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Comment by aranelsurion | Hacker News Reader

There was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021.

I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?

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I've been a registered user of ST for long long time, and I thought if anything hurt them in the marketplace, it was taking several years off from the end of 2013 until late 2017 with hardly anything being released that opened the door to Atom and other editors to catch up.

Yeah, as others already mentioned, I think they sat on their laurels for a bit too long and let VSCode overtake it.

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.

It's the LSP plugin that finally drove me to leave ST4 for Zed. Language integration is table stakes for an editor now. The fact that ST support is behind a volunteer plugin instead of integrated directly in the editor just means it's never going to be as good as a editor that does have first class support. The ST devs need to actually improve the editor, but I haven't seen any material updates in years.

I think it's less that they sat on their laurels and more that a team of 2 had trouble keeping up with the dozens of well-paid folks working on VSCode. Which suggests that perhaps a shareware model did not work out so well for them.

They literally stopped developing for about 5 years, it wasn't just about the team not keeping up

I don't think development actually stopped. ST3 was in a quiet public beta for a long time, but you can see builds of ST3 from 2013 to 2019: https://www.sublimetext.com/3.

Why would you stop developing for 5 years?

Maybe they just wanted to do something else. Sometimes people just don't want to grind on endlessly for theoretically more money when what they've got already is enough for them.

Probably to write sublime merge

If they were already having trouble keeping up, then perhaps taking years off and building Sublime Merge wasn't the right strategy.

Agreed, LSP has replaced Linter extensions and the TabNine LLM which is nice (and snappy). Even if some of the lsp servers are clunky to use.

even before VSCode Atom had started to eat their lunch

I don't get this Sublime is dead nonsense. It's still being updated and works great. It's been my editor of choice for years and I happily pay for my license. I'd probably pay more if they asked me, it's tremendous value for money in my opinion.

I dislike "$x is dead" as much if not more as you do, and I'm sure it works fine as something doesn't need to be the most popular choice to be working.

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.

Eh.. I gave ST4 a go earlier this year and moved away from it due to plugins I wanted not being updated for years, and no longer working. That really feels on the cusp of being dead to me

There needs to be a critical mass of people using it for things that aren't core to stay updated

I don't run that many plugins to be fair, but the ones I do run (of which at least a couple are no longer maintained) works fine.

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!

Out of curiosity which plugins didn't work for you?

wish I could remember, this was a good 6 months ago

Yeah Atom and then VSCode killed it. Turns out being able to use JS to extend your editor is quite valuable. Essentially every JS devs have their own Emacs without having to learn Emacs and Lisp

Plugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.

The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?

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.)

> What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?

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.

What about writing a quick ad-hoc command? Something I would have found useful today, which I would have done in emacs fifteen years ago, was writing a command to parse a file in a log, generate a curl command from it, and copy the command to the clipboard. Could I do that in VSCode without creating an entire project?

I can't even start listing the issues with your hasty generalization here - I see outdated anecdotal evidence, survivorship bias, vague metrics, false correlation, goalposts moving. While your personal experience likely genuine, presenting it as evidence that Emacs is inherently impractical as an IDE only adds to the fallacy of generalizing from a single data point to universal truth.

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.

Emacs has eglot built in these days and it works quite well as an IDE

An emacs "distribution" like e.g. doom-emacs has worked to be quite stable for me.

VSCode copied most of the good features of ST and it is free and open source. Just that is enough to overtake it.

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.

NB: Not all parts of VSCode are open source, especially not many popular extensions.

good question. I think the community fell off and many plugins were left unmaintained. I was using it for over a decade up until recently. ST4 had so many plugin issues and it stopped being worth manually fixing.

For me, it was that the maintainer of a language plugin I used was, um, challenging to work with. I wanted to contribute to add some much-requested functionality and he talked to me like I was a toddler and warned me not to waste his time.

Well, OK then. Back to Emacs I went.

Yes, VSCode killed it, because VSCode was free. Which is kind of sad because ST2 is actually noticeably faster than VSCode. Someone mentioned Atom, but that was never really a contender, not many people used it.

Personally at that time (circa 2013 I think) I wasn't using it because it lacked integrated features like debugger or good autocomplete. I was using a specific editor, but one editor per language (java = eclipse, C++ = QTCreator, C = geany). I feel like there wasn't a true "one size fits all" editor (except maybe Vim, but it felt so... unfriendly?). Also, I'm not sure it was available on Linux (don't quote me on that)

I love ST and don't get why it stopped taking off. VSCode is way too heavyweight for just editing text and TextEdit is more like WordPad on Windows than Notepad.

I think it stopped taking off when they stopped developing on it for something like four years

Anecdotally a lot of people I know went from Sublime to Atom to VSCode. I think it mostly was about scale of community and momentum of updates.

Basically yes, vscode was free, almost as fast and had more features, like out of the box intellisense.

People refer to it as VSCode, but do people really use VSCode or VSCodium? I personally use VSCodium. I think that is the most de-telemetry'd version of it, I think?

Not sure if VSCodium and others can use all the extensions, especially Microsoft ones like Copilot. I remember setting up something like that once and had to do a lot of fiddling to be able to use all the extensions I wanted. Gave up on it at some point.

As for people in general, safe bet in almost any topic is that most people won’t care. :) So yes most people use VSCode.

and before that was TextMate.

vscode came along with a thriving extension ecosystem. That made up for any pitfalls really.

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