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Comment by sebstefan | Hacker News Reader

Maybe for the Thing™, but from where I stand it does seem like Sublime Text might be headed towards the Abandonware territory if they don't wake up

It had a presence at some point, now every company I visit I see a lot of VS Code and Sublime is nowhere to be found on people's screens. I switched too. I liked sublime text a little better but VSC is free and the Rust integration was very pain free. I have painful memories of having to configure build systems sometimes with Sublime (not with Rust - I didn't use Rust at the time).

And I waste 8 seconds every time I need to boot it up...

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I don't know. For a while, Sublime hit a slump, where 2 was no longer actively maintained, but 3 an unfinished beta that also didn't seem to receive much public updates, but that's been resolved years ago, and from all public indicators, Sublime is a healthy, steady business these days, with regular releases for both Text and Merge and new employees getting hired.

At some point, I was prompted to upgrade, with no indication that it would invalidate my license. Subsequently, there was no obvious path to downgrade. I'm not sure how many people are in my boat, but that left a sour taste. I like the product, but not enough to read the fine print in the license agreement and pay for it again.

Just uninstall and get old versions at https://www.sublimetext.com/2 or https://www.sublimetext.com/3

Since you are licensed you can just disable update check.

I used my licensed old ST for years like this, but recently purchased the new version to get wayland support.

I’m in the same boat. I’m using ST4 unlicensed until they downgrade me back to ST3 automatically.

I can't say I'm surprised, when I was typing it I kind of foresaw the hole in my point was that they could also just keep afloat with a very small market share forever

I recently tackled this with my side projects and created an open source contingency plan (https://www.candid.dev/open-source/). Basically, if a product goes without an update for six months, it will be released under the MPL-2.0. I am still working on finding some kind of foundation that can keep the code in escrow, for now it is just written online and in the LLC operating agreement.

They've been around since 2008. They released a huge major version change (4.0.0) just 2 years ago.

They've released 12 builds in the past year[0]. They released 3 builds in one month last December. Two weeks ago was their most recent patch. Here's the most recent patch from two weeks ago on this "Abandonware". They have Mac/Windows/Linux specific fixes as well as fixes to their API. They're not just fixing bugs either, new improvements have been added.

Sublime deserves all the money they make. The price is super reasonable. You may be confusing "Abandonware" with "Mature software that doesn't need any major fuck-up changes anymore because all of its users love the way it works and happily spend money on it"

BUILD 4148 14 Mar 2023

Various syntax highlighting improvements

Last tab in a group can now be selected with alt+9 (Windows/Linux) and cmd+9 (Mac)

Split View retains the original view's viewport position

The window title now indicates whether Sublime Text is running with administrator privileges

Improved indentation detection for files with many single space indents

Fixed first character beyond ASCII range not being decoded/encoded for short code pages

Find in Files no longer cancels ongoing search with a renamed buffer

Fixed regression where ./ wouldn't work in the "Where" field of find-in-files

Fixed find settings confusion when run immediately after find_under_expand

Fixed minimap viewport highlighting not working when color schemes specify a text background

Reopen Closed File now uses the window's file history by default rather than global history

Fixed annotations displaying incorrectly when "ui_scale" is set to something other than 1

Fixed issue where the command palette could consume key presses while not having input focus

Fixed syntax-based folding not working correctly with some indented code

Fixed backtracking bug where tokens were being dropped

Fixed some hangs caused by syntax backtracking

Fixed tabs of deleted files incorrectly showing as modified in some cases

Fixed word wrap wrapping early in some cases

API: Added Window.num_views_in_group

API: Fixed inconsistent focus after Window.open_file

Mac: Better support for running as root

Mac: Added workaround for Monterey bug causing scrolling to misbehave

Linux: Fixed incorrect mouse behavior at window edges

Linux, Mac: Attempt to find the license key for the user when using sudo

0: https://www.sublimetext.com/dev

For anyone else curious, the most recent update on their site seems to be from May 21, 2021, so almost two years ago -- but unless I missed it, this does not seem to be mentioned by the article.

The author seems to simply be saying that VSCode is more popular because it's open source, and therefore Sublime should go open source. Not sure I quite follow.

Two years is definitely a long while, but Sublime has always had long breaks between releases.

> unless I missed it

You missed it[0]. Last update was 2 weeks ago, not 2 years ago. Sublime has had 12 updates in the past 12 months, with 3 updates in December alone.

0: https://www.sublimetext.com/dev

The latest stable version of ST4 was released in November 2022, and the latest dev build in March 2023. https://www.sublimetext.com/dev I assume that their target audience is inquisitive enough to find out about recent updates.

There are long periods without updates though.

> VSC is free and the Rust integration was very pain free

I switched from VSCode to Sublime Text. While Rust Analyzer has best support in VSC it works more than ok in Sublime Text.

I had no problem paying for Sublime Text (and Sublime Merge). My mbp has enough battery and RAM but there is no reason for VSC to be that hungry.

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