Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben-schaaf | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.

View on HN

For starters, I love the licensing, as it is very fair: I bought a personal license and I can take it to as many machines as I have (I do use many different computers). And you can buy it one time, no silly monthly subscription fees.

As a result, Sublime ist the only commercial (locally installed) software I still use, and it is always open.

There are situations, where I use macros, regex substitutions, or browsing the file system (using the keyboard only for speed) when I prefer to use my other editor, Emacs.

I recently played with Zed, which looks cute, but I immediately lost an important file, so back I was in the Sublime buffer. (Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything.)

I tend to have many Windows open (several dozens), some of them for several years, others for five minutes. The only two features I would like are: - search across all open files and - a list of edit buffers that is itself an editable buffer that you can walk around using cursor key and select a file by hitting RETURN like Emacs has it.

Generally, I prefer that I doesn't become a feature overloaded big monster of a program that can do everything (that's Emacs already, but I like both, I just want them to stay different).

Although for longer-term programming of bigger projects I prefer IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or PyCharm CE, in recent time, I had to write mostly small programs, and both Emacs or Sublime fit that bill (no need for language servers for me for two screens full of a Python script as I also teach that stuff).

> but I immediately lost an important file

Zed has an "autosave" setting, it's just off by default.

Sublime’s behaviour isn’t an autosave, it just never loses text in a window. You can upgrade the entire OS, start Sublime and your windows and text will be waiting for you, regardless of saved or unsaved state. I’ve got five-year-old scratchpad windows open that I’ve never saved.

Fwiw zed also has this explicit "sublime style" save all buffers since 3-4 months ago.

How do you enable it? I just installed Zed yesterday and I was looking for this setting.

Edit, I suspect what I wanted was the "after delay" setting here https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#autosave

It doesn’t save unnamed files which is mostly how I use this feature in sublime-text (as a scratch pad): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4985

That's still my favorite feature of all, it even remembers the undo history. Never lost anything to a crash.

I had no idea it preserved this too.

I think you need to create a project file and then it stores things there.

For a long time I would get paranoid about accepting Mac updates which would require a reboot because then I'd lose my undo history and then I discovered that this is all I would need to do.

While I meant closing the whole application at once (which restores all windows/projects and unsaved changes when you restart ST), you're right that projects keep track of unsaved state on a per-project basis, too. So you can open and close project windows individually, but also do the same for Sublime Text as a whole.

It doesn't remember undo history after you close the tab, would love to see that feature though!

VSCode does this as well.

I do this with Notepad++ and honestly I have mixed feelings about it. It's so convenient but I feel weird about constantly pasting semi-important notes and snippets into this unnamed, unsaved, unsynced doc that just sits there always open on my desktop.

Basically I just feel guilty that I'm not using a "proper" note taking application when so many of them exist.

I use notepad++ in the same way without guilt, I also have a paper notebook where I write things in the same random chaos. In the past I had at a time a LG monitor that had really large bezels and I used to glue post its to it all the time as my "temporary" notes.

Most of note taking applications I tried attempt to convince all my text is important and must be stored and if possible classified and that's just not how my relationship with physical notes is.

I resonate a lot with this. Like most of what goes into that system really is pretty disposable, but it would be nice if a note-taking app could just quietly swallow anything I didn't look at for a few days, while still making it available as an "also, this?" entry in full text search. Or maybe for a kind of context-aware search/browsing, if it were possible to do a query like "show me everything I added or altered around the same time I was working with keywords x and y".

I used to use a clipboard manager. It had two functionalities:

- The ability to scroll or search my clipboard history

- The ability to pin/favorite individual entries, which would then show up in the pinned/favorited tab

That thing was practically my extra brain before the database corrupted itself... (that threw me so off that I don't even remember anymore most of the time from back when I had it.)

It's saved, just not to separate files.

And the solution to getting it synced is to back up your computer, which you should definitely be doing.

Fair, and I have a whole-system backup (Backblaze), but if the unsaved Notepad++ files were lost, I don't even know what it is I'd have to download from BB to recover them. Obviously I can Google that and figure it out, but who knows... maybe the BB agent will consider them a cache and exclude them? The point is that I haven't really taken the time to consider much of this because step 1 would be to literally just hit the save button, and I haven't even done that.

More broadly, though, I don't know that I consider whole-system backups as important as I might have once. All my local important docs are in Dropbox, and all the code I'm working on is regularly synced out to git hosts. Other than some unimportant Fusion/Bambu projects, most of what I'd lose is honestly that same kind of ephemeral context that unsaved Notepad++ files are: terminal history, browser bar completions, my downloads folder, etc.

I'll just say that if it was somehow not backing up AppData/Roaming that would be a big deal and you would want to figure that out and fix it ASAP.

Same. Although I just discovered UpNote, which seems good so far.

>never loses

That was not my experience with sublime because it'd just spontaneously lose a session along with all unsaved data. Some other people would have similar problems too (just look up 'sublime lost session', and apparently people are still having these kinds of problems with them complaining even quite recently).

If you have multiple windows open and close them in the wrong order, you lose everything but the last one. Learned that the hard way and now never have more than one open.

It works well, but Zed consuming too much CPU on Linux: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14833

How did you lose a file?

possibly restarting the System

> but I immediately lost an important file

Notepad++ has had that feature (persisting temporary text buffers) before Sublime Text even existed.

I'd guess vim has had this (the .swp files) since the 90's.

>Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything.

Unless, of course, you accidentally press "delete folder" instead of "remove folder from project" in the sidebar context menu.

As far as I’m aware it just goes to the bin, it’s not rm’d, so it is recoverable.

It's not a one-time purchase if you consider updates.

> Personal licenses are a once off purchase, and come with 3 years of updates. After 3 years, an upgrade will be required to receive further updates.[0]

Tbh I think this is fair, but it surprises me every 3 years when I have to pay up again xD

[0]: https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text

I actually like when I get the note that I need to pay for the upgrade. It's a good reminder that I still find Sublime valuable (so much that I use almost daily), and that I got 3-4 years of free upgrades for a fair price (vs. subscription models like 1Password, or version-specific rip-offs, like VMware Workstation).

It's one of my favorite piece of software. Obsidian being another one.

Hey! I'm a Sublime Text user since ST2 in 2011.

I love ST (my last blog post is https://blog.separateconcerns.com/2025-01-04-teal-lsp-sublim...) and I think the main thing lacking compared to the competition is the remote development experience.

I work in AI so we typically work over SSH on machines with big GPUs. Most of my colleagues use VSCode because it has a very good Remote Development extension.

Can't this be solved using a remote file system these days?

I haven't done it in years since with every customer from the last few years the only official way to get to prod is a CI-pipeline, but I think I remember using sfpt or ssh-based file systems even a decade back?

You can use a remote FS but it is nowhere close to the experience VSCode gives you. For instance, running code will run it locally, not on the remote machine.

Likewise!

The only reason I moved away from subl is that I got access to a big ass machine and I needed to work remotely. The performance of VS code here is so good that often times I forget that the code and terminal is not my local machine.

This! Upvote for ST SSH remote development, currently using ST for local dev and VSCode for remote.

IMO remote mounts is a feature of the OS.

For Linux and macOS, you can mount ssh directly.

Unfortunatley, Windows makes it a little more complicated.

But there's hope. You can use yasfw with dokany (dokan fork).

https://github.com/DDoSolitary/yasfw

https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany

Or mount from inside WSL.

In principle I agree, in practice I haven't found an OS based filesystem mount that works as reliably as vscode. In particular, I mean the connection is relatively robust, reconnects automatically most of the time after an outage and editing is totally asynchronous, i.e. there's no noticeable pause after saving before continuing editing and no lag (other than what's induced by the electron) when editing.

Same here, for 15 years. I mainly use vi on the remote machine.

My preference is that it could use .ssh/config to explore the remote machine and then open/edit the file/dir.

I actually have heard that working over a remote connection can be a pain. From what I've seen from other Sublime users is that they will usually just mount a drive and then edit off that. There are also a couple of SSH plugins that can be used. In the past, I've just downloaded the files I've needed and then used rsync or scp. Not slick, but it works.

Remote development is VSCode's killer feature.

This would be my top feature request. In addition to being great to have generally, there are increasingly environments where this is essentially a requirement and local copies are often verboten so you can't just use rsync/ssh.

Same experience. My local machine at $Job is so slow and locked down that spinning up a VM in the cloud + VSCode remote plugin is the only way I can develop now. I would not have switched if I could edit the remote filesystem without syncing. I've worked on a ton of projects with the paid SFTP plugin but it was too painful in this case.

I've used it for 15 years and ST is still the first thing I install on a new PC.

All thoughts, meeting notes, journals, blog post drafts... everything is jotted down in ST first. I even went as far as writing my own to-do list syntax highlighter[1] which is the main reason ST is always open, at home and at work, even though I mostly use VSCode and IntelliJ for coding nowadays.

[1]: https://github.com/mlagerberg/todo

Love the simplicity of your to to-do list syntax highlighter in comparison to todo.txt. That's more how my brain works, as simple as possible. Especially your take on the due date vs. date when you plan to do it. Will definitely try it out.

Same! I use ST for my to-do list and personal wiki, with custom highlighting and commands, and VSCode for coding.

I also use sublime for managing todo and IDE for coding as my work repo uses custom tooling for build and autocomplete which only supports Visual Studio.

I use PlainTasks [0] which is very similar to your plugin but also has a few keyboard shortcuts to toggle the item state. Using this with a watered down GTD setup has really brought a lot of peace in both my personal and professional life.

[0] https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks

Wow, you really pulled out all the tricks for this one! Commands, key bindings, completions, snippets, and a syntax! Nicely done!

That's really cool. Great work!

Why does sublime do code navigation in such a clunky way? Such as "go to definition". Control click does not work, instead you need to press the far away F12 key. It then opens up a new tab instead of an inline dropdown. Apparently that tab isn't normal text, it's clickable text. it contains usages as well as definitions so you need to manually scan and decipher the results. When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)

The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.

Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.

Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?

Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.

> It then opens up a new tab instead of an inline dropdown. Apparently that tab isn't normal text, it's clickable text.

If you're talking about the built-in goto-definition then it's definitely not a tab, it's a popup similar to goto-anything and the command palette. You can type to filter, use the arrow keys, press enter, ctrl+enter for side-by-side, etc.

If you want to use the mouse you can hover over the symbol and get a list of definitions and references.

> it contains usages as well as definitions

That sounds like you've got a syntax that isn't classifying its symbols correctly. I vaguely remember Microsoft's Typescript package doing this. All the built-in syntaxes properly classify definitions so you won't have references show up in that list. It's possibly simply removing a package will fix this for you.

> When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)

Not scrolling to the definition is odd, it's working fine for me. I agree we could highlight the definition better; by default the line is highlighted though. You can enable line highlighting if that's too subtle.

> The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.

We don't currently have a terminal, but the Terminus plugin is fairly popular if that's what you're looking for.

> Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.

We generally don't integrate that tightly with build systems; doing so effectively requires a plugin per external build system. Though I don't know if you'd actually want to have all targets listed for Make, since virtually everything is a target (and apparently this wasn't possible until --print-targets was added last year).

> Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?

If you have the build system set to "Automatic", then ST will automatically pick which ones to make available. For Make it'll check for a Makefile for instance. You can then use Build With… to select the one you want to use. If you've manually picked a different build system then that's what ST will use.

> Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.

The behavior you want it to have sounds like how I remember it being, but that's clearly not the case; I'll have to look into that, thanks.

It's rare for an app dev (of such a popular tool) to go out of their way to respond to a random forum user. Even rarer is to address every point on their list with patience and consideration.

You must be a remarkable person and I wish you nothing but success.

Thank you for responding. I was wrong about some of these in hind sight.

Today when I tried goto-definition, it worked as expected. I'm not sure why it didn't before. This was for a C project. I do have various Package Control packages installed:

  "Golang Build",
  "Package Control",
  "PackageResourceViewer",
  "SublimeLinter",
  "SublimeLinter-clang",
  "Theme - One",

And you were right, I had set my build process manually. I'm sorry for slandering.

What I meant by "terminal" is the output monitoring pane. Whenever I build "C - single file" or "Python - single file", a pane with <textarea> behavior appears in the bottom, showing the program output. But if said program is interactive, there's no way to send it any input. Nor to stop the program. Building it again leads to a new instance of the program being spawned, but the old one stays running.

Is there any chance we'd see a Sublime Debug? Loved Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. The main thing I'm missing in my life is a really good and fast cross platform UI for a LOT of debugger backends. (I tend to works with a lot of programming languages, and CLI debuggers are really clunky to use).

I'd also be delighted with, and happy to part with cash for, such a thing.

I have found this plugin works surprisingly well

https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Debugger

Wow, I did not know about this.

ST user who is on it still mostly just by inertia (learning tools is my least favorite part of the job) but really not getting the features I want/need from it. This'll help!

Cool, but git integration in the editor was also cool until SublimeHQ decided to spin out a dedicated client for it.

The only debugger I'm happy with right now (in terms of performance/features) is RemedyBG, but it's windows only and compiled languages only. In general, I mostly live with painfully slow debugging in VSCode.

I would really love to see RemedyBG's dedicated debugging UI/UX approach refined by some group like SublimeHQ. A group who knows how to turn the UX up to 11.

> Cool, but git integration in the editor was also cool until SublimeHQ decided to spin out a dedicated client for it.

Is it completely removed from Sublime Text?

I love merge, but the simplest controls like stage/unstage/commit/indicate file status seem kind of essential.

Having said that, Merge is far and away the best git UI I've used. It has saved my bacon a few times. I'm not terrible with git in the terminal (I use it there 98% of the time), but sometimes... I really don't want to be doing things without a decent visual representation of the mess and chaos, and intuitive access to the tools available. I get why they wanted to create Merge.

> Is it completely removed from Sublime Text?

Of course not. I was just describing 2 different levels of coolness.

Thanks for Sublime Text! It's been my daily driver for over 15 years :). 10 of those developing Rust, and making heavy use of the Rust Analyzer/LSP plugin infra.

I also want to thank you for having such a reasonable licensing model, I'm launching my own desktop app in the next week or so, and I plan to have a very similar model to Sublime (free to use with nags, license is good for any personal usage, inclusive of updates for X period of time).

I've been using Sublime Text since version 2, so probably close to 15 years, and I love it! It's my go to editor for code (mostly front end web dev but I've used it for C# as well, when VS won't get out of the way) as well as all of my writing (using Markdown). I've published 5 tabletop RPGs and related supplements (with another on the way) all written using Sublime plus so many lines of notes and blog posts. It's a dream to work with!

I've paid for my licence but is there a tip jar anywhere?

I've been a Sublime Text user for ten years, bought it and Sublime Merge multiple times. A year ago, I permanently moved to VSCode because of three things:

1. Solid coding AI integration with frequent improvements. Sublime Text at best gives you an option to plug an LSP with modest capabilities. It's behind the times.

2. Small community, infrequent extension updates.

3. Limited UI capabilities. Extensions have to contort hard to fit into available extension points.

What's your vision of ST future?

That's basically my experience. I've switched from ruby to golang a while ago and developing in sublime text was become a pure pain, while vscode provided a lot of plugins to solve basic needs. Then i switched back to ruby and discovered that vscode also have superior ruby support.

I still love sublime text, but there is no way i'm going back to it.

Those are actually some of the reasons why I use Sublime.

Yeah I have accessibility/distraction issues with all the flair and animations and small text in vs code.

I know all text editors need some degree of config to be comfortable but sublime is nearly immediately usable. Vs code is the only thing I need to configure to remove flair and features vs extend them.

I agree. The last thing I want from Sublime is to have AI nonsense.

Here's my two (or three?) cents

1. There are several plugins that allow AI integration 2. There is an active community on https://discord.sublimetext.io

3. From what I can perceive based on Sublime HQ's responses, it's main focus for Sublime Text is simplicity and to be a text editor. You can notice this if you look at the banner text in the website; it says "Text Editing, Done Right". And while it is mainly used for code and most of its users are developers, it tries not to be. However, it does provide people the ability to extend it however they please.

Overall, Sublime Text is indeed not as fully featured as VSCode because it is not supposed to.

Semantic highlighting! The LSP thing I mean [1]. It's the one thing which I thought was just an aesthetic nicety but actually makes a huge difference. In C++ for example:

- Color virtual calls differently from direct calls to tell them at a glance

- Class members in a different color than regular variables

- Arguments in a different color than locals, in a different color than statics

- Consts in red, mutable variables in orange

makes a huge difference in effortlessly reading the code.

It's not supported in Sublime (though you can hack a kludge to make a basic version of it work).

[1] https://gist.github.com/swarn/fb37d9eefe1bc616c2a7e476c0bc03...

I don't use it much for programming, since I mostly use IntelliJ for that.

Where Sublime shines for me is opening large files, and opening pretty much any file. So many times MacOS wants me to open a json file in Xcode, or a txt file in TextEdit, when all i want to do is open it in Sublime! And I know that i can open files that are multiple GB without issues, just takes a few seconds :P

And the Ctrl-D shortcut and multi-cursor in general is so neat. I know other editors have it too now, but when I showed my wife how useful it was for simple tasks like formatting a list of emails...she ended up making her company buy her a license and teaching others how to use it.

Just in case you or another reader doens't know (you probably do), it is very easy to configure MacOS to by default open .txt or .json (or whatever) files in the app of your choice, such as ST. I have ST opening .txt and .json, yeah.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/choose-an-app-to-op...

(There's also prob some way to do it from terminal, but I do it the above way)

Piling up to the grateful comments, I've been using Sublime Text for years and still love it. It has never quite done it as an IDE for me as I'm used to more fully fledged ones like IntelliJ, however it is an amazing scratch pad and text manipulation tool. I pretty much have it permanently open. This post made me realise I had never bought a license, it is now done. Thank you for it being fair, by the way.

I'm genuinely interested in seeing what you kind of envision for Sublime Text, its evolved nicely, and arguably I would say that it inspired some of today's top editors like VS Code and even Atom, I definitely felt like those took strong inspiration from ST.

1. You've said that the UI system is tightly coupled with the text editor. What are the benefits to this? How difficult was it to use the UI system with sublime merge?

2. How are you able to maintain stability of the application? Do you have an extensive test suite? What QA do you have in place?

2a. How do you ensure that there is no regression in editor performance?

3. Sublime text is almost 2 decades old. How has the code based evolved since then? Does it have a lot of technical debt, or has the core of the editor aged well and remains relatively unchanged?

I have a lot of respect for Sublime Text not being yet-another-electron-monster. Thanks for your work.

Sublime Text team, thank you so much for creating the best tool out there! I truly appreciate the stability and simplicity of your product.

My main request is to add a tool similar to Cursor Composer and Chat. Thank you again!

Long time Sublime customer here: Please, please do not add any LLM integrations. One of the main reasons I love Sublime is that I can just focus on writing code, without 100 distracting things popping in and popping out. Also, that I support a business with my money that does not spend resources on the LLM hype.

I am in the exact opposite boat - AI is significantly improving my programming flow and having to use VSCode (well, VSCodium in my case) rather than something lightweight like Sublime is suboptimal - I would love a good plugin for LLM integration ala Cody and frankly that's the only way I could see myself as a paying customer.

I'm in the best boat, I don't want to use LLM but I think ST having hooks to allow people to make such plugins (if those don't already exist) would be a fine thing. Luckily, that boat has loads of space and you're all invited :P

Sure, I'm fine with this boat :D

I'm aboard for sure!

The resistance developers have to LLMs considering how much they're 10xing myself and many other devs I know is just sad to see. Anytime new disruptive technology comes in there's always an old guard that doesn't adapt in time.

In this thread you're seeing survivorship bias. We're discussing an editor that doesn't support AI.

AI is Rashomon. It's just an association engine of immense scope. We're not talking to an alien intelligence; we're talking to ourselves. It's an existential mirror, and each person's experience will vary. Some people can control the dance of the campfire flames. Some people just aren't cut out to be shamans.

Evolution is always making failed experiments, as a hedge against catastrophic ecosystem change. I'm convinced that neurodivergents are better suited to becoming AI Centaurs, in the sense Gary Kasparov promoted after he came to terms with his chess loss to IBM's Big Blue.

I made my career by computerizing a branch of mathematics that did not want to cooperate. Now in retirement, I see AI as the key to achieving my dreams before my father's dementia arrives. It has radically transformed my past month.

My preferred language is Lean 4, and AI has as hard a time coding in it as people. This morning's retooling has been distilling the Lean 4 website down to fit well within a 200K token context window. I prefer AI chat at arms length so I make the mistakes not it, but with enough editor integration that we can both see what we're doing.

I loved Sublime Text when I used it. And AI coding doesn't primarily accelerate one's original spec, it encourages tool scopes one might never have dared attempt. So writing a Sublime Text plugin that interfaces with an Anthropic API key is something any of us could probably knock off.

Would be good to have it opt-in, without any sort of inpact, for users, who aren't using it.

As someone who also loves ST, please do not do this. Stay far away from bringing in something like that. If someone really wants this it seems much better suited for a plugin, which anyone can make.

as a paying customer I will stop renewing my license if AI slop generation appears in the product

Similar to LSPs our approach to this sort of thing is to enable plugins authors to integrate 3rd party tools.

I just added a "Open In Cursor" plugin:

https://github.com/spencerchristensen/sublime-open-in-cursor

It isn't on Package Control yet as I just submitted the PR.

I made this as I love Sublime Text as a text editor and do not want to pollute it with AI garbage. However, there are times where I want to quickly open the same file in Cursor to hash out some their agents. Workflow is:

- lovely text editing in Sublime

- encounter something I would like AI assistance for

- quickly pop open the thing in Cursor and do the AI stuff

- hop back to Sublime to continue my lovely editing

Thank a lot for sublime, this software is incredible, especially the consistent keyboard handling across all UI, all others editors messes up on this one !

I've things I'd like to see with sublime:

- I'd like to have all menu entries accessible from command palette.

- I dont use files tabs (always hidden). I'd like to have a special mode that only tracks saved/unsaved status on files, no opened status, or something like auto close on file switch. I've just no use for the opened status, I'm not even sure why it exists besides being a relic of the past (good old) times where "goto file" did not exist.

- I like sublime to be aware of git branches changes, eg having heuristic for auto closing or revert saved files are not present in FS after branch switch. The feature is partially here with the reload suggestion. (this partially overlaps the no-open status)

- Goto default file listing should be last opened file present on fs, and then alnum sorted listing

I suspect there are roadblocks for these suggestions, sorry if I overlooked obvious issues.

I’ve been a happy user customer for subl and smerge since launch even when a student.

I really really appreciate how few regressions, amazing low latency and always refining everything. And I’ve def had positive interactions with everyone who is working on the sublime sublime software since it’s been out. So like 10-15 years ish I’m going to guess without looking stuff up

Maybe you can priorize https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/1649. As a heavy LSP user, I find it very inconvenient not being able to copy text out of popups.

Also, I think you should open-source `minihtml`.

That would be handy. I tend to use the "diagnostic panel" like one of the comments suggests for that reason. It isn't perfect but it works.

On the odd chance that you read this and feel like replying, I have always been in awe of Sublime Text's UI. Can you elaborate a bit on how it works? There was a short comment by Jon Skinner that it is custom and written on top of a cross-platform portability layer, but I mean, I'd love to hear some more details.

Are there are plans to improve Search UI and make sidebar more capable. I really like the way VSCode’s search interface where results are listed on sidebar and clicking an item opens the file in the editor.

Regardless of the above experience, Sublime Text is still my daily driver since 2012. Nothing has come close to it.

there is a "Find in Files" feature. It will show you a new tab with results where you can use key binds to navigate (next, previous, open line of result)

You can see the feature under "Find > Find in Files" You can see the "navigation" under "Find > Find Results"

For more help, head over to https://discord.sublimetext.io (and tag me, I'll reply when I can)

This is what I use. Unfortunately, when I’m doing a search and replace, the search results don’t update automatically once I’ve edited a file.

But thank you for replying. I’ll hop into Discord eventually.

12-ish year user here. I love Sublime and by extension love you. Keep up the awesome work!

I’m a hobbyist programmer but make my living as a doctor and use Sublime to write medical reports. It’s just so damn good for manipulating/shaping/crafting text.

Not a question, but by God I hope Sublime makes enough money to justify continuing to do business, because if you can't both make something you love and get paid a good chunk of change for one of the best quality editors in the industry, then it would make me very sad.

Love sublime text! Would be amazing to see a blog post from you guys go over the gui framework. Really cool tech! It’s my editor of choice!

Please fix the bug if possible with Sublime Merge where the UI just becomes completely unresponsive... it always happens due to using it on a workspace and its so annoying to force close and reopen it every day! I love sublime merge otherwise!

My colleague does Sublime Merge, but I can look into this for you. Have you reported this on our issue tracker: https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_merge/issues?

G'day, I head up the Sublime Merge team.

Firstly, thanks for using it and supporting us!

If you haven't already, it would help immensely to get a bug report here: https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_merge/issues/new/choose

I'll definitely look into this further and get it sorted

Was a sublime user through version 2 and 3, which were always champions of performance, but while I installed and used 4 for a bit it never quite became part of my workflow.

I think part of it was because it sat between using neovim vs. using vscode, and if I had to reach out for vscode I probably wanted to use remote code editing, code intelligence or AI integration which a default sublime setup wasn't quite offering, and the plugin game seemed stale. Maybe there were also some Wayland issues, don't remember.

Maybe I'll try again and see what you have been up to. Using a proprietary text editor in ${current_year} feels a bit weird though.

I’d happily pay again if you come up with remote editing like VSCode has. It’s the killer feature. You can forbid me from using any of its extensions and turn off syntax highlighting, but as long as I can connect somewhere over SSH and still have the latency of local editing, I’d be using it.

That said, it seems like in 2025 AD the LSP client should come baked in and integrated, with configurations for how to start individual LSP servers possibly shipping on the side. I liked how the whole Go shebang was accessible in Zed in one click, same in VSCode.

That all said, I still use Sublime Text whenever I can.

Thank you so much for the tool you've built, and for being so generous in how you license it. Sublime is always installed on my machine, Sublime Merge is great too :)

Big fan of the tool. Sublime was one of the few editors that could even open the massive logs one project was generating. The recovery is so good, I've realized I had dozens of tabs unsaved for years until IT updated machines.

One question: is there going to be another 3.x release? The popup takes you to a 4.x release, which is great if you are on 4.x. If it hit EOL, it makes it easy for us to force the update. Right now, it is in a bit of a weird in between.

The last release of ST3 was in 2019 [1], 2 years before the first stable release of ST4. It is dead.

[1]: https://www.sublimetext.com/3

ST3 won't be receiving any bugfixes or new features, so it's effectively EOL. Anyone's of course free to use ST3 or 2 or 1 if they don't wish to upgrade, we still make those available on our website.

Sublime user for many many years now. I've tried VSCode many times, never liked it. I use Cursor a bit now but still prefer Sublime. Thank you for building it!

Perhaps Sublime Text could run some annual anonymous survey?

It could both be an indicator of what the community is doing, and who your users are, and also a way to promote some new features people might have missed (like the survey "state of CSS").

I enjoy both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge almost everyday, thank you very much for making them!

Some annoyances, though:

- the way plugins are displayed inside ST while browsing for them is limited. Other editors usually provide a much better UI. The web version of package control is required in the end.

- Ctrl-P does not the same thing in ST and SM, and it always tricks me. I wished they would be more aligned by default, but that ship has sailed I guess. I should rebind them.

- SM UI can be slow / be unresponsive for a while like when a tool has run and 20k files were created but not part of git ignore yet. It makes deleting them quite difficult from the UI.

- I wish SM would allow me to pick up patch files from the diff UI and import them from there more easily.

- I wish Mac OS dictation would be more native in SM, and allow me to change language like in other Mac OS apps.

Hi, I just renewed my sublime text and merge licenses after starting in 2021. Thank you for sticking to simple product excellence and not following trends. Thanks for focusing on the editor for human users and not pushing some service based enterprise licensing system or ai tooling where the company aspires to 1000x. It’s a great product and my most used PC software.

The most important thing for me as I am using ST since ca. 2009. I am retro programming fan and ST is the only editor that still allows me to conveniently work on windowses across 98 to 7. I am not using the most recent version, heck I haven't upgraded it for few years now, but I hope the compatibility still remains.

You really should write a book on programming a text editor. It seems like we’ve all been on this journey with you.

Promise, when my situation get better i will pay the 80$ license. It is on my buylist since a lot of time :)

Thanks for the software

Bought Sublime a decade ago, bought the new version last year, still love it.

If we're doing feature requests: a "recently closed windows" alongside the "recently closed files" would be amazing, for when I misclick and close a window containing a bunch of open files and a folder or two :)

One tiny thing, that I haven't investigated at all... And doesn't seem to be a common thing to worry about... If I have a file with an asterisk in it, then Sublime [0] seems to have issues displaying the file name.

*.x will appear as [].x for some reason.

[0] (Build 4180, out of date...)

That could be any number of things, I suggest posting an issue on our public issue tracker: https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues

- build system that understand colors.. out of the box..

- revamped project system so i don't have to store extra files in my root directory, there is a plugin for it, but this should be working out of the box imo

- drag&drop panels to create layout with the mouse

- tabs in output/temporary panels

- UI API for status panel, side panel and in the views

- a proper built-in terminal, i know there is Terminus, but color support is lacking, tabs support is lacking, doesn't work well with tmux, overall it's very janky (wrt to scrolling)

- sticky scrolling (the thing that pins the scope name) or - the thingy that says where in the code we are, i forgot how it's called: [MyStruct > my_function]

I'd be willing to pay extra for a proper terminal for ST

I think a big hit for ST's popularity - next to the rise of Atom and VS Code - was its upgrade from version 3 to 4; are you considering to do that again or, if funds are required, do a different way to raise money?

With the new licensing model we no longer need to hold back changes and do major releases. Avoiding the big pause in updates was partly why it was changed.

It makes sense. As a mostly casual user I couldn’t justify the new model so have kept the previous version, which still works for my needs.

Sublime is the best! I've been creating a new programming language ACPUL with Sublime for 10 years https://old.reddit.com/r/acpu/comments/1fxxjtx/acpu_mobile_d... .

I don't have the resources, so please add support for the ACPUL programming language. If Sublime had a good debugger, it would be even more powerful.

Support for syntaxes (and/or debuggers) are mostly provided by the community. Creating a syntax for your language shouldn't be that hard afaik. Just head over to https://discord.sublimetext.io to talk to the active community

Yeah, I know. I think maybe there are interested. Thanks for the comment and link

Just to echo others I love your software and have been using it for years. It’s my go-to text editor for jotting down notes, pasting clipboard contents, authoring and formatting quick todo lists, comments and all sorts. I love that it starts quickly, runs reliably and is kept up-to-date. Three cheers for you. Keep up the good work.

I paid for a license for Sublime, but then I was forced to upgrade a while ago, and my license no longer works with the new version. Is there a solution to this?

I'd start here: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/previous_versions.html (^:

Thank you!

First: I love your software, it is such an inspiration. I have been a fan for more than a decade at a point.

There are two pieces of software I would love you to implement, and I would buy both:

1. Spreadsheet App 2. An AI aware editor like Cursor that uses DeepSeek or equivalent. You could sell a subscription to it like Cursor also.

I think you could make both of these sing.

I don't use ST as my daily driver any more but I still use it for fast editing of large files occasionally. I am daily driving Merge though. Any other Sublime apps in the works?

Have you also considered offering ST and SM as a bundle price with a discount? I'd be interested just because of my lopsided use of the two apps.

We already offer ST and SM in a discounted bundle :)

Duh, I completely missed it somehow! Skim reading is a bad habit kids.

Hi! I was a Sublime Text fan throughout University, and I would have loved to continue using it. Unfortunately for me Sublime lacks too many necessities, and that forced me off Sublime and onto the much slower VSCode.

I really wish Sublime would develop a more solid plugin system and have some sane built-ins such as a terminal.

> sane built-ins such as a terminal.

It’s all preference. I think it’s insane that people use the terminal in their editors.

Why is it insane? Along with a terminal, I also use a database editor inside my code editor.

That’s the point behind an IDE - integrated developer environment.

But Sublime isn't an IDE, it's just a text editor. The line is blurry (especially with how VS Code is used these days) but I have ST running next to IntelliJ all day, they serve different roles.

At this point I’d call vscode an IDE.

Or at least an IDE platform where plugins provide the language integration.

It’s insane bc I don’t like it :)

Like I said, it’s all personal preference.

I mainly code in neovim, I do a lot of work ssh-ing into other machines (sometimes with multiple hops.)

I live in the terminal and sometimes cat very very large log files and would like an experience that is terminal centric.

It very much surprised me to learn how many devs there are nowadays who aren’t terminal centric (outside of windows land)

Also I use my text editor to edit database records (via a plugin) as well. Editing DB rows in vim is the kind of crazy I like.

I've been using ldapvi to manage the LDAP of an entire college faculty.

Which plugin do you use for DBs?

I get where you're coming from and generally agree. The trouble is that the integrated tools are all pretty bad, in my experience. If I can use DataGrip instead of some VS Code extension called "Database Client", I'm going to use DataGrip. I will often even prefer pgsql for many tasks. A mediocre tool might save time here and there because it's convenient, but I find their broader impact is poorer work done in worse ways.

Of course, this is all opinion in a very subjective context. Some people do best-in-class work with terrible tools.

Datagrip, of course, is just the integrated database editor of intellij packaged without the rest of intellij, so it's not a rule that integrated tools are always bad

Is it integrated into their IDEs? That's incredible. Fair point, then.

Maybe I should consider using their IDEs.

Yes and since few weeks ago it now comes for free with WebStorm.

Wow, that’s crazy! I need to give it a trial again.

Do you know how the LLM integration is? I heard it’s terrible, but that isn’t a deal breaker.

Sublime isn't an IDE - it's an editor.

You don't like quickly accessing the terminal? The biggest draw for me is that VSCode can easily attaches to terminal processes, so I can launch a debugging session with custom arguments with a simple "CTRL+~" and a "npm run foo".

“Alt+tab” works all the time.

Guake is a great terminal for quick access too.

I have a hot key for opening kitty as well.

Vscode attaching the debugger automatically is a really nice feature, though.

Nothing you couldn’t do with a few shell scripts, but it’s nice that it does it automatically.

100%. I prefer having a separate client for various tasks.

I'd use those terminals, maybe, if the implementations weren't so bad. The one in VS Code is a sad version of what's possible.

> sane built-ins such as a terminal

After I initially switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text, I used Terminus [1], which I used to swear by. But then I made an effort to strip back the amount of plugins I used, and just bound a hotkey to focus my default terminal (Konsole on KDE), and I don't really miss the integrated terminal anymore.

[1] https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Terminus

Why don't you request a text editor inside of your terminal program? ;)

Sublime Text is great the way it is. If you have to change things, please make them just tiny, incremental changes.

Thank you! Can you share some technical details of the product, if not against the contract you signed?

I'm mostly interested in UI so would love to know how is the custom UI code structured?

Would also be very nice if you could talk a bit about interesting text editor programming/challenges you encountered.

Thanks for the product.

Thank you for sublime! Have used it for the past 10 years. Do you mind if I ask is it your full time job?

It's myself and my colleagues full time jobs, yes. Jon Skinner (ST's creator and owner) also works full time with us.

Just FYI - I think there is an incorrect date in the change log.

The latest build (4192), says it was released in "2024" when I think you mean to say "2025".

https://www.sublimetext.com/download

I bought Sublime with my first developer paycheck, eons ago. Thanks for your great work <3.

Thank you for well crafted and performant software! I'm oscillating often between Helix/Zed/Sublime but I'm probably never going to drop Sublime Text even if I would have to obtain new licenses for next versions.

Have y'all considered something like vscode's extension experience in sublime. The current one is not really intuitive or easier to setup

FYI the latest update on the site and when updating via UI says "20 Jan 2024", not 2025.

Great product, thank you for being awesome :-).

I bought sublime text 3 over a decade ago. What are the top new features of sublime text 4 that make it worth upgrading too?

We list the big ones on our front page:

  * GPU rendering
  * Apple & Linux arm64 support
  * Tab multi-select
  * context-aware auto-complete
  * TypeScript, TSX and JSX syntax support
  * Much more powerful syntax engine
  * Adding python 3.8 for plugins

Some personal standouts not listed are:

  * Syntax-aware code folding
  * Mixed-indentation highlighting ("draw_white_space" setting)
  * Kinetic scrolling on Linux
  * Preserved undo history
  * Change-aware white-space trimming
  * Asynchronous file saving
  * Find result highlighting in the scroll bar
  * Find-in-files filtering by gitignore

Has the UI become more Mac-like on the Mac? This is the only reason I still go back to TextMate even though I purchased SublimeText.

You're welcome. Keep up the good work. I will keep buying it as long as I keep using it!

I'm happy with the most of the features, bought v2, 3 & 4 over the last 13 years, but it lacks debugger, so for Rusti, I have to use VS Code -- which is awful, but there's no better alternative. I'd pay for a special plugin that will work faster than VS Code.

Please make an Evernote competitor out of Sublime…

Oooh, or an Obsidian competitor that doesn't take 10 minutes to boot.

Some notetaking app would be amazing

ST user here, just wanted to say thank you.

Suggestion: implement a vimtutor: subltutor

There's this...

https://sublimetutor.com

But for v3.