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Comment by glimcat | Hacker News Reader

It's a developer tool. I bill more than that per hour. Lots of people bill more than that per hour. If it saves you time or stress, it's easily worth $70.

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The potential problem is not so much the price, which is as you say very reasonable, but getting locked into a proprietary product that you are then attached to. What if they stop developing it? What if they take it in a direction you don't want? What if they move to a higher and higher price? All things to consider.

As for me, you can pry my Emacs from my cold, dead fingers.

The answer to all of the above is: 'Don't upgrade'. As it stands ST is an excellent editor with a rich plugin system around it, even if the dev decides to call it a day it's unlikely it's going to stop working in the next 2-5 years, and additional features can be introduced via the plugin system.

I do understand the concern though, but for a lot of people (myself included) ST is a better solution than a non-proprietary solution.

Also my main objection to Sublime. It's such a waste to make such a nice text editor and then make it proprietary.

A waste to who? It's the editor of choice for a large number of people. It provides value to developers. In turn, the people who spend all day building it (I assume from a comment above) get paid to do so. Do you want to work for free?

dude, free as in freedom, not free beer

I may be in the minority, but I don't think all code should be open. The people behind Sublime have made a great product and continue to improve it. Do you think they'd receive even half of their income if they made the code available?

Step 1. Remove nag message. Step 2. Release to the world. Day 3. Tonnes of people jump to non-nag version and never pay.

The plugin system and API is available for those that wish to complement or extend the editor. Making the code available directly harms their ability to make money and their ability to continue to invest time and money building the product.

And using Emacs without remapping your Caps Lock key will cause those fingers to die just a bit sooner....

Perhaps the wrong place for flaimbait.... I apologize ahead of time!

If you are a developer billing that much per hour, then it is undoubtedly worth it. For hobbyist programmers and people just getting started, however, it's a bit more uncertain. It's the age old question of how to price a product that is of great value to professionals, but also useful for novices (think Photoshop and Excel). I think that ST2's approach of being hassleware that doesn't go overboard is a good system.

It's the same editor whether you pay to use it or not. The tiny hassle at the beginning of clicking "OK" is just to remind you to finally pay for it when you move from hobbyist to professional. :)

And if you work in a big company, who knows! They might already have a group license you can you.

My problem is that I am invested in vim to the extent that I will need to relearn quite a bit if I give up vim. I can do that but what does ST provide me over vim - that's my main point of debate along with the fact that the $70 price for one version with paid upgrades means things are not in the impulse purchase zone over the long run. (Not upgrading doesn't really work - ST2 might stop working if I upgrade to say Ubuntu 14.04 and I am not sure if ST2 will continued to be supported and how long.)

I would have bought it if it was $29 and proprietary OR $70 opensource donation ware or $49 proprietary with 3 free version upgrades. That's my comfort feel around editors - YFMV of course.

You are right, but the problem is exactly that it's a developer tool, and most developers tools are $free these days, so it kinda sets the expectation of price for a developers tool. If Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, Visual Studio (Express) and many, many others IDEs and editors a free, it's pretty hard to justify paying for a developers tools. It's not that it's not worth it, it's just that the common expectation is that developers tools are free.

Sublime Text and Textmate likely wouldn't have existed without many people being willing to pay for them. If we refuse to accept paid for developer tools we are only ever going to get certain types of tools build by certain types of people/ companies.

Not an expert but wouldn't you be able to deduct it from your taxes anyway?

That works if you are doing consulting on your own but not for full time employees.

It does in Australia. It's a work expense. Just because there are other options that are free it doesn't mean it's not deductible. That'd be like telling a carpenter they have to use a tree branch as a hammer. But I'm no tax expert in your region, so it might be worth investigating if you're not certain.

The thing is I need to do Itemized Deductions if I want to tax deduct that expense here in the US. The problem is that it many a times comes out less than the standard deduction.

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