Sublime Text Build 4213 | Hacker News Reader

Sublime Text Build 4213

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108 pointskonz71 comments

The headline changes in this release are related to the Python plugin host:

- Upgraded Python 3.8 to Python 3.14

- Python 3.3 is now disabled by default

By default, Sublime plugins now all run under the Python 3.14. The 3.8 plugin host was removed (Python 3.8 reached EOL in Oct 2024), and the 3.3 plugin host is deprecated, and will be removed in a future release.

This is great for plugin devs. They get improvements to syntax, performance, type hints, the standard library, etc, and they can depend on modern versions of Python packages. Many packages no longer receive updates for 3.8 (e.g. https://github.com/psf/requests), let alone 3.3, and many others simply don't run on these older python versions (e.g. https://github.com/xberg-io/tree-sitter-language-pack).

Like the plugin systems for Emacs/Neovim/VS Code (and unlike the sandboxed systems for e.g. Zed and Helix), Sublime's plugin API has low-level access to the editor, and the runtime has full OS access.

I think Sublime was smart to bet on Python for the plugin system. They released the plugin system in 2009, before Python was everywhere. The super flexible plugin API and the huge package ecosystem is a powerful combo.

Emacs doesn't have "plugins", they are called "packages" for a reason. Every Emacs package is not just a plug-n-play "product", it's a recipe, you can use them as libraries, cherry-picking behaviors you want without ever executing the main features of the package.

Does this I can finally add it to my NixOS config without having to use `permittedInsecurePackages`?

https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/5984 :)

You'd need to keep the python 3.3 plugin host disabled, but otherwise yes. OpenSSL 1.1 will be removed along with 3.3 in the next development cycle.

First release in over a year! I had left ST when I felt that there wasn't the will or resources to address basic usability things like https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/328

If anyone is following along in the forums and understands the health of the team behind the product, could you give us a read on the prospective longterm health of the product? Most in my circle thing ST is dead or abandoned.

Long term prospects for Sublime Text look good. The business is healthy and there is consistent work being done by a small but dedicated team.

As for why specific issues aren't addressed, it's merely a prioritization thing. It's a large task, and I'm sure if you asked 100 people they'd all give you different answers for which "basic usability" thing needs to be addressed.

> Long term prospects for Sublime Text look good. The business is healthy and there is consistent work being done by a small but dedicated team.

I am glad to hear this. (As someone new also trying to sell a text editor)

Great inspiration.

Good to hear it - thanks for the reply and if you're on that team, congrats on the release.

Not very much following the forums, but the pace they are producing things is fine. What is "basic usability thing" for you, might be something unimportant for the rest. How the team sets the priorities might be just fine for a lot of users..

fair point.

Just so you know, most of the action is in their unofficial Discord server.

https://discord.sublimetext.io/

The best coding editor just got better.

Does ST support opening a repo on a remote server? The last time I used it was back in my freshman year of college, and I haven't touched it since. Does anyone happen to know?

The answer is probably "no". Sublime Text has no built-in remote editing capabilities.

Of course, it supports remote filesystems (NFS, Windows network shares, etc..), as these are just files, you can also run Sublime Text on a remote desktop or X server, and there as plugins for things like ssh-based synchronization, so its not that you can't do it.

But what it doesn't have and that VSCode and Zed have is the ability to edit files on a remote server with only an ssh connection, by running the GUI part on one machine and the file I/O part on the other.

Even though Sublime Text is my primary editor and I have no intention to change, it is still something I miss. It is one of the reasons I sometimes switch to VSCode (which is a good reminder of how slow VSCode is compared to ST).

If you mean git repos, Sublime Text itself only has minimal git support, but it integrates well with Sublime Merge, which, of course, supports remotes. I don't use Sublime Merge though, it is probably very good, but I never took the time to learn it, I do most of my git work on the command line.

"what it doesn't have and that VSCode and Zed have is the ability to edit files on a remote server with only an ssh connection"

I thought Zed required a zed server on the remote machine for that. Docs seem to suggest so:

"Remote development requires two computers, your local machine that runs the Zed UI and the remote server which runs a Zed headless server. The two communicate over SSH, so you will need to be able to SSH from your local machine into the remote server to use this feature."

I didn't try Zed but VSCode does the same. It is automatic, so you may not realize that it is installing a server, but it does. That it only needs SSH means that it doesn't need an additional communication channel, but you still need to be able to install something. In practice, it means you need a typical non-root shell account.

But Sublime Text can't do that, it is not a client-server application, everything has to run on the same machine, while Zed and VSCode can split the UI part and file access part on two different machines.

"That it only needs SSH means that it doesn't need an additional communication channel, but you still need to be able to install something. In practice, it means you need a typical non-root shell account."

Right, and the remote machine must be a platform that zed supports, since you have to run their server on it. That's often not the case for me.

Dunno about VSCode, never seen it.

Not sure what you mean by "opening a repo on a remote server", but if you mean mounting a remote file system, this isn't really a sublime-specific feature. Use SSHFS (or other) and then just open the folder in Sublime and have at it.

If you mean interacting with git directly with Sublime, there's a number of plugins https://packagecontrol.io/packages/GitSavvy. But this does like any normal workflow does -- it creates a local repo and uses standard git commands to sync (push/pull).

My use on remote servers is usually with winscp on windows and defining sublime as the default editor. Works fine for my use.

I haven't looked much in the repo of plugins, but quickly searching 'ssh' there I found these (but not tested) that might fit your need : https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SSHubl https://packagecontrol.io/packages/OpenFileOverSSH

Curiosity is killing my cat here. How are we supposed to know when your freshman year of college was? Was it a year ago, 8?

About thirteen years ago

As far as I know ST is just a text editor (File -> Open -> Choose File)... so what would "opening a repo" even mean in that context?

Like many text editors, you can open a directory and it'll show a file tree in the sidebar.

What are some reasons to pick Sublime Text over Zed for someone not familiar with either?

For me? I already have Sublime Text installed, it works great, and has never not worked great.

Ditto

Sublime text is what notepad++ wished to be. There are many tasks that do not require a full IDE, not even vscode and sublime just works. Always, consistently, reliably works, is fast and a joy to use.

If you're using AI to write code, IDE features don't really seem that important anymore.

cool. and if you're not?

Otherwise, jumping back and forth while you're reading the code is a real pain.

Also, LSP can turn Sublime Text into almost an IDE (but much more performant).

Sublime Text's implementation of LSP is the buggiest and clunkiest I have used in a text editor

Sublime is an editor I trust to leave open at all times, no matter what.

But, Helix lsp integration and shortcuts is really excellent, and much better than anything else IMO.

>Sublime text is what notepad++ wished to be.

Nonsense statement, Notepad++ has always been superior in every metric

Objectively, Notepad++ is inferior at cross-platform support. Subjectively, I don't like that the creator of Notepad++ uses the software itself as a platform for his politics. In either case, I prefer Sublime.

Notepad++ is like if Word 98 and IrfanView had a baby, a baby who updates twice a week. No disrespect to any of them, but having a clean interface and killer performance was never their claim to fame.

Are you kidding me!? You can have hundreds, even thousands of tabs of files of any size open in Np++, close without saving, and yet get back instantly on the same session when you start it up next time. Notepad++ is literally faster than Microsoft's own native Notepad, let alone Sublime Text. Even 50GB csv files open instantly in Np++.

Zed pretty much copied everything over from Sublime, so it's pretty much on par. Sublime was one of the first editors to have an uncluttered UI without toolbars, but with advanced features, like multi-cursor editing and the command palette. As a long time sublime users, it still feels superior as it gets lots of small details right, like for example when I do Cmd+P to search for files and scroll through the files it will show a preview, Zed doesn't show a preview until you actually select the file.

cough textmate

Yup, I used TextMate a lot back in the early 2000s, and Sublime from around 2010 and bought a license maybe a year later.

To this day I always install Sublime on my new machines, it's the perfect text editor for my needs: fast and snappy, buffers are persistent so I can use as a scratch pad without having to save files, can customise with plugins if needed, the command palette gives quite a bit of power user features.

I mostly use it as a scratch pad nowadays, like if I'm debugging something, collecting a bunch of text from different places to reference quickly, nothing too advanced (nor directly related to coding) and is still one of the most satisfying programs to use on my day-to-day. It's basically always open, just waiting for a new buffer.

Technically correct. However, for the majority of humans, their first encounter with these features and behaviors could never be TextMate, and instead would be Sublime Text. TextMate never growing to be cross-platform is a major reason for Sublime Text's early growth.

no, their first exposure was bbedit

I use Sublime mostly these days but I still have a soft spot for TextMate. Sublime is the closest that exists to its spiritual successor, but it’s missing the “macness” that TextMate brought back in the day, which is the cost of being a cross-platform app I suppose.

Sublime was an evolution from TextMate. They even used the TM file formats for snippets and language syntax iirc.

I’m using Zed, but I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone yet. They claim 1.0 but in reality it’s still beta software. It is fundamentally broken in how it deals with the file system so the project panel and git panel can easily miss changes, and it’s still not clear if they’ll even address it.

At least it seems the next release might fix the bug where the git panel will jump to a different repo when you click on a file in it. They should seriously have fixed basic stuff like that before releasing 1.0. But they got in lots of cosmetic changes to the markdown viewer.. they really need to consider their priorities

Don't have any metrics or anything, but I use both, and anecdotally, I feel like Sublime is snappier and gives me better battery life.

Sublime Text is measured "snappier" and use less memory than Zed.

https://koieditor.com/benchmarks/

Flipside, sublime's memory management leaves much to be desired.

We put a fair amount of effort into reducing our resource footprint, so I'm curious what you find lacking in our memory management. From a quick test we use a similar amount of memory to Zed.

How long did you leave your test running?

Was it sustained use with files open over days / weeks?

(I've been a sublime user for well over a decade, across multiple platforms. Thanks for the downvote.)

Hard to compare the two programs over a week of uptime. ST memory usage does get larger as caches get filled over time, but I've had uptimes of months without issue. I'd expect similar results from other editors.

Do you have a specific memory issue where it keeps using more over time?

General issue, have observed it on multiple systems. On a long enough timescale, will grow to farcical amounts of memory usage.

Unfortunately, while this is something I've observed through major point releases and on different platforms, there have always been some plugins in use.

UnUnfortunately not enough commonality in configuration or hours in the day to track down if this would happen on a totally clean install...

I'm sure your roadmap is quite extensive, but it would be great if sublime itself could graph or warn when memory usage increased by some specified percentage, or if any particular plugin spikes resource usage.

Plugins are a frequent culprit of issues like this. Depending on how you're tracking memory usage you may already be able to at least narrow down the culprit by looking at which process is using too much; plugins run on a separate process and may launch additional processes from there.

Unfortunately tracking individual plugin memory usage is not possible without invasive (and slow) tracing. If the plugins are causing big memory usage in the main process it can be hard to nail down due to that state being shared between all plugins.

Zed has no real plugins, and its core isn't as advanced enough as to not require them (though given the infinity of workflow variety, unlikely to ever be), it's bloated in comparison, and has a few more broken basics (like not properly tracking externally changed files)

Sublime Text is not aligned with an 'any minute now' pivot to enshittification.

And whatever it does, it does better than Zed, debatably.

I started using Zed daily about 6 months ago after 10 years of VS Code. VS Code was having idiotic regressions (like randomly inserting a copy of the final line of a file on save) while they were busy pumping out AI features.

Turns out, Zed is also busy pumping out AI features and the code editing experience is degrading. I'm actively shopping for a replacement.

If you're on Mac: https://koieditor.com/compare/zed/

Sublime Text doesn't automatically download and run language servers without your consent. Zed does, and last I looked there's no way to turn that behavior off (the devs said it's an intentional decision to make things easier for users). I am personally of the opinion that it isn't acceptable for software to start pulling in other software without my consent, so I avoid Zed like the plague. The Gram fork of Zed is pretty good, though.

> it isn't acceptable for software to start pulling in other software without my consent

Yes. That is a bit shady.

If you need to ask this question, that means there is no difference for you. Just choose one and commit.

Sad about the slow plugin host churn- given how relatively unpopular the host app is, a lot of plugins will are abandoned and won't be upgraded from 3.3 (but hopefully at least the most useful would be)

By the way, are there any plans to extend beyond Python so you could depend only on the editor APIs breaking and otherwise use whatever language version you want?

Tangentially related, are there any great examples of apps greatly designed from the start in a way that can support plugin APIs without breakage for decade(s)? How do they do it?

Most plugins just work in Python 3.14. Python didn't break backwards compatibility that much.

It was so nice recently to come back to ST after several years of increasingly bloated IDEs. I should probably (finally) pay for it.

Unfortunately, still not much progress on improving the ergonomics of the sidebar. You still can’t do drag and drop, cut and paste etc.

Otherwise, really excellent editor. I use their Git client [1] daily and there’s nothing like it.

[1]: https://www.sublimemerge.com

I miss ST but I can’t go back after working almost exclusively in VSC for a year. ST is for serious DIYers

Different horses for different courses? I wouldn't open a 100MB logfile in VS Code, but ST or Zed handle that fine. I use all three, though my ST license was for a version or two back, so I have mostly switched to Zed for those giant-file-don't-need-any-bells-and-whistles tasks.

klogg for giant files

100MB is not a giant file

I worked in VSC for 7 years and went back to Sublime Text today! VSC became so slow and overreaching..

Interestingly it refuses to install on Windows 11 ARM. Portable version works fine though.

Thanks, we've got a fix for this in the works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com