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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

This actually makes me wonder which the company's plans are.

Sublime Text's changelog (https://www.sublimetext.com/3) depicts the product as essentially abandoned, which matches my experience.

On the other hand, the page linked says that the team is expanding.

I'm puzzled.

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We are actively working on Sublime Text as I type here, and we've got a lot of good stuff coming!

Sublime Merge and Sublime Text share a bunch of low-level code, various aspects like the syntax definitions and engine, the UI library, rendering backends, and a whole bunch more. The higher-level UI components and the exact way they are put together are different, but there is a lot shared.

All of that is to say that we've been busy at work on Sublime Text and have a whole bunch of new features, improvements and bugs fixes that are working their way towards a release.

Some of them are present in Sublime Merge since they are part of the shared code base, but a whole bunch aren't present in Merge since they are the sort of thing you deal with with editing and navigating source code, and not when dealing with version control.

We now have six engineers working at Sublime HQ between the Sublime Text and Sublime Merge products. So we have been growing, and we are still very much dedicated to both Sublime Text, and Sublime Merge.

Will there be any significant improvements in Sublime Text? Reading through the changelog it seems ST4 is mostly polishing and playing fetchup with VS Code, but adding nothing revolutionary which could be sold as a killer-feature.

For example, vim can offer modal editing, composable commands and a builtin commandline with ex-mode as it's killer-features. Emacs, well it's emacs, it always has much going, but lately it got some additional stuff like which-keys, hydra-mode and magits transient commands, which all innovate the editor-game quite strong.

Compared to that, ST seems to be quite conservative and only competing on a very small area.

From your comment it sounds like you are looking for Sublime Text to become something… different?

From my perspective, Sublime Text isn't looking to become something different. Instead we are continuing to make a well-polished text editor that is fast and can be extended in many ways. As you've noted, we've added a lot of polish, but also added some pretty significant features, and continued to lay the ground work for more smart, out-of-the-box functionality. Some of the things may not jump out at you in terms of reading a changelog, but you'll feel them as you see how they can help you to navigate and write software.

Many users want or need their edge cases more well handled. Package developers want to have access to more information and be able to influence more of the behavior of the application. We daily engage with active community members to better understand how they want to add features, and are regularly working on ways to make that possible. However, the biggest number of users are helped by the features provided in a default install and that require no configuration. We've continued to put work into those areas to make Sublime Text excellent and easy-to-use, from the moment you open it.

I'm not particularly interested a feature by feature comparison, but I think upon a close look, you'll find that Sublime Text generally provides excellent, high-performance implementations of many features that get less attention in other products. Some people really appreciate the polish, the speed, the things that just work. Other people want more automation and deep language integration. Some people want a single interface that contains many different tools. Through a combination of default functionality and plugins, we can cover a fair bit of that. Clearly we aren't trying to be everything to everyone. Luckily for users there is a healthy market of tools to write software, and we'll continue to be a part of that and to build a product that we (and many, many others) love to use.

What do you use guys to build such an awesome cross platform app? it is native, right?

It all depends on what you mean by "native." :-)

Our products are implemented in C++, and we utilize platform-specific APIs to integrate with the OS in the ways that make the most sense.

In terms of the UI, however, we have a custom library with our own controls, control structure, event handling, rendering, etc. We only use native UI for menus, file pickers and title bars. We do, however, use OS-provided font layout and rendering APIs so that text looks like other apps on your OS.

By implementing only what we need, using a language with low overhead, and making a point of writing code that is efficient, we can generally accomplish excellent performance. This, combined with trying to following platform conventions and taking the time to integrate with the OS APIs, provides a UI that feels snappy and generally doesn't look out-of-place, such as most Java UIs.

According to this comment[1] by the author, he used cross-platform C++. See also [2] from Sublime’s other author.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822114

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312357

With all due respect, most of us moved to VS Code. I paid for Sublime, I'm not paying for a git merge GUI $100. It's just way too expensive!

You can use both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge without paying if you choose to (as I did when I was a broke student).

Unlike VS Code, not all software can be open sourced and provided for free while many paid software engineers are employed to actively develop it by a trillion-dollar corporation. Software that is fast, native and cross platform without ads costs money to make. I support it with my dollars (I use SM and ST). Fortunately, there is a healthy market for GIT GUI clients as seen by Git Kraken, Source Tree, Fork, Sublime Merge, etc.

Thank you for stating the obvious! My point was that there are cheaper and better git GUI tools - many of them free, some paid, yet, cheaper. $100 is way too much for something you get better and for free or less. For example, VS Code + plugins like Git Lens is better than Sublime Merge.

GitLens is great, if you like it use it. When I use VS Code I do, but VS Code is not the only tool I use in my work. You are free to your opinion of course, I am just not a fan of statements like "X is better than Y because Y costs money" with no evidence, as if it were obvious.

The GitLens website asks for monetary support and sponsorship front and center. If that's the way you prefer, that is perfectly OK. That doesn't automatically make it a better product.

All my dev tools are open-source... I don't want to break the rule and add a nagware to the stack.

Sublime Text 4 is in beta and active development. AFAIK the latest build is 4074 released 28th April 2020.

I'm not sure where the changelog for Sublime Text 4 lives officially, however searching the web turned up this gist[1].

[1] https://gist.github.com/jfcherng/7bf4103ea486d1f67b7970e846b...

is there a waitlist or anything to join the alpha/beta of ST4? the sublime website doesn't seem to acknowledge that ST4 is even in the works yet, so i'm guessing it's still only available to an inner circle.

i'm a big fan and would love to see an early peek at what's coming, and would be happy to do bughunting or feedback if that's what the team is looking for.

To try 4074 version

Linux:

* https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime-text_build-4074_amd...

* https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_build_4074_x64...

Windows:

* https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_build_4074_x64...

MacOS:

* https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_build_4074_mac...

Sublime Text 4 dev builds (with public download links for Linux, Windows and Mac) are announced on their Discord [0]. If you're using Arch, or just want a quick download link to the probably most recent Linux build, see [1]. I believe a valid ST3 license is required.

[0] https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublime-text-discord-server/...

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sublime-text-4-dev/

>Sublime Text's changelog (https://www.sublimetext.com/3) depicts the product as essentially abandoned

Sublime Text is not abandoned. Having a glance at Sublime Text 3's update history, as well as the forums, will alleviate any such concern.

>On the other hand, the page linked says that the team is expanding.

The linked article discusses Sublime Merge, a different product.

> Sublime Text is not abandoned. Having a glance at Sublime Text 3's update history, as well as the forums, will alleviate any such concern.

Based on the history, in the last solar year, the builds have been:

  - 3211, Oct/19: 4 fixes, plus what I suppose is a functionality, for Mac
  - 3210, Sep/19: 1 fix

That's... all.

> The linked article discusses Sublime Merge, a different product.

I'm aware of it, but my question still stands, as there is no information in the typical information channels (i.e. blog, twitter).

If you write that the forums says so, I trust that, but not updating the blog and twitter (about ST specifically) is generally not a good sign.

If you have a Sublime Text 3 license there are additional beta builds available on their discord server. Information is available on their forums and website. Stop spreading such fuddy fud. Latest build was April 28:

  Changelog:
    * Auto Complete: Ranking quality improvements
    * Auto Complete: Added auto_complete_use_history setting to control if previous choices are automatically selected
    * Added additional settings to control the status bar: show_sidebar_button, show_indentation and show_syntax
    * Added relative line numbers, controlled by the relative_line_numbers setting
    * Color Schemes: Added support for the underline font style
    * Color Schemes: Added new property, inactive_selection_border
    * Added setting hide_pointer_while_typing
    * Console now uses Python syntax highlighting by default
    * Windows, Linux: Added Shift+F10 key binding to open the context menu
    * Fixed folder dragging in the sidebar
    * Further improvements in layout preservation when programmatically editing preferences
    * API: View.add_regions() calls that add an underline now have that underline applied to whitespace characters
    * API: Added sublime.INHIBIT_REORDER
    * API: Window.new_html_sheet() now accepts the sublime.ADD_TO_SELECTION flag
    * API: Window.new_html_sheet() no longer accepts cmd and args parameters
    * API: Fixed a regression in View.split_by_newlines()

>Based on the history, in the last solar year, the builds have been:

> - 3211, Oct/19: 4 fixes, plus what I suppose is a functionality, for Mac

> - 3210, Sep/19: 1 fix

>That's... all.

I don't see what you're trying to point out. What about bug-fix updates points to the software being abandoned? I'd argue that it demonstrates the exact opposite.

>I'm aware of it, but my question still stands

What question?

>not updating the blog and twitter (about ST specifically) is generally not a good sign.

Perhaps; perhaps not. You may be putting too much weight in their "social" presence instead of looking into the factors that matter most such as ongoing support and development. The team behind Sublime * is tiny compared to other software enjoying similar popularity. I suspect effort is primarily focused on development of the next major version of Sublime Text, the ongoing support of Sublime Text 3, Sublime Merge's newest release, and other projects we don't know about. I can understand a lull in Twitter/blog/etc. presence.

This is exactly what people thought with ST3: there were years and years when it was in beta with radio silence, and then, all of a sudden, it came out in a production release and it was awesome as expected. I think that's just how they roll.

When you say look at the update history, there have been no updates, even very minor, in 9 months. While not abandoned, that does feel a little concerning.

>When you say look at the update history, there have been no updates, even very minor, in 9 months. While not abandoned, that does feel a little concerning.

Why is that concerning? I'm no longer on top of Sublime Text's outstanding bugs as I was some time ago. Is the backlog of issues/severity such that an increased release cadence is necessary?

maybe it's pretty much feature complete? (and they seem to be focused on sublime merge)

what else do you think it needs? keeping in mind that it's a text editor, not an IDE

well, for example, on the file panel, not all the desktop events are caught. that means that you can open the pop-up menu _only_ with the mouse.

then, the last time I had a look at the plugin API, again, there were significant limits in the events systems (I don't remember which; I think they were again related to the tree panel).

they are quite active on their github issue tracker. i've posted twice about minor bugs; both bugs were fixed within a week or two.

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