Sublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model.
It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?
I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.) Eclipse had a robust architecture, but writing plugins for it was a dispiriting slog, even when I got paid for it (again, my experience, many years ago.)
Unironically, maybe VS Code.
Everything simple you can do with it, either comes built-in, or within Github/Microsoft ecosystem, or has an official plugin that gets recommended and featured by the editor itself. Plugins from individual hobbyist developers I have, I can almost count in one hand. (VSCodeVim being the most important one)
Now I compare this to my Neovim setup, and that one is basically running on charity from OSS developers.
I have completely opposite experience with [modern] Emacs. Of course, it wasn't smooth from the day one, but neither was my ride with different IDEs. Somehow, I keep coming back to Emacs because no IDE ever provided all the machinery I need to be productive. For me (and I suppose for many other people), Emacs is far more sweeter spot of an IDE than any other alternative.
For what it's worth, I went from ST3 -> VSCode -> ST4, and have been happy since. I've found that I prefer my text editor with minimal extensions, and with Sublime Text's LSP Plugin, I'm pretty content. The performance and customizable UI make it more worth it to me than VSCode.
Well, OK then. Back to Emacs I went.
With that being said, just a quick look at, for example Stack Overflow 2025 survey tells me it doesn't have the same mindshare it once had.
There needs to be a critical mass of people using it for things that aren't core to stay updated
The key plugins I use are some LSP servers, and they work wonders. The few languages I mainly use (yaml, json, TS/JS, python and Go) I get great language support for via the LSP servers and the editor is blissfully fast always.
I could live without even the LSP stuff, but the one feature I can't live without is Sublime's excellent recovery support. Every once in a while my system will crash, and even though I've had multiple unsaved buffers Sublime recovers them every single time. Saved my butt more times than I want to know!
As for people in general, safe bet in almost any topic is that most people won’t care. :) So yes most people use VSCode.
I still use it, it is maintained and it is very good and fast, and that it didn't try to reinvent itself is a good thing for me. But it is not a full IDE (not Jetbrains), it didn't jump on the AI bandwagon (not Cursor), and it is not free (not VSCode), so it is not surprising that it lost some market share. But it is not dead.
In reality 70% of the people I see are using Cursor (Subscription), Vscode (Free) or some JetBrains products (Subscription). I only know of some people including myself that have ST for opening large files, where performance matters.
I'm a fan of indie software and native apps but I know zero people in the past 10 years that switched to ST. I know plenty of people of people who switched to Vscode and all the other free or paid competitors. It's probably enough to sustain a small company, and not everyone has to strive for a monopoly. But I wouldn't call that thriving.
People are 7x more likely to be using VS Code, which means that a niche tool is far more likely to have a VA Code plugin than an ST plugin.
Other than that, if the 11% of people using it are happy then there’s no issue.
Although at least to me, Sublime Text 4 feels like a "finished" product.
> Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted.
I'm curious what you don't like about this model? The most common complaint with regards to updates was the long waiting period between major versions, which we've now eliminated, and without changing the perpetual nature of our licenses.
I have had experience with quite a few projects switching to recurring billing, occasionally justifying it with "to support development of great new stuff" and then... just keeping the same rate of updates as before, resulting in a de facto steep upgrade. That said, three years of upgrades for 99$ is reasonable, even if there were only bugfixes
Thanks. I guess I'm just not really seeing how that is any different to what we did before? You'd buy a ST3 license with no knowledge of what improvements would be made to ST3.
Personally, I'm OK with using an old build so I don't mind that much about the limitation. Although if my 3 years elapses right before ST4 introduces first-class LSP support and an official Debugger, I may be very peeved. :)
That's correct, but it could be the day after you buy the license is when ST3 stops receiving any updates and we dedicate all work to ST4. With a ST4 license you're always getting 3 years of updates, ST3 it was anywhere from 3 to zero (not counting the beta period, ST3 only got 3 years of updates).
> Although if my 3 years elapses right before ST4 introduces first-class LSP support and an official Debugger, I may be very peeved. :)
I think we can all sympathize with some buyer's remorse. Unfortunately the line needs to be drawn somewhere. Maybe you can take solace in that we probably can't put multiple huge features in a single update, at least not a dev release. :)
You got everything in the current Major Release and every minor and patch update to it. If it took more than three years to release a new Major it was not a big problem, because you were still covered.
The new model might leave you without bugfixes before a new major version is out.
They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions), and since the release of ST4 in 2021, there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025). All other releases have been bug fixes and "improvements".
I get that developers need to make a living, but 4 years of fixing bugs in your products is probably not what I want to be paying for, at least not when that is the only thing I'm getting. Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.
I have used ST ever since the first version replaced TextMate for my use (TM2 spent something like a decade catching up to ST2), but I've since switched to Code and Zed (mostly Zed as of late, Code on windows until Zed is ready there).
ST was great back when it was still an actively maintained product, but in recent years (ever since ST2) it has felt like it was mostly on the back burner and other editors have passed it in functionality.
As for VC funding, it has done miracles for Code to have Microsoft sponsor it (and others). Code is currently the editor to beat for anything that doesn't involve opening large files.
vscode seems to have totally taken over dev mindshare these days.
vim has a universal and in many ways a eternal use case. You have to edit a file at some point on a server, be it a self hosted or even on ec2. Thats kind of the only real use case for vim.
In these days of AI assisted coding, no one really 'edits' code. A lot of editor short cuts and fluency related concepts kind of in many ways are not relevant in this paradigm.
The thing is vscode just works, like just works, for nearly all the usecases. In case of emacs, learning it and mastering it takes lots of time in ones career. In case of vscode you don't have to do this, you can straight away work on the project that you want to get done.
emacs is some what like a massive distraction from the actual task you want to achieve. Instead of writing code to build a project, you have to first write code to make emacs work, then use emacs to write the project code. In vscode you just write project code.
Emacs and Vim has this built-in. Other editors kinda have that, but it's clunky. I can suffer IDE because they provide a lot more than editing.
> Instead of writing code to build a project, you have to first write code to make emacs work, then use emacs to write the project code
That's only done once. It's like adjusting the mirrors and seats of a car. Once it's comfortable, you don't have to touch it. Using VS Code feels like borrowing a car with a very limited range of adjustments. Why is the explorer on the left and the terminal at the bottom? Why are they always there?
The "distraction" framing assumes everyone has the same preferences and working style, I for one find VSCode (and IDEs in general) massively distracting from productively solving many tasks. No, it's not "a skill" issue - I have used InteliJ every single day for almost a decade, diving into some profoundly advanced and non-documented features, and I do open VSCode from time to time.
I feel your argument conflates initial learning curve with ongoing productivity, and assumes VSCode's approach is universally optimal rather than just different.
I am one of those experienced Emacs users myself. Wrote more stuff in Emacs and even vim than most devs today will even write code over their careers.
Its just vscode now does simply too many things out of the box, you obviously can recreate that in Emacs, but its a pointless exercise. Time consuming, and distracts your from your real job. My job is to write code, not build emacs to write code.
I totally stopped using Org-mode, because Google docs do it way better.
At some point you have to move on. For some people like that point arrived a little early.
Can you name Emacs packages you've authored, maintained or contributed to?
> vscode now does simply too many things out of the box
Oh yeah? Can you edit your filesystem in VSCode like a wiki? Changing directories and filenames as if you're editing plain text? Can any of thousand of its extensions provide "indirect buffer" experience? Can you bind a double tap of the comma to navigate to the last error and automatically fix it? Can you at all bind to double/tripple comma or just about any arbitrary key based on context in VSCode? Keyboard macros with counters - e.g. to transform lists into numbered lists? True buffer based (not file oriented) workflows? Occur-mode style search and replace? Comint style process interaction? Are there any extensions that allow you to move the cursor to the piece of a plain text like "rfc-3540" or "myproj#4044", intelligently recognize it and allow you to browse the RFC document or review a Pull-Request - Emacs does. Can you run a shell command and pipe it into a buffer, or pipe the content of a buffer through series of shell commands and into another buffer?
> I totally stopped using Org-mode, because Google docs do it way better.
Don't be ridiculous. They are completely different classes of products. If you are even having to compare Org-mode with GDocs, perhaps you don't know well either or both. GDocs can't manage my dotfiles. I can't use it to annotate books or academic papers. I can't have inline LaTeX formulas in GDocs. It can't let me control a videoplayer and type my notes at the same time. I can't use it to manage my flashcards or keep the log of my LLM interactions there. I can't have executable blocks of code - in org-mode I can explore APIs or send SQL queries while passing them into data transforming code blocks. There are no TODO states/keywords in GDocs, no agenda views, no scheduling/deadlines, no time tracking/clocking, no habit tracking, no pomodoro timers, no dynamic time tables, no tag-based filtering, no capture/refile system.
> At some point you have to move on
Like I told you already, you're assuming too broadly. Both VSCode and Google Docs are excellent products - no denying that, but they are not universally better. If you came to the opposite conclusion, it is yours, and yours only.
Licenses are perpetual. It is not a subscription. Don't like the work we've done? You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.
> there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025)
August 2024 we added kinetic scroll and xdg-activation support for Wayland; we also added the ability to configure image extensions and allow dynamically switching between the hex-editor and image view.
November 2023 we added native font dialog support for switching fonts.
August 2023 we added webp and proper support for running as administrator on all platforms.
November 2022 we added syntax-based code folding and operating system recent file integration
December 2021 we added GB18030 support.
I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.
You can read the full changelogs here: https://www.sublimetext.com/download
> Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.
We do stable releases infrequently, because they're stable. If you want more frequent releases you can switch to the development releases. You can see from the build number how many builds we've done of ST4 since the release: it's around 150.
Or until some change in the underlying OS makes it no longer able to run. Not saying that happens frequently, but it does happen.
> I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.
New font pickers, settings dialogues and other "polish" is hardly what i'd call new features. I listed those as "improvements".
I'm not trying to start a fight, and i respect the work that has been done, but VS Code releases more features in a month that ST has released in the entire ST4 lifecycle, as does Zed. I understand the team is (a lot) smaller. My frustration is that when a new release comes out, it's mostly polish, and not fixing the real problems, such as lack of integration and plugins.
You may choose to brush it off as just an old fart rambling on the internet, but i'm not alone with this opinion, and i have ST licenses dating back to the original version, and i have chosen not to renew my ST4 license. When you start losing the "religious" users, maybe it's time to reevaluate ?