCode to be unusable for editing a 1mb a markdown file (it used over 50% of my i5 3.2ghz quadcore just idling with the file open). I wrote about the experience at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/vim-is-saving-me-hours-of-wor....

Haven't looked back since.

I have an i3 so I might not have as awesome experience as you may have... had to optimize for longer battery life because I was traveling a fair bit at the time of purchase.

I'm looking to change jobs, so hopefully when I end up somewhere new, I can get a new laptop and try to start with vim. After reading @frosted-flakes comment, I was messing around a bit with vim yesterday, but went back to Sublime because of familiarity with commands for navigating through files.

I'll get to vim one day, just happy with where I am at now.

Was reading through your article and noticed your comment about managing windows in Windows. Did you try using the windows key + left (or any of the other directions)?

Here's a video of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxerpQ8WK8Y

I'm on an i5 3.2ghz from around 5 years ago but most slowdown issues with WSL will be I/O bound, not CPU (unless you happen to be compiling code a lot).

Yeah I use the window key + arrow key shortcuts a lot but it's not the same as a dedicated window manager. Thanks though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com