Sublime Text 4 | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Text 4

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Hello HN,

I'm one of the developers at Sublime HQ. We're all very excited about this release. If you have any questions you'd like to ask I'll do my best to answer them.

Are there any plans regarding first class support for LSP (or, more generally and perhaps more useful, first class support for extensions providing semantic knowledge about the code)?

I know that LSP plugin exists, but, anecdotally, folks are having trouble with it. Which i think is understandable https://lsp.sublimetext.io/features/ says Show Code Actions: UNBOUND, and this is the second most useful thing in LSP (the first is extend selection), it’s not that the plugin is wrong: it’s just that you can do only so much if the editor lacks first class UI/UX concepts for features, required to expose LSP to the user.

As a developer, I tried to use a lot of code editors, my main criteria being performance, and I've stuck to ST since the first day I used it. Your editor is awesome and in term of perf you're far ahead. Thanks for your work, and also thanks a lot to adding the M1 support with ST4! I didn't expected it (ST3 works fine with Rosetta on M1) and it's much appreciated.

Thanks for introducing the multi select feature in text editing. There may have been other editors before which had but Sublime was where I first encountered this and where it felt natural. It has saved me countless keystrokes! I use VS Code now but it has started getting slower and it may be time to go back to sublime!

Hey there, subl is absolutely the best when you quickly need to open and edit a huge file. You cannot, however, do that when the file only has 1 line. Do you think it might be possible to get that fixed at some point? Opening a 1 line 1GB file on a modern machine brings subl to a complete halt and regex editing is sheer impossible.

Sublime is awesome, thanks! I've purchased an upgrade straight away.

Can you pretty please fix the issue where files deleted/renamed outside sublime are shown as unsaved? It often ends up with a lot of wasted debugging time until I realise I'm working on the wrong file

Please show "filename (deleted)" on the title, instead of "filename •". Thanks!

Are there any plans to open source the GUI system? It could be a hugely beneficial for a set of cross platform apps.

Thanks a lot for creating this piece of software art. I’m a user since the v1 and no matter what the editor du jour is, I always fallback to ST and Vim.

Do you have any plans to add first class support for SSH based or docker based remote development workflows?

The current Rsubl implementation kinda works. But is a bit hacky for reliable everyday work.

I've loved Sublime for years, and it's always the first software I install on a new machine. I even voted with my pocket by buying a license.

However, since we started using Yarn workspaces (for JS), I've needed to switch to VSCode because its auto-import is just so much better, and it's one of those things that's hard to go back from, once you're used to it. Sublime text already indexes my code for search, which can probably be used for path suggestions / automatic imports without affecting performance too much maybe? I dunno.

I wouldn't mind it being a plugin either (before Yarn workspaces, I'd use FuzzyFilePath plugin which worked pretty well). But native support would mean the performance would be on par with what I've come to expect from Sublime Text :)

I don't have any questions, but I would like to thank you and the rest of the team at Sublime HQ for developing such terrific products. I've used Sublime for various purposes for about 7 years now and just purchased, I think, my third license for it. And if I had to label any of my dev tools as a "must-have" for the way I want to work, I would probably put Sublime Merge first.

Thank you so much!

The UI of ST is fantastic and like most people here I love it.

However, opening big files doesn't work too well, it seems the program wants to load the whole file in memory. Any change on that front?

Congratulations on the new release though, it's been my favorite editor for years. Just a heads up, when you upgrade an existing license, the instructions say to click on Help > Enter License, but you have to remove the current license before you can enter a new one.

Vim has Vimtutor; could Sublime have its Sumblimetutor too?

I've been using Sublime for years now and yet I barely use most of its "well known features" and I feel ashamed of myself.

I know there are tutorials out there, but I am a chronic procrastinator and I just can't bring myself to watch them while at home.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27232271

I love this editor, but this detail annoys me:

https://i.imgur.com/wu6ZfSa.png

Folding code with curly braces doesn't "eat" the brace. It's indent-based, not syntax based. There is a 2 or 3 years old issue on their github, and they don't plan to fix. A little annoying for a paying editor.

Here is the github issue: https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101

Maybe they fixed it and I did not look up new settings?

I'am using it since 2 years, and i planned to pay the license as soon as a have a stable income.

For me it's the best second editor, i always have it open when i do an operation. I have different main tool / editor open but always sublime text as a second tool.

Thanks for keeping a 32 bit version also.

Hi there,

Thanks for this release! I use ST every day and I love it: the speed, the efficiency, everything.

The one thing I miss, though, is manipulating files from the left panel (moving files especially). I know there is a plug-in doing that (Side Bar) but it lacks drag-and-drop support.

Any plan to have it natively in the future?

I love Sublime Text and use it for everything from code to notes and todos. Thanks for all the hard work!

I was surprised to see "By default, GPU rendering is enabled on Mac, and disabled on Windows and Linux". Is there any reason I shouldn't manually enable GPU rendering on Windows/Linux?

Thanks for this, I absolutely like it for the most parts.

My only complain with Sublime is that if I have 100s of unnamed tabs opened, it gets very difficult to find a particular tab.

I wish there was somewhat better tab organisation possible. Maybe there are some plug-ins, I did check last time when I was frustrated with it.

Does anyone else face this issue or have I been using it wrong?

I would love to use ST on FreeBSD and Solaris natively, i know it's a niche and probably not worth the time, but still here i said it.

BTW: Thanks for a great Editor.

I want you lot to get a lot of funding for this because ST is the best editor IMO and it shouldn't be abandoned

Is there a Raspi version yet?

That would make my little embedded dev station just perfect! Would migrate it all to that new Pi 400.

Is there a reason why ST re-indexes everything on every update? (I'm fairly sure it didn't used to).

My workflow involves keeping 9 sublime projects open most of the time (damn microservices), and restarting sublime after an update makes my computer very slow (not unusable, not noticeably laggy) for 5-10mins each time.

Relatedly, sublime has an excellent changelog window, but it only shows up after you've already updated! It would be really nice if I could see the changelog before I decide whether to update or not...

Hi Ben

When will ST4 show up on Homebrew?

https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/sublime-text

Thanks for taking the time to answer questions

Thank your for bringing into the world this beautiful tool. I paid for ST2, ST3 and SM and it brought a lot of joy into my work. I'm more into VSCode now (ST python editing experience has been lagging behind), but I keep ST close for out of project editing.

I hope one day you will release your UI toolkit. Since it's crossplateform, fast, and plug into Python, it could be a wonderful alternative to PyQT, wxWidget and the like, and we really need something in the Python world.

Good luck to ST4.

Question about license upgrades. The page says:

> Note you can upgrade to the bundle from either a Sublime Text or Sublime Merge license.

Right now I have a ST3 license and would like to upgrade it to both ST4 and Sublime Merge.

If one upgrades to a bundle now, will it be possible in the future to upgrade the bundle license to a single product one? Or is the only option to buy a new single product license instead?

(I’m ok with it either way, I just want to find out so I can plan better.)

I love Sublime Text and have purchased licenses for each version. Thank you very much!

Is the team considering making an "HTTP Client, done Sublime" at some point?

Regarding the licence upgrade options: Are there any solutions for users owning a single licence for both Sublime Text 3 and Sublime Merge? My Sublime Merge licence for example is still valid for 2 years from now. If I try to upgrade my current licence and want to bundle them together it says the price is 152 USD. Any options for users like me to not make them pay twice when choosing the bundle licence?

I am wondering if it's possible for Python plugin to add custom UI elements?

For example, if I am using Julia/R I want side panel that shows all my current variables in memory. Is Sublime plugin system capable of adding UI components such as variable/plot viewer and add custom interactions to those UI panels(i.e. zoom/rotation for plots)?

I like the fact I can upgrade my 3 licence ! Whoop whoop. Will take it for a spin - thanks for that hard and continued work.

About Sublime Text says that I have a Single User License registered. Is it going to prompt me to upgrade, or am I grandfathered in some way? I bought this Sublime 3 license in Feb 2018. Just trying to understand what's going on. The app itself is great so far, especially the GPU performance.

Any plans to help Syntect (https://github.com/trishume/syntect) work with the latest sublime-syntax format (https://github.com/trishume/syntect/issues/271 and https://github.com/trishume/syntect/issues/323)? There is a big overlap in contributors for syntect users and syntect can be used by syntax writers to debug syntaxes so it would be a win-win.

a bit of a weird one... is there anyway I use my license for version 4 on version 2?

my day job has a fixed list of binaries that are permitted to run (by digest)... 2 is on the list, and 4 isn't

(quite happily using 4 now at home!)

Any chance of a Windows ARM64 version since macOS/Linux have one?

Do you expect that working with Python codebases will get better with this release? I mean it in the context of code completion and other "intelligence" features.

How difficult would it be to make a Sublime-Text-for-terminals?

Could it be that you‘ve already been using the new GPU rendering in SublimeMerge but not ST3?

That would explain the visual corruption issues I sometimes have with Merge but not ST3. In Merge some actions, sometimes (mostly in the settings) corrupt the application window (sometimes also after minimizing and sleep) on my MacBook. To me it looked like a rendering/GPU issue. It looks like blocks of pixels having different colors, lines shifted, etc.

Congrats! When the payday hits I will buy it. I've been waiting. I know I could have purchased an ST3 license and got this but...I am weird.

Thank you for your great work. For HTML / JavaScript, Sublime is simply amazing and a joy for me to use.

I can see personal licenses get the 3 years worth of updates that you've mentioned elsewhere in the comments here. However, business licenses get 1 year of use before it expires, but I can't tell if that includes upgrades from ST3 to ST4. Can you clarify what the status is for that?

My favorite editor. Thank you so much.

How can I save groups of tabs so side views won’t get lost if I switch to another tab?

Edit: ctrl+tab saves, but mouse clicking a tab loses

How can I open find results in a split view?

How can I open definitions and references in split views without using the mouse to hover and click?

Edit: F12 and shift+F12.

Would you ever consider a licensing model similar to Cockroach DBs BSL where older versions fall into the public domain/are open sourced once they're no longer revenue generating? Or perhaps once a new major version is out?

Is there a way to go back to the trapezoid-style tab UI instead of the rounded new Chrome tab UI? I didn't see it in any of the preinstalled themes but maybe there's a flag somewhere.

Do you plan to add an integrated terminal to ST at some point?

Congrats on the release!

I was an avid user (and paying customer!) of ST1 and ST2. Somewhere along the way I switched to VS Code. Why should I use ST4 over VS Code today?

If you could say one thing to a person currently using vs code to get them to try sublime, what would that be? It can't be "speed".

Is there any chance you'll be adding support for moving the sidebar to the right? This is the one stopping me from moving back to sublime.

for typescript it would be nice to hover any word and see it's type. is that a planned feature?

I noticed that you can only see the type of a type

Congrats on the release!

Are there any plans for some kind of combo deal now that Sublime Text and Sublime Merge licenses are aligned?

Are there any chances for better Vim mode?

Could you give a high-level description about what does sublime do in order to handle large files?

Hello. How was the transition on the Windows side to UWP?

It looks great.

Do you use Sublime Text for development?

Congratulations on the release!

anything improved for Rust?

The new auto-complete is really impressive.

I've always been a big fan of using snippets and auto-completing based on open buffers in a project instead of using LSPs.

I haven't used ST in a while but decided to install ST4 to try it out.

I opened a Flask application that uses SQLAlchemy. I opened a Python file and typed User. and then it showed me a list of fields and methods on my User model without having the User model open in a buffer.

I did the same thing in an Elixir project and after installing the Elixir package it worked for project specific "things" in my app. Like after typing UserView. it showed me only functions available in that view. Likewise it did the same thing with context modules, it picked up all functions inside of a specific module.

In both cases as I started typing "User" it showed me options to pick from. In both cases it also listed out the number of definitions for a specific "thing" and lets you quickly jump to a specific one. If you mouse over a function it brings up the list to pick a definition / reference. There's also key binds to bring up a CTRL+p'ish feeling menu to see and preview the file where something is being used.

It's not as good as a LSP but it's definitely a few notches above what I've seen in other editors and the best part about it is not needing to configure multiple LSPs and it's lightning fast.

How does it compare to the autocomplete in IntelliJ/Webstorm/Phpstorm? The amazing autocomplete is most of what keeps me on Jetbrains, but their software is soooo slow.

IntelliJ's autocomplete is much better, but it's doing some heavy lifting to get such good results.

I haven't gone crazy testing ST4 btw, I played with it for like 20 minutes. It felt like it was maybe 65% between ST3's auto-complete and what you'd get with a LSP back-end using VSCode. Meaning it's closer to VSCode than it is than ST3, but not as good as a LSP, but there's also no effort to get it set up so it's a reasonable trade off if you're someone like me who just wants pretty good auto complete without configuring a million tools to run in the background.

> Many plugin API additions particularly to better support plugins like LSP

It is coming with LSP support so that will work as well.

> The new auto-complete is really impressive.

How does it compare to YouCompleteMe or TabNine?

I haven't tried TabNine but according to its home page it doesn't support Elixir. It also requires a monthly subscription (the daily limit would be consumed in about 5-10 minutes of coding). I don't mind paying for things but at this time I'm not interested in subscribing to more services.

YCM feels more like a LSP client than buffer / project level auto-complete. AFAIK it requires you to have a language's runtime specifically installed which is a deal breaker for me. Most of my apps run in Docker and I don't have local copies of any runtimes installed.

ST4 works wonderfully in this case because it parses everything out based on syntax highlighting rules.

It's much better than YouCompleteMe imo. The context-awareness of it is quite amazing.

I feel bad using VSCode after years of supporting Sublime (by purchasing a license). However the one case where I do use sublime repeatedly? When I need to open an editor QUICKLY. It boots faster than VSCode, and frankly, it finally broke me of my constant habit of VIMming now that I have it on my mac, win and linux boxes. I am eager to try V4, but I'm so deep in VSCode now, I don't know if I can find my way out! I can even cross compile C and debug in VSCode!

To me, VSCode competes with IDEs, Sublime competes with text editors. Startup speed accounts for a solid 95% of that distinction. If I need to make a quick edit to a file or write down a temporary (but reasonably persistent) note, the only tools I've tried that let me do that in less than 3 seconds are Sublime, Notepad, and Notepad++. Among those choices, Sublime is the clear winner in overall usefulness and functionality.

Not just startup speed, but speed/efficiency, period. I use Sublime a lot to manipulate decently large csv, json, etc. files. Multi-cursor text wrangling still works well even with 10s of thousands of cursors, VSCode chokes hard way before that.

VSCode is much much faster than the popular IDEs (namely, IntelliJ) in my experience.

I'd say it occupies a middle point between full IDE and text editor.

Settled into neovim for startup speed. My VSCode editor has vim keys too, so ... ohm! :)

edit: My only gripe with VSCode currently is that it seems too eager to correct my typing.

I don't understand the startup time issue. Tools I use regularly like VS Code, IntelliJ, etc. are constantly running on my machine. I pay their startup cost once per reboot. Once they're running, they open files* as fast as Sublime for me. There maybe other use cases, but startup time feels pointless to me.

*files of sizes I work work. I don't care about gigabyte-sized files; if I do, vim or my existing ST3 license are good enough.

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't usually close VS Code, so this isn't an issue for me.

Agreed, it's nice and fast. Sublime is my go to for notes, storing quick tidbits, quick macros (this has saved me lots of time), data editing, little bits of quick code, and SQL scratch pad. There is probably a ton more I could be using it for.

For me, I use Goland and Pycharm as IDE, and VS Code as editor. I also used Sublime, but found that VS Code somehow surpassed it, and startup speed is also very fine (if you have strong computer :-)).

`emacsclient` gives you the best of both worlds. Instant startup, with as much added sugar as you can stomach.

Same. I don’t tend to need an IDE all that often. More often I want to read code and I need something that opens up FAST with good support for a WIDE variety of languages out of the box. ST ticks that box for me.

That's an excellent point. There really is a continuum that I overlooked.

My favourite aspect of sublime is that the "sessions" are so reliable.

I often just open it to jot something down, and before I know it I have 15-20 notes on separate pages, I'll consolidate and save them to a file somewhere or delete them if necessary.

It's just a super reliable scratchpad and a versatile modern textfile editor.

Pages as in tabs that are not saved to files?

This is exactly how I use Sublime Text. It's probably a workable development environment, but there are too many solid alternatives for that purpose for me. But as far as a quick text or code editor, there is nothing else I'd rather use.

I can relate. Huge fan of ST. I switched to VSC because of some integrations that were not available on ST. I hated it, it was only out of necessity. Everything on VSC just felt... sluggish, compared to ST. There's this barely noticeable input lag. Autocomplete seems to lag ever so slightly. The startup is just a smidge too slow. And so on in all dimensions.

Alas, now I'm used to it, and I can't go back because of the same integrations that made me switch in the first place, and new ones I've found since. All the crispness and snappiness is gone in favor of deep features. I accidentally became an IDE-guy.

> Alas, now I'm used to it

I tolerate it, but I hate it every day. So much bloat, so many useless notifications and fragmented interface.

I don't want to take any thunder away from Sublime but VSCode basically opens instantly on M1.

You almost definitely speak the truth, but that kind of attitude towards performance is why so many apps are so awful to use now. Especially if you can’t afford the newest Mac.

Sublime opens just as fast

On my, 2015 Macbook pro (16 GB RAM)

and my 2012 Macbook pro (2 GB RAM).

Instantly.

Nothing else on my 2012 Mac opens that fast. Not MacVim. Not emacs. Not TextEdit. Not even the terminal.

Everything opens instantly on M1. Enjoy it while software hasn't slowed down accordingly.

For people not fortunate enough to own an M1, it’s a slow to start typical Electron app. Don’t get me wrong, I love and use VS Code. But performance isn’t in the same league.

Sublime Text basically does what you describe above on ANY hardware.

I mean... I would hope pretty much anything opens ~instantly on the most absolute cutting edge custom-designed SoC from one of the richest companies in the world. hahah ;)

For now... Wait a few months/a year and they will find a reason to "take advantage" of that increase in performance and slow it back down again.

On M1, Sublime is still faster than VSCode to open. The bouncing icon is not even done bouncing back down that the whole project is open in Sublime. Yes still very fast in Vs Studio, but there's always something nice about Sublime being able to get to a file so quickly.

VSCode opens <1 second on my Dell XPS as well.

takes my M1 mac about 3s to open

I have VS Code running 99.99% of the time. If it's open then it pretty much loads any file < 50mb instantly for me.

I don't think sublime really compares to IDE's like vscode and jetbrains products.

It sorta is in just the text editing realm similar to vim and emacs. Sure it can do more but I feel like it's not fair to compare it. That said sublime text is probably the only text editor I ever used that comes even close to competing with vim and emacs for text editing.

> When I need to open an editor QUICKLY

Do you actually ever need to open a new editor? Why not just start whatever editor you want when you boot up, and then open files in it?

You probably don't shut down and start up your web browser every time you want to open a new site, so why would you do the analogue with your text editor?

> Do you actually ever need to open a new editor? Why not just start whatever editor you want when you boot up, and then open files in it?

Speaking only for myself and not the GP: due to a lifelong habit of putting things away when I'm finished with them, I always close windows and quit applications when I'm done using them for my current task.

> You probably don't shut down and start up your web browser every time you want to open a new site

Not literally every time I visit a new site, but yes, I quit my browser every time I'm finished with my current browsing session, even if I might end up launching it again in 10 minutes for a different reason.

> When I need to open an editor QUICKLY.

I solved this need long ago with BBEdit (hi Rich!): I leave it running all the time. It is the only application that starts with my user login, and it is always available.

I don't get really get this "quickly" thing. I just checked, on my 2014 MBP my VSCode takes < 3 seconds to open a project from shutdown, including opening 14 files. Checking Sublime Text 3 it's faster (1.5 seconds?) but 3 seconds it's not enough for me to care.

I tested "Visual Studio". It takes ~10-12 seconds. For some reason VSC code fits within my threshold of "fast enough I don't feel like I had to wait at all" where as visual studio feels like I'm waiting. I guess your threshold is lower than mine though.

> Sublime Text license keys are no longer tied to a single major version, instead they are now valid for all updates within 3 years of purchase. After that, you will still have full access to every version of Sublime Text released within the 3 year window.

I really love this model.

I just wish it was a little cheaper. Every time I think about buying a license I realize it’s like 30-40 USD more than I expect and I chicken out

So do I. Makes a ton of sense. I am going to buy a license. This program is worth every penny.

Wait, does this mean my license from 2014 isn't going strong anymore?

Edit: I've upgraded. I've felt guilty for years for how much mileage I've gotten out of Sublime. It is one of my most used applications.

Isnt it just a simple subscription model with a 3 year term?

That is a good model, but I'm a little confused about the transition. My license from 2015 obviously doesn't include ST4, but does it still include all versions of ST3 since it was purchased before this change? Or was it retroactively updated to only capture ST3 versions released during that 3-year window?

Why's that? It depends how frequently a major release happens. If it stays at "4.x" for 5 years, I'd way rather have the "tied to a single major version" license :)

It's software like Sublime that sustains my faith in the software industry and why I'm still a developer.

It's beautiful, efficient software that single-handedly proves that desktop software in 2021 doesn't have to be a shit, low quality side show to SaaS "apps" and mobile.

Heaven knows what their code looks like. Perhaps it's best it never goes open source so we can sustain the Opera-esque magic of a <10MB binary that packs so much punch.

Craig Mod puts Sublime Text in the “fast software” category: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

> (…) Sublime Text has — in my experience — only gotten faster. I love software that does this: Software that unbloats over time. This should be the goal of all software. The longer it’s around, the more elegant it should become. Smooth over like a river stone. I have full trust in the engineering of Sublime Text because I’ve used it for over a decade, but also because it always feels like a fast, focused tool (even though it’s actually very complicated) and has only become faster the longer I’ve used it.

The whole essay is a nice read.

EDIT: Something else I wanted to add: I’ve tried other programs (file managers, for instance) that attempt to emulate Sublime Text both in interface (keyboard-driven, command palette, etc.) and speed, but they mostly manage to hit the former while blowing the latter. Fast software is hard!

This is a great essay! Completely agree with all of his points and really wish well-crafted software got more respect.

I don’t use sublime in my day to day, but always keep it on hand because it’s the only IDE that quickly opens for viewing very large csv or similar files without a hitch. PyCharm, VSCode, Aton all barf under these conditions.

Just for the speed of large file, on macOS, I find the BBEdit is great too. The basic functions of BBEdit can be used for free even.

For these instances I just use vim or sed/awk/etc.

Sublime will barf if the file gets big enough too. In that case use something like HxD

That's interesting, because I've noticed the exact opposite between VSCode and Sublime. What version of sublime are you using?

I don't use sublime on my day to day, but I'm always happy to purchase their new licese when a new version ships for this reason.

I buy mostly nothing, use ms alternatives like libre office, blender, gimp, resolve, darktable, etc, but sublime text has been a fantastic lightweight ide, like a notepad++ or gedit. Even when other big companies are coming out with nice free smaller than before apps, I'm happy to have bought sublime. I find I can use many editors at the same time for different uses to separate my minutia.

Version 4 accepted my version 3 license purchased in january 2019. Yay me!

I tried Sublime text and I really like it.

But I have been a user of UltraEdit for many many years (maybe 20?) and I still find it much more natural to use.

I found it while looking for an editor to replace Semware's Qedit (DOS).

I wonder why UltraEdit has not much love here.

I do find Sublime's price much better than UltraEdit.

Another long-time UltraEdit user here.

I love it in general, but in particular there's one feature that I can't do without: column mode. I don't understand why other editors haven't copied it (at least to my knowledge. If you know any other that has it, I'd like to know). For those of us that often work with CSV-like formats, it's a real time saver.

It's also better behaved for huge files than any other editor I've tried.

UltraEdit is probably the best text editor there is. Not the best IDE or anything, just the best text editor. It seems thoroughly underappreciated, though, for some reason.

It's the only editor I'm aware of that can do do disk-based editing, that is you can open a file of multiple gigabytes quickly and edit it because it doesn't load the whole file into RAM.

Their Git client (Sublime Merge) is the first graphical git tool I've felt happy with.

Desktop software is superior to web in virtually every way except:

(1) Collaborative features and syncing are easier to build when all the data lives in the cloud. There are currently no easy ways to build collaborative decentralized apps that scale and perform well and don't lose data. The best compromise solution today is probably cloud syncing, which is the Apple approach and keeps most of the brains local while using the cloud as a cache and a relay... but that tends to lead toward more and more stuff going to the cloud over time.

(2) The cloud is the only DRM that works. Cloud software can't be pirated because the user doesn't even have most of the software. At best the user gets the UI frontend in the form of obfuscated JavaScript or WASM.

(3) Due to #2, it's possible to easily collect recurring payments. "Recurring revenue" is the holy grail of virtually all businesses. Some VCs don't even consider non-recurring revenue in valuing a startup company. If your company collects $1M in one-time licenses and $100/month in subscriptions, some investors will literally chalk you up as having $100/month MRR.

(4) Cloud SaaS is a political loophole around free-as-in-beer ideology. The "information wants to be free" ideology tends to poo-poo commercial software and insist on the freedom to pirate everything, but cloud SaaS gets a free pass. Even better: with cloud SaaS you can use FOSS software without giving anything back! ... unless the license is AGPL, BSL, or Commons Clause, but those are not "true" FOSS licenses according to the FSF. (The AGPL sort of is, but it's also not strong enough to really prevent SaaSification.)

(5) Last but not least: shipping software sucks, especially on Windows. The Windows MSI installation subsystem is a horror from the deepest smoldering pit of hell. Be sure your company offers mental health benefits for PTSD treatment if you have to ask an engineer to deal with it. Mac and Linux are a little better but they are collectively only about 1/4 of the desktop market. The web offers a zero-friction "install" process that makes adoption and updates seamless and easy.

If those problems can be addressed, we can see a renaissance for real software that serves the user and doesn't have 100+ms latency for every action.

I love me my Sublime.

I like an editor that's fast enough, isn't bloated and isn't Vim.

Don't always need the IDE.

And although I can use Vim, I'm just not as efficient with it to use it 100% of the time. I learned a little to be able to work on remote servers but that's all I need. I can use a GUI editor like Sublime for the rest.

Sublime is versatile.

All nice i use it a lot but why does it take way too many seconds to open large files? And its not the cpu i have top cpu ram and ssds.

At least the technolgy of those "shit, low quality side show SaaS apps and mobile" allowed people to build apps that wouldn't be able to do so before.

I'm a Data Engineer that works all day with all sorts of data, most of which gets streamed through python, dataframes, some sqlite, lots of awk/sed - but at least a half dozen times a day, every day, I drop a massive chunk of text into Sublime and crank through it - its progressive regex, fast filtering, search/replace are just coded into my finger DNA - It handles absolutely huge files that would cripple something like vscode - I understand why some people who have been using Textmate for 20+ years will never use another tool as their primary text-editor - once you've found "the one" - it almost becomes part of you.

Happy to buy every version of Sublime that ever gets released.

> its progressive regex, fast filtering, search/replace are just coded into my finger DNA

Not a Data Engineer (yet?) but that sentence definitely apply to me.

I'm blown away by how snappy this is. It always is, but it's even better now. This is really impressive work.

I don't think I'm the target audience here. I just spent 30m trying to tune this for a TypeScript project, and I can't seem to easily get eslint, prettier, and a few other tools working. I added the TypeScript language server package, but it doesn't offer any of the effortless reference navigation and refactoring I'm used to.

Having said that, am I just missing something? Can Sublime be that kind of editor?

I think I'd love to give it a shot, but without these conveniences I'm feeling like I should stick with VS Code.

I've used the following list of packages for eslint, prettier, and TypeScript. It's not as effortless as it should be, but the two LSP packages in particular do give reference navigation that's pretty equivalent to VS Code.

- https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeLinter

- https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeLinter-eslint

- https://packagecontrol.io/packages/JsPrettier

- https://packagecontrol.io/packages/LSP

- https://packagecontrol.io/packages/LSP-typescript

If you're on macos, I also recommend creating a file at ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages/User/Default (OSX).sublime-mousemap with the following contents -- this adds a cmd+click "go to definition" shortcut that's also equivalent to what VS Code provides. (I guess the path should be "Sublime Text 4" now? but after upgrading, the config at the "Sublime Text 3" path still works for me.)

[ { "button": "button1", "count": 1, "modifiers": ["super"], "press_command": "drag_select", "command": "lsp_symbol_definition" } ]

I've tried to switch to VS Code a few times -- language features (especially TypeScript) tend to work better out-of-the-box but it still isn't close in terms of performance. If you want IDE-like features to "just work" then VS Code is definitely the best choice, but the persistent (albeit sleight) input lag drives me up the wall.

Thank you so much for this! I was looking for an optimal config myself, and this saved me so much time :-) Cheers!

Sublime can definitely be that kind of editor, but requires quite a lot of setup in some cases. There is a language server plug-in, which (IMO) is not straight forward to customize or even setup, with very little feedback when something goes wrong (broken LS implementation, or misconfiguration). However, when it does finally work, it's super snappy and clean.

The philosophy of Sublime is almost opposite to VS Code and other IDEs. Instead of everything enabled by default, everything is simple and lightweight by default. Then you add your own things on top.

I mostly see it as analogous to programming, where I too prefer to start simple and add things I control on top and where I understand the whole stack. Compared to picking a huge framework which lets me get started but where I don't understand the hundreds of layers beneath.

Since I use Sublime Text since years, and plan to use it for years to come, I see it as an investment to learn the underlaying functionality and eco system from the ground up. It makes me a better and more productive programmer in the long run.

I use Sublime instead of vim/gedit/notepad/notepad++ for quickly viewing files. The main benefit of Sublime over VSCode is that it opens several orders of magnitude faster. However, in terms of doing actual programming work I prefer VSCode over Sublime because it has way better plugins.

Sublime Text used to be my main editor but when I've started developing more in TypeScript I dropped it because I could never get it working well enough. I'm using VSCode now and TypeScript with it just works without having to install and configure many half-working packages, some of which will conflict with other packages you might use.

Perhaps ST4 addresses these issues, but personally I probably won't go back to it.

I was a Sublime user, then Atom, and now I’m a VS Code user. In 2021, what reasons are there to use Sublime over VS Code? Performance is the only one that comes to mind, but there are surely others... right?

I tried VSCode and Sublime each for a month earlier this year.

I was surprised to find myself deciding on Sublime at the end of it.

It came down to performance but also clutter. Sublime is fast. But also, VSCode just had too many panels and bells and whistles.

And VSCode's defaults were just all wrong. Like trying to autocomplete every other word when I'm typing text in a .txt file -- it's not even code! I couldn't believe how many random options I had to hunt down just to make typing usable and not trying to insert a million things.

Typing in Sublime seems to operate... just how I expect it to.

I prefer the performance, design, configuration management and plugin ecosystem of Sublime to VSCode. I also found Sublime Merge growing on me despite not intending to use it, so I think it's something about how the developers think, not just the one tool I've gotten used to.

I don't know how to describe it, but there are a lot of little aggravations Sublime avoids.

What Sublime doesn't have anymore is the community zeitgeist. I definitely feel more like I'm sticking to tried-and-true as a user these days, than something innovative, even though it's still innovative.

I've tried to make the switch from Sublime to VS Code a few times, and a few things consistently hang me up:

* Performance, like you mentioned. I've very used to opening hundreds of megabytes of line-delimited data in my editor; anything that can't keep up with that immediately ruins my "tempo."

* I don't really understand how to customize VS Code's UI. It has a lot of little toolbars and widget panels that I don't want (I have everything except for the edit buffer on Sublime removed), but I can't find any obvious way to permanently remove them. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

* This one is largely my fault: 10+ years of Sublime Text have broken my brain, and VS Code's default bindings are just different enough to cause me significant annoyance. I'm sure I could spend a couple of hours fixing them, but I'll admit that the thought gives me pause.

On the other hand, I really like VS Code's session sharing feature (other than the shared undo/redo buffer). I'd love to see a version of that for Sublime!

I've tried VSCode a few times hearing it was better for Elixir. I have a strong dislike, bordering on hatred, for IDE's. I don't want a bloated environment that gets in my way with features I don't want but seemingly can't turn off. VSCode feels like an IDE to me. Back in the day I moved away from Eclipse to Sublime and built command line tools to do what I needed with building releases (Ant - does that still exist? LOL I don't do java anymore).

When you realize you want VSCode to look and feel like Sublime, and spend hours trying to tweak settings, turn things off, use Sublime keybindings, etc. why bother? Just use Sublime. Also, I like paying indie devs for their work.

I switched to sublime text because VSCode makes you write

  /**
   * Block comments like this
   */

where as I wanted to write

  /**
    Block comments like this
  */

Seems like a trivial thing but it irritated the hell out of me. I didn't want the editor to put little asterisks in. I didn't ask it to. But it did.

Sublime Text just does what I ask.

With Sublime Text, I enjoy not having to turn off data collection and thinking about if updates enable them again.

I've tried using VS Code after years of coding in Sublime Text but quickly returned to ST - VSC just felt so slow, bloated, sluggish and overall unpleasent that all other features didn't matter because it simply made writing code irritating, it felt like the IDE is more important than the actual code you write and the editor is less important than all the bells and whistles.

Right now the majority of development I'm doing is Python/JS/TS. I've been really liking the Pylance extension by the MSFT team for VSC, it is so much faster than Mypy etc.

Then for JS/TS, the out-of-the-box support is what won me over from being a ST user for nearly 10 years.

Happy to see Sublime still enjoying major version releases; i say this as a religious Textmate 2 user. Monocultures are rarely good for innovation and these projects monetizing in a sustainable way is a tide that raises all boats.

Also, a few comments here are asking versions of "What does Sublime have that $MY_EDITOR doesn't?" For many the answer is simply "experience". The idea of swapping off of TM2 for me is daunting because of the sheer number of keyboard shortcuts i've memorized. Most i don't even know by heart but rather by hand position.

How feature-rich an editor is should be less important than how feature-complete your understanding/usage is.

> How feature-rich an editor is should be less important than how feature-complete your understanding/usage is.

As someone who's in BBEdit five days a week, I definitely understand this. :)

One of the features I am most excited about it tab multi-select. The simplicity of using it versus traditional pane management is really key, in my opinion.

Instead of having to manage groups and the files within them, tab selections are very fluid and low overhead. From the user experience perspective, I think they are as fundamental as multiple selections and Goto Anything are.

There are some docs at https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/tab_multi-select.html. However, I recommend opening a folder and holding down ctrl/cmd when selecting files from the side bar, Goto File, tab bar, Definitions popup, etc.

It integrates well with ctrl+tab, and the Definitions navigation flow is pretty user-friendly.

Oh wow! Thanks for pointing this out, that really does sound interesting. Until your comment, I had thought tab multi select meant you could do multicursors now across tabs.

I recently discovered that a friend of mine was a big fan of Sublime. Said friend doesn't do any coding, and isn't at all technical, so I was curious. Turns out that it's used a lot by their circle of colleagues in the editorial text world as a fast and approachable tool for bulk editing large, raw text files (as in manuscripts, books, manuals, etc.). Makes sense!

I love Sublime Text!

I don't know how I'd work out just how much more productive I am because of ST, but it'd be interesting to see.

I've written 4 plugins so far. My most used two are:

I created a tool to take a tab-separated table(when you copy data out of excel) and convert it into an insert statement to a temp table, so I could copy from excel, run a keyboard shortcut, run the output in MSSQL and have a temp table with all the data available(Yes, I know MSSQL has an import function. This is quicker and easier).

Also, I switched to a mac and couldn't find a nice HL7 Message Sender, so I wrote my own as a ST3 plugin and it took on a life of it's own as a tool, with people in the company sending me feature requests and everything.

Thank you Sublime Devs!

I've been using ST4 since the early dev builds and there is just no editor that makes me as productive as SublimeText. I tried everything under the sun from going with VIM/nvim for the majority of the time, vscode, atom, intellij, emacs (spacemacs).

The plugin ecosystem picked back up when Sublime started pushing out dev builds. The editor improved, got much faster, the plugin APIs expanded. Right now with my ST4 setup, I'm in coding ZEN. It's super snappy no matter what I throw at it, looks great, I know how to configure any keybinding I want, how to add new functionality with own plugins.

To me ST4 is a bit like VIM with customizations, except that it's much faster than VIM.

Happy to see ST4 got released and hoping it will attract people to consider it again.

(SublimeMerge is also a really great product)

Would you mind talking a bit about your setup, what plugins you use and wrote yourself?

I know people who love Sublime but are worried about it disappearing, or paying for an upgrade only to see development to stall.

It's good to see that the Sublime team have responded to this with a licensing model that rewards them for releasing updates:

I'm curious how this works at the technical level.

The license key presumable encodes both an expiry date and what version numbers it is valid for when it was issued (and therefore will continue to work for even after expiry)?

I'd love to use a lighter (in terms of resources) editor like this, but after using IDEA (not for java - but it's the single Jetbrains tool that supports all other language packs) the editor in this feels like comparing a car to a bicycle.

Sure, the bicycle starts off quicker, and you feel so much quicker.

But that's where the benefits end, IMO. I just opened up a client project with this (that project is a mixture of php, sql, shell, and some client side browser code).

The symbol recognition compared to IDEA was pretty abysmal. Then I thought maybe I need to try the other way (i.e. find a usage of a symbol manually and then try to resolve it back to its definition).

That the find-in-files results are just another text view with paths in there is probably appealing to some people... me I'd rather you just let me open the file.

I like IntelliJ a lot but it has some distractions that make me keep an eye on the Sublime/Vim/Neovim communities because I'd love to switch to something lighter and politer.

A couple of small examples in IntelliJ:

I see the “IDE Fatal Error” light flash about 5-10 times a day. It's quite hard to ignore and you have to dismiss it by opening a window soliciting feedback about what you were doing when the IDE exception occurred. I generally have no idea what caused the exception, so I usually leave the feedback field blank. It feels like being a mechanical turk for exception reports. (There's an 11-year-old YouTrack to auto-submit exceptions in case this annoys anyone else too: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-5835 )

Most themes show a large number of stripe marks in the editor scroll area for errors, warnings, “weak warnings”, and more, which lights up the scrollbars for no good reason. You can turn these off in the preferences along with all of the other visual clutter. But I got so frustrated having to track all of those options down whenever I try a new JetBrains IDE that I ended up making a theme that reduces a lot of the visual noise by default, such as only showing stripe marks for errors: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/14858-blackbird-theme

For the last point, you can double click on a line in the search result page and it will open the file for you. I have to admit I don't particularly enjoy this search UI either, it's rather unintuitive, plus somewhat annoying as well since when you do a new search, if you don't remember to close the search result page the new search results will be appended to the existing page, which isn't what I want most of the time.

+1. Sublime is a fantastic lightweight text editor, but the version that I've used simply isn't an IDE. Excited to see what new features are in this one, though!

> Linux: Added proper support for Wayland

> Linux: Touch screen events are now handled

> Linux: Native file dialogs like those for KDE will be used when configured

On behalf of the small, loud minority that cares about these things, thank you very much

I've used ST (2 at the time) for a long time, back when IDE's were hardly offering any help or support for web development (early 2010's), since they couldn't make heads or tails from JS applications.

I've done some other things in the meantime, some Java, some iOS development, etc. I tried Atom for a while, but it was just too sluggish. Then came VS Code, and for a good while that was the One. And to date, VS Code still gets frequent major updates and active development.

However, nowadays when I scan the changelog, 99% of it is just not relevant. They spent a ton of development time building a terminal client into it. Which I guess makes sense for the use case where it's an in-browser editor, but personally I could have done without. Other things I don't really use are debuggers, remote editing, etc. It's still snappy enough, but I don't know if it's still relevant for me.

For the past year or so, I've been using intellij as my primary editor for everything; JS and TS support are now good enough, performance is good enough, and it's a big help with Go, old PHP / JS, etc code.

But I'm still nostalgic about ST from a decade ago, how fast and frequently I would just go `subl somefile` and it would be just There. Or the time I found a todo plugin that just worked fast and intuitively. Or the joys of cmd + p to open a file quickly, or fast global find & replace (really useful if cmd+click on a function doesn't navigate to said function).

I just hope it works well with existing system and languages, e.g. using the TS language server or Gopls. I don't need it anymore as an all day working environment, but quick and dirty editing, yes please.

Anyway yeah I just bought a license.

Same here

How long does it take to open is not the meaningful metric; what matters is what happens afterwards. And yes, most Electron apps do get sluggish under load: Spotify is alright for adding the first 20 songs; then searching >> adding to playlist takes twice as long; then triple that, and then it's downright unusable. "But 90% of the time it's fine...". Ok, but that didn't used to be the case with mediamonkey on a Pentium III, or did it?

VS Code is perfectly fine if you're being sensible: you're editing a dozen files in a single project. It's not not so fine if you've got 12 files open on three different projects, or you're sharing your screen, or you've never closed the editor for a couple days. It's being built with care, for sure, and yet you do feel the load, you do have to take resources into account, you have to be responsible. Do I need to Invest on higher end machine for the purpose of Editing Text Files? There are times on Emacs when I suddenly realize I've opened a hundred, 150 buffers, simply because I've never felt any load. And Emacs is the heavy one! Sublime was the first editor I used "for real", and it was absolutely awesome. I switched to VS Code for all its shiny features and started to think that yes, it had its sluggish moments, but it simply saved too much time, it was way too efficient to leave. Well, it isn't. Lightweight tools have an steeper curve, but they draw no boundaries for you, they don't hold any usage agenda; they do, in a way, set you free.

I was a trial user for years back in the Sublime Text 2 and 3 days, then moved over to Atom when it was the hotness that was clearly Sublime Text inspired.

Atom was just never fast enough. I still use it to this day, but I recently purchased a Sublime Text 3 license just to use Sublime Text 4 while it was in development and now I use that alongside Atom.

It really is incredible how immature Atom was. You literally could not multiline search and replace. Incredible.

> TypeScript, JSX and TSX Support

It doesn't seem like Sublime ships with the Typescript language server by default, not sure if I'd call syntax highlighting as support.

It's the same support we supply for every language. Syntax highlighting drives our goto-definition, goto-symbol, auto-complete and more.

This repo seems to disagree: https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP-typescript (please correct me if I am wrong, I can't test it now)

Perhaps you need to install TypeScript compiler into the project? VSCode bundles that too, ST4 might not.

Anyone know of a good vi plugin for sublime ?

The last time I tried, all the plugins were significantly laggy and while nvim was functionally complete, it had this annoying behavior of switching out of insert mode if sublime lost focus. Apparently that's by design too.

Sublime itself was super snappy though. unfortunately a good vi/vim mode is a requirement for me.

Have you tried the built-in vintage mode?

https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/vintage.html

NeoVintageous is the one I landed on after trying...

- vintage mode

- sublimesix

- actualvim

I really wish that Sublime would add an integrated terminal panel. None of the packages I’ve tried that do add a terminal view, work the way the way I want them to. It’s really the one feature that’s holding me back from even trying to switch away from VS Code.

The whole set of Remote Development extensions is a game changer. You can be remote and it feels like being local with the terminal, debugger, files and language server.

It's especially useful when your laptop is running a different OS than Linux which is often the target.

I just hate the overly zealous autocomplete that fixes good words into bad words and forces me to hit Esc every time.

I prefer having my terminals separate from my editor, personally

Sublime Merge by the same folks is also fantastic. My favorite visual fit client

My workflow at the moment is VS Code for TS/JS but Sublime Merge for when I need to interact with git, ignoring the built-in VS Code stuff.

*git

> `subl -` can now be used to read from stdin on all platforms

Cool, with how fast sublime startsup, I bet I will be using it in some pipelines with things like `vipe` (from moreutils). pasting things into sublime for quick text manipulation with regex replace and multiple carets is already a common occurrence in my workflow (things people use sed/awk for, but this is the "discoverable" way I am used to).

For some reason this is really slow for me, and I am not quite sure why. It seems to literally update the buffer line-by-line as input comes in, which is kind of unfortunate for large inputs…

For FreeBSD users who want to install Sublime Text 4 or Sublime Merge 2, you can find ports here:

https://github.com/matias-pizarro/freebsd-custom-ports/tree/...

Hopefully soon, these will get added to the official ports repo and you can find them there:

https://www.freshports.org/editors/linux-sublime-text

https://www.freshports.org/editors/linux-sublime-merge

I am perfectly satisfied with my existing (and now expired) Sublime Text license. Yet I just bought an upgrade anyway because I'm so happy with the software and the developer that I simply wanted to support them through further development regardless.

Very excited about this release!

I immediately took out my CC to purchase an upgrade when I realized the upgrade license is only 12.5% cheaper than a full license. I dunno, man, personally that felt a bit like a slap in the face. I don't care about a few dollars more or less but I _felt_ underappreciated as a returning customer.

I'm a Sublime devotee and have been anxiously awaiting this release and the support for Apple silicon. In my unsophisticated benchmarking, 100% worth the wait.

With the same projects open, ST4 is using about half the memory of rosetta ST3.

The time to index my projects went from about 5 minutes to under a minute.

Searching across large projects is instantaneous.

I'm in the same boat, it's great M1 support was added to ST4 whereas the discussions on forums (last time I checked) were not indicating it was going to happen soon. Very nice.

Does anyone still choose Sublime over VS Code? I wonder what plugins I'd miss from a frontend dev perspective.

I sometimes do, sublime is a significantly faster and sometimes that works with my "though" process better than vscode. Pretty much, I use sublime text when I want to do something fast, and vscode when I want maximum compatibility.

I tried out VS Code after using Sublime for a while, and almost immediately switched back. I may have liked it if I used it more, but VS Code felt comparatively slow, and it seemed like there are a ton of tiny UI elements scattered in every corner, all trying to get your attention about something.

I use Sublime for editing and formatting large CSV/JSON files. It’s much faster than VSCode which I find freezes for my use cases.

Yes. VS Code is too damn slow.

Just tried ST4 over the weekend and decided to switch from VSCode. Basically got everything set up exactly the same, but ST4 feels a lot better/faster.

i begrudgingly use VSCodium at work because they don't have a licence for sublime text and they probably wouldn't buy one if i asked. i swear it takes me twice as long to do things but maybe with time i will get more used to it.

one thing i do like about it is how easy it is to create split screen documents just by dragging then to the edge of the screen

I used to do battery life tests with different editors and sublime always win by a huge margin. This release claims both better performance, and also lower power use? How much less power?

I don't have data on exact gains from hardware accelerated rendering, but simply disabling the blinking cursor reduced power usage by 1W at idle.

I saw a post about ST4 beta here on HN about a month ago. Decided to pay for the license to support the devs, as I was using just the evaluation version before I’ve started by programming career, and then I’ve switched to IDEs and went back to editor world with Atom. ST introduced me to the world of multiple cursors and easy to usr shortcuts. Atom ported that well, and it’s the first thing I set up in vscode (thanks to the atom keymap package).

Sadly, I agree with the post I saw on the other thread month or so ago: “too little, too late”.

I see a lot of mention of how ST is fast, and that’s impressive. But being fast does not make my job web dev easier. Vscode still delivers a superior developer experience, it’s easier for me to understand what’s going on under the hood and work with plugins. The speed is good enough, I work around the slower startup by having a window open at all times while working, so opening a new file is nearly instant.

I’m still glad that I’ve paid for the license. It makes me happy to see small apps that pack a punch and are fast, rather than going for the lazy way of using electron and eat up resources like crazy. I intend to give ST more time on my personal projects. But I just don’t feel as productive, and to me it matters when I’m using an editor almost 8h a day.

I used to use Sublime a couple years back, I do not remember having a paid license though. When I had a slower laptop (I ran Arch on an 8GB/i5 4th Gen) I felt the need for a faster editor.

Today, I tried Sublime Text 4. It is definitely faster to launch and overall UI felt more responsive even in a couple clicks. But I could not see how to browse within the components/files (Ctrl+Click usually) in the folder that I opened (TypeScript/Deno project). VS Code does that without much effort. I could not see how to set debug breakpoints on the editor gutter (left).

I have an i5 9th Gen/20GB laptop now and I would still like a faster editor/IDE. I would be happy to take a license too. But getting debugger and project level browsing setup should be really easy and I feel VS Code does this, even if the overall UX is a bit slower. Plus plugins like Prettier, Git viewer and some other tooling.

I will spend some time but if anyone takes some time to figure these out, please share them. We need more editors so that we do not end up having one winner and then the winner starts becoming a slow monster...

I love ST.

As many stated here one of its strengths is speed: I “close” the editor when I’m done with it and I reopen it when needed: the boot time is <1s; but the speed is not just loading, it’s all over the application. It really feels like a very sharp tool and I’m so used to it that I hardly can work with anything else because it would feel clunky.

Voilà, I just wanted to share my appreciation to the ST team.

I like how I started years ago by saying “Notepad sucks, let me try Notepad++ and Sublime Text”.

Now it’s almost an IDE, but still a great text editor!

Notepad is on every system

I find it hard to believe anyone would use Notepad past the “wow I can edit this HTML file” phase. I found PSPad years before I started working.

Even though I stopped using it as my primary development editor years ago I still use it every day for quickly writing notes and quickly editing arbitrary files.

I just checked, I bought my license in 2013 and since I really appreciate good software that support linux I just upgraded the license.

Thanks for creating a product that has turned out to be useful in many ways over the years!

I still miss the old MS-DOS edit.exe for it's speed, utility, and availability. The faster the better, I can't abide waiting for something that edits plain text.

I might give Sublime 4 a go, because sometimes I just really need a super speedy text change. It will be competing with Emacs for speed and functionality.

Nothing eats through the huge json & text files I have to check on a daily basis, nothing comes even close... while all the funky new kids have crashed and burned trying to process the data I have to ingest, ST has been the one and only trusted source. Bravo!

Interesting, they have a limited 10 days offer $99 USD to $80 USD. https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text

Was this always the case for new revisions?

This is the first sale we've ever done. Thought really it's more of a delayed price increase :)

If I had to guess it’s because the announcement of the new version drives a large amount of traffic to site and they want to entice people with a sale while the new features are still exciting.

I tried Sublime Text a few years ago, and it was OK, but I’m still sticking with Emacs which is burned into my muscle memory. I can use it with or without a GUI (I never use the menu) like in a remote SSH command line. The thing that could get me to move was if there was a Mac AND iPadOS version of Sublime Text.

Looking ahead, now with the M1 chip on the iPad Pro, it seems the next step for Apple would be to allow a lot more power in iPadOS, especially since it is a different OS than iOS on iPhone. We shall see. In the meantime, I plan to get the 2021 iPad Pro 12.9 to replace my 2018 12.9 and look forward to WWDC for any iPadOS announcements.

It's interesting to see how much more performant Sublime is on Windows & Linux than it is on macOS.

https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/hardware-accelerat...

On a 4k display, to render:

* Windows is 3-7ms

* Linux is 3-17ms

* macOS is 18-30ms <-- 10x worse than Windows best

Anyone have ideas on the cause the poor performance of macOS relative to Windows or Linux?

Would also be interesting to know how this compares to VS Code, since a large reason why people choose Sublime over VS Code is due to performance.

That table isn't a comparison between operating systems, it's data points to show how OpenGL compares to software rendering. The hardware used for each operating system is vastly different. The macOS benchmarks were run on a 2015 macbook air, whereas the Windows and Linux benchmarks were run on workstation desktops with dedicated graphics cards.

Too late, too little. Please don't get me wrong- I'm saying this with the utmost respect of a long-time paying user. I used to love and recommend ST but then it stalled in development. Have replaced it with VSCode ~3 years ago.

The approach VSCode takes as platform with a clear development and plugin model is imho better suited and what gives VSCode the competitive advantage (apart from MS backing it of course).

What remains is the Sublime keyboard shortcuts that I‘m using even on VSCode.

I love this editor, but this detail annoys me:

https://i.imgur.com/wu6ZfSa.png

Maybe they fixed it and I did not look up new settings?

Does Sublime have good support for Vue.js, specifically code formatting? I briefly looked a while back and all the plugins seemed ancient.

Is there a good reason that I want to switch from IntelliJ if I'm satisfied with its functionality for web development except that I feel a lighter tool is certainly welcome.

Usually what lighter editors miss is auto completions on SQL fragments as it has no ability to access remote database to analyze the table structures, so they end up as plain text fragment.

I bought the license for sublime text 3 in which feels like forever ago but it turns out that it was only 2.5 years ago and I could use ST4 without having to purchase it.

Amazing. The product is amazing and I love the improvements. Before the language support for Elixir for example was kind of poor and it's vastly improved now.

I feel very excited to run this new version onwards.

I love their philosophy of ever improving performance and memory usage. Sublime is one of the last gem resisting Wirth's Law.

I changed back to Sublime after using VSCode because the UI is just significantly snappier. VSCode has a ton more features but personally I don't think I need them, and the occasional lag when opening files or typing drove me mad. Sublime provides a perfect compromise between terminal-based editors like vim and fully-fledged IDEs, IMHO.

I love Sublime Text. Like many have said already it is indeed really performant. What I like the most is that I can open large files (say 600Mb files) and do stuff like regex search and replace with great performance. This would be pretty much impossible with Atom, or Bracket , or Vscode. I also found ST UI really simple and not bloated.

I used it before, it's very nice. Just wish they'd do a FreeBSD version, then I'd probably still use it.

I also ported v4 and Sublime Merge 2:

https://github.com/matias-pizarro/freebsd-custom-ports/tree/...

Hopefully soon these will get added to the official ports repo and you can find them there:

https://www.freshports.org/editors/linux-sublime-text

https://www.freshports.org/editors/linux-sublime-merge

There seems to be a Sublime Text 3 under freshports: https://www.freshports.org/editors/linux-sublime3/.

If anyone is interested I wrote a small guide to set up Sublime Text 4 for Python development using Python LSP Server: https://yeray.dev/python/setting-up-sublime-text-4-for-pytho...

Sublime Text is my first tool to install on any new notebook. As someone who spends more time in meetings than in writing code, I almost purely use it as a note taking app and nothing’s come closer with just how easy it is to fire up a new note and get started! Thank you for building this.

I hope they have (or have plans to) updated the docs for their plugin API. I've made some bucks building plugins for ST3 and the docs are... scarce. It's a shame, because I prefer using Python for building plugins than JS or TS as in VSCode, but it was a PITA to find anything.

I love how Sublime text is fast and handles large codebases pretty well in my opinion when compared to using VSCode.

I’m definitely not trying to hate VSCode i think it’s awesome too with all the community support but sometimes it just uses way too much ram making my system slow

I love Sublime Text and used it for the first 6 years of my career, but I completely switched to VS Code. It took me 2 attempts and here are some things that eventually made me stay with VS Code:

- better sidebar: drag & drop, quick rename, copy/paste out of the box

- better project search: faster, opens in sidebar by default or you can open it in an editor tab. sidebar search results refresh automatically when you delete search occurrences from files. 'editor tab search results' have syntax highlighting and you can have multiple search tabs open simultaneously

- more usable extension store. I don't need to go on the web to research the best editor extension for given language/technology

- it is open source

- it has a UI for settings

Anyone with experience on Sublime Text with LSP support for C++? I'm currently using CLion but am considering switching to ST if things like autocomplete/go-to-definition/simple refactoring works for C++/CMake without much hassle.

Wait, older versions of ST were NOT rendered by GPU?

No, previous versions rendered purely on the CPU. We did use the GPU on macOS to draw to the window itself, but actually rendering the frames was still done on the CPU.

Unless you're doing something graphically intensive you don't need a GPU at lower resolutions. At higher resolutions (or with much slower CPUs) you do need a GPU to keep up though.

I'm still using Sublime Text 2 on macOS Mojave and sometimes, but not always, if I take a screenshot of it, the text gets captured without syntax highlighting despite being highlighted on screen. So it's definitely doing some graphical shenanigans to render text as fast as it does.

Had to run the following command to make "press and hold keys to repeat" work. (for example holding down the e key will create eeeeeeeeeeeeeee, instead of an option menu to choose eêíë)

defaults write com.sublimetext.4 ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

If you don't want that anywhere, it can also be disabled OS-wide instead:

    defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

then, typing for example ë can be accomplished using alt+u e (may vary by keyboard layout).

Does all of the documentation for sublime text 3 also apply to 4? Is 4 compatible with plugins for 3? Sorry if that's a dumb question, I haven't used sublime text in forever. Hoping to try it out on a flutter project.

> Does all of the documentation for sublime text 3 also apply to 4?

All of our documentation has been updated to describe both 3 and 4. The vast majority of the changes have been additions.

> Is 4 compatible with plugins for 3?

Yes, completely. What's changed is there's now an extra plugin host for python 3.8 with ST4.

Sublime Text is the only editor I use outside of vim. It's worth every penny.

Sublime is blazingly fast for all its features. I hope there will be similar UI for NeoVim in the near future (no Electron please). There is OniVim, but it dropped the NeoVim as an engine, which is quite sad.

You might want to check out Neovide.

https://github.com/Kethku/neovide

I've been using ST4 (beta) last few weeks ago, trying to move away from VS Code. I used to use ST2/3 before moving to Atom and then VS Code.

My experience so far:

- Feels so much faster (as expected, but still faster than VS Code - I'm on M1 MBA)

- Settings are still in JSON instead of GUI

- There's no scrollbar markers [1]

- I was struggling set up the system-based light/dark mode color scheme and theme, wished that it was easier.

[1] https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/2072

Sublime Text is my favorite tool by a long shot, even if I have to admit that I am impressed by the quality of VSCode,

I came back to ST a few months ago when I experienced weird slowdowns on VSCode.

I would love to see an integrated terminal.

This is my most used software. I loved it.

I’m just glad the default theme doesn’t suck anymore. And it respects Dark Mode!

Neat.

Perfect timing. I just ended a months long voyage of VIM and headed back to ST, new version? Bonus!

I also tried VS Code (again) and it still isn’t as snappy as ST. I don’t get the hype.

I'm a IntelliJ/WebStorm user (I use IntelliJ but for mostly JS/TS/X), what's the level of support for these tools vs VS Code for example?

It colors the words, mostly

I am also phpstorm user but I use sublime text exclusively for quick edits or for projects I have not set up "proper IDE" yet as opening whole project folder is much faster in sublime text and there is no need for import or index step which are quite slow on first open

Somehow I enjoy read the changelog, straight to the point.

I've upgraded and it was super smooth. Thanks for that! One question remains, how can one disable the title bar on gnome to preserve space?

You can disable client-side window decorations using the setting `"gtk_client_side_window_decorations": false`.

I am a home, amateur developer and I was always curious why developers would choose an editor instead of an IDE.

When I started to code 25 years ago, there was no choice but as soon as I discovered IDEs I never looked back.

Startup speed may be an issue, but it is I believe insignificant for a coding session (of a few hours). Key bindings are portable. IDEs bring code completion, integrated debugging etc.

I am really curious.

1.) Speed. IDEs often take seconds to start and you just need to edit .md, .json, *.sh.

2.) Support of different file formats and ease to install a new one with Package Control. Often, it's just Ctrl-Shift-P -> Type "Inst" -> type format's name and it's done.

3.) Many IDEs show the typed symbols after some delay and I really hate it.

My opinion is that it depends on the work done (codebase, language, etc.). In the

I am huge sublime text fan, and have updated my license, one thing that I would like to see is an official and better vim emulation extension, I know there is vintage package but it is far from being useful, and then there are other vim emulation packages that are not making proper use of sublime powers, so I would like to see a better and newer vintage package

I’ve found NeoVimtageous to be a good stand in

Check out NeoVintageous

VSCode seems to have a larger and healthier plugin ecosystem but I still find sublime text so much nicer to use.

Does it integrate with the OS text input facilities already? The last time I checked Sublime didn't support Windows 10 native word hints, MacOS long-press accented letter input and didn't accept keyboard shortcuts during using non-latin keyboard layout on Linux.

Great job anyway, Sublime is really cool.

With ST4 we have native support for windows IME and better keyboard support on Linux and Mac OS. The long press has been working for ages as far as I'm aware.

I still need to upgrade from version 2, have been ignoring the update now prompts for a while now it seems!

The cursor got extremely big (high) and it really bugs me. I don't see a way to change that (yet).

Quick screenshot for comparison: https://imgur.com/a/o5v8iVx

Settings:

caret_extra_top

caret_extra_bottom

caret_extra_width

Awesome. Sublime is my favorite editor by far. Performance, multiple cursors, and syntax highlighting is all I need

Couple questions:

1. I already have JSX and TypeScript plugins installed. Should I remove those?

2. When will there be a `~/Library/Sublime Text 4/` directory now?

> I already have JSX and TypeScript plugins installed. Should I remove those?

Yes, you're likely best off uninstalling third party syntaxes for those languages.

> When will there be a `~/Library/Sublime Text 4/` directory now?

See https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/side_by_side.html

Is there any way to get it to render at over 60Hz? I've got a high refresh rate monitor but Sublime still renders in 60Hz. I've enabled the hardware_acceleration and it shows up in the console but still no dice.

Oh, I was wrong, sorry. It turns out that it does render in 120Hz but the smooth scrolling is somehow still capped at 60Hz. Is there a way to fix that?

This is my go-to editor for R, MATLAB, Python, Julia and Markdown notes. Fabulous!

Unfortunately, ny company won't let us install software thats not signed.

Could the portable version do the trick?

I have never been that convinced to switch from vim to a closed source text editor as when I tried ST on Windows.

It has a glorious interface and defaults that give your fingers wings. And maybe one day GPL license, who knows?

Sublime sustained me for years, until I switched to VScode for complaince .. FML.

Go sublime!

Does anyone here have any thoughts on how Sublime Text 4 compare's to Panic's Nova?

I used to be fully on the native editor train, but I love VSCode so much, it's difficult to justify switching back.

What's the best way to have both Sublime 3 and 4 on my Mac? Would it be to rename 3 in ~/Applications and its subl to subl3, then download 4 and let it run as-is?

https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/side_by_side.html

Am I the only one who doesn't like the layout? I really liked Sublime 3, I use it on a daily basis but something doesn't look right on this Sublime 4 :( idk

I changed the tabs angles, the theme, the colors scheme and the caret blinking back to look identical to ST3.

After having sublime have the same theme for years, changing the theme in v4 is very jarring. Is it possible to go back to the same theme that comes OOTB in v3?

The default theme hasn't changed from "Default" in ST4, though there have been some changes to it. The default color scheme however has changed from Monokai to Mariana. You can easily change it back using `Preferences > Select Color Scheme…`. You can also get back the old tabs - though they do have a reduced feature set - using the setting "file_tab_style".

Sublime Text 3 - 10.9 MB RAM

Sublime Text 4 - 109.8 MB RAM

Windows 10 x64

just downloaded it. looks awesome!!!

I kind of completely forgot about Sublime and Atom after VS Code came out.

My text editor journey:

* Dreamweaver

* PSPad

* TextMate

* Try & Fail with Coda

* Sublime Text

* Try & Fail with Atom, BBEdit

* VScode

* Try & fail with Nova

Am i the only one who doesn't like it ? :(

Does Sublime Text 4 have support for WSL2?

I tried using the windows version of ST3 (latest dev releases) with project files living in the wsl2 space and ST didn't jive well with these "remote" files, so I ended up with VS Code and the WSL2 extension.

There isn't anything specific to WSL2 in Sublime Text. Depending on your use case I've seen people either run the Windows version or the Linux version with WSL.

The core question is - is this better than VSCode AS AN EDITOR? In recent months, I had the feeling VSCode just surpassed it in almost every regard.

Even taking performance out of the equation, ‘Go to Symbol in Project’ more than makes up for anything VSCode has. I’m amazed VSCode still doesn’t have that

Does it have a preferences UI yet?

No, .json file as always. Honestly, I like it this way: it is easier to search for parameters and the comments over them explain quickly what each parameter does and how it can be changed.

I'd buy it if it weren't closed source...

One of the few products that you can buy as closed source without hesitation.

any happy clojure ST4 users?

Vim

It's been 84 years...

I feel like they fumbled the ball a bit. Vscode was flailing for a long time before I finally switched away from sublime text. Sublime text had ample time to move the needle on the problems they had for years and ignored.

I don't think I could go back at this point, there isn't any real drawbacks staying with vscode and it's more likely to work with my companies processes.

- no GUI for settings

- no proper file swap/search without having a file preview

- still no LSP built-in

- still no open source (want to edit something like the preview file issue, then you are out of luck and must wait for an update)

- still no debugger built-in

- still no terminal built-in

It's paid and has many issues that doesn't exist in open-source alternatives..

It's sad because i used to love ST, now it is VERY hard to recommend it

Mixcel

This is the future of software even though sublime text isn’t new. People need to understand that the incentive structure surrounding the development and maintenance of software is as much a part of the software as the code is. Open source doesn’t work for the vast number of cases. When Linus dies, the only real example of a successful open source software project will die with him. Making things free doesn’t make you virtuous.

I suppose It's joke.

There are countless successful open source projects (libraries , frameworks and languages).

Open source have come to stay, besides, nobody forbidden you to put a price if you have a opensource project and you want to give a premium experience, with extra features, maintenance or even a technical support.

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