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Comment by brittohalloran | Hacker News Reader

Can I just say I love the pricing model. It's paid software, with an unenforced 'trial period'. Relying on coders who use a text editor all day and appreciate good software and want to compensate someone for their good software. +1 humans.

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Plus the license allows me use it on all of my machines (Linux, OSX, Windows), at home or at work, for commercial or non-profit purposes.

That right there sold me- no issues at all getting purchase orders at work and regardless of the OS I'm using I still have the same editor.

That was the main reason why I purchased it. I love having a reliable editor on all OS.

I agree. It would be great to see some revenue numbers, if it's really successful (which I think it is), it would be a nice model for other developers or software companies.

I'm not sure about that. Developers tend to be more sensible about paying for software. Regular people will just download it without reading the "yada yada" stuff about paying.

Case in point: WinRAR, anyone?

EDIT: Just to clarify, I like the pricing model too. I just don't think it works for software in general.

An article on the demise of winamp suggested that the winamp people were receiving over $100,000 a month in checks sent by mail. I would suppose if you had an easier way to pay then checks by mail, even more "regular" people would be willing to pay.

I point out winamp because it is similar in that no new features are unlocked after paying.

Fair enough, though few of us will ever write software as popular as WinAMP once was.

Well, it's infinite trialware, but it pops a few nag screens here and there, especially when saving files. And this, when you are working and have a habit of mashing Cmd+S regularly, gets in the way often enough.

I think the nag dial is just about right between casual use/unlimited evaluation and I'm using this editor for real shit.

Interestingly, I think this model works best for 'software for developers'. Developers naturally empathize with the author of their software much more so than a 'typical user' would.

Developers are typically very bad software customers. As much as they could empathize, more often than not, they think they could do it themselves in a couple of weekends.

I have wasted so many months of my life in this trap, spending a few days coding an app myself rather than paying usually less than $100 for it (usually because I want some small feature it doesn't have) . I dont think its ever been worth it in the long run.

I'm fairly sure he's made really quite a large chunk of dollar out of it already. Especially after he started forcing people to pay up if they wanted the very latest builds. That was a stroke of genius.

Really? I was using the dev builds without paying (bought my license yesterday).

Nightly would be the very latest, I think.

That is, it's not like, say, Chrome release where it's Dev -> Beta -> Stable. It is (was?) more like Nightly -> Dev -> Beta/Stable.

I saw it as more that he didn't want the masses trying to use potentially buggy builds as their 9-5 editor, which is what happened with "dev" beforehand.

That's interesting. Back when I was using Windows, I had some tools (like WinRAR, I think) with that sort of license. I hated it. One of the things I really loved when switching to Linux is that I didn't have to deal with that sort of nonsense for an archiving tool, or for any other tool I needed but didn't use often.

Would Flatr be appropriate here?

How often do you use a text editor?

Naturally, I use a text editor almost all the time. That doesn't make this licensing model any better though: it's still annoying, and there are still superior alternatives that are free in both senses of the word. For me, that alternative happens to be Emacs, but there are other options that are almost as good :P.

Of course, it is much harder to learn how to use Emacs properly (navigating with the keyboard, using more obscure commands, writing your own elisp... and so on). However, as everybody has pointed out, your text editor is probably your most important tool; it seems odd to be willing to put down some money on one but not willing to sit down with a tutorial and learn how to use something like Emacs well. Sure it might slow you down for a bit (it took me about a week to get as proficient with Emacs as I was before), but it's completely worth it in the long run. I've been using Emacs for almost three years now, and it's helped me do all sorts of things more efficiently than I would have with another editor.

While I agree with almost everything you said, I think you're downplaying the importance of person preference. I used Emacs nearly exclusively for well over a decade, but fell in love with ST2 the moment I tried it. To me, it feels like a well-configured Emacs that's 95% the way I like it right out of the box. The other 5% has been easy to install through the package manager. As a bonus, it's scripted in a language I like working in.

Don't assume that people are flocking to ST2 because they're not aware of the alternatives. I'm very aware of them. For me, the advantages of ST2 over Emacs were worth the money and I'm glad I bought a license.

That said, I always keep the latest Emacs installed on my laptop and I could jump back into it if ST2 were to disappear off the planet tomorrow. I hope it doesn't, though, because I find ST2 more pleasant to use than Emacs and I hope I can keep using it for a long time.

I really appreciate being able to just use it on whatever machine I am at. I did bought it initially just to support the developer, but since I use both Linux, OSX and Win, it helps great deal to have two good editors, vim and Sublime Text ;)

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