Ask HN: Is Sublime Text dead?
The latest beta (3) build dates from 2013.
The latest stable is almost one year old.
Several features are missing, mainly a proper go to definition mechanism.
Is the project dead?
"From the Sublime office: We are not selling to Github, we are not stopping development of Sublime. As noted by another poster, this is effectively a one man band (I'm here to answer sales questions, process your refunds and get the mail so Jon doesn't have to). The past few months of silence on the development front have been a combination of boring back end work (taxes, new payment platform) as well as a break for the man driving this whole operation. No, we don't currently have a loud internet presence, which is can be an understandable cause for concern-something we intend to address once we move into the production version of 3. There is a vision for continued growth and development, there is momentum behind Sublime Text; it is not dead, just slow.
I'm happy to field any specific questions you might have about the Sublime's future: sales@sublimetext.com."
[1] https://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&...
Edit: I'm talking about the ST3 beta version here.
Textmate was a prime example of what happens when an incredibly popular project is run by a single individual. The fact that TM 2 has flourished (IMO) since being open-sourced, is a good indication that additional eyes are a good thing.
I'm not suggesting that Jon open-sources ST, just saying that reaching out for help is not a bad thing in these one-man-band projects.
Docs: http://platform.qbix.com
So far my company are still the only ones working on it
I just wanted to illustrate how just opensourcing things isn't enough. You need marketing, PR or organic notoriety. And often that takes resources. Once, I met Eben Moglen and he yelled at me for half an hour simply for taking investors for my company. I explained to him that "free software" doesn't solve the economics for entrepreneurs who start new projects. You still need to use resources. Later when I sent him the link to github he said he was wrong but stopped short of an apology. Quite a strange guy.
Hell, the only reason I tend to drop editors (which happens rarely) is exactly because there's so much development that it has become bloated with bells and whistles I don't need.
It's an editor, not a fashion item.
Second, ST is not based on a freemium model. Only the betas are free (and that only as long as there's no stable release), for the stable versions you have to pay.
Second, the fact that since ST2 he was able to hire a second person to help him with the business side.
I bought ST just like many friends did. Sublime may be selling about as much as RubyMotion, which invested the proceeds in hiring very few, high-level coders that seem to be fully inline with the founder/original author.
Perhaps an amazing text editor is a project that's easily given to being a one-man-show. A single developer writing code and then thinking, "I need to make myself a better tool than this".
The wiki gives a good overview of the problems with current Vim https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Introduction#problem
I was wondering whether Neovim would end up as a one-man endeavour too, but it seems like a pretty lively project with loads of other people involved - I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes next.
Textmate 2.0s failure is a sad one (although I still often use the OS version), but hey: that happens, projects fail.
I like it and still use it daily, but if it had come 3 years earlier or so, it would have been a serious competitor to Sublime.
And it looks like the same is happening to Sublime Text, which is why I've moved to PHPStorm.
I've never liked Sublime Text because it took the wind out of FOSS editors like Kate, Geany, etc and stole all kinds of valuable project contributions and userbase.
Don't know, half of the work works with proprietary software for very critical stuff (from banking to government) and I haven't seen it "biting them in the butt".
>I've never liked Sublime Text because it took the wind out of FOSS editors like Kate, Geany, etc and stole all kinds of valuable project contributions and userbase.
I think you're thinking with an OSS bias (ideology, more like it), instead of pragmatically based on real life facts.
ST is huge on Mac and Windows. What few users it "stole" from Kate et al is negligible, much less of stealing "project contributions" from them.
And I speak as someone who has used Kate and other FOSS editors since 2000 or so. Those editors cannot hold a candle to ST in aspects of general speed and overall flexibility and architecture.
TextMate was basically a badly written amateur editor with a handy system for extending it (albeit kludgly).
ST's system for extensions and the whole package managing thing is so far ahead of TM it's not even funny.
Edit: Downvotes for factual information on HN?
I have almost nothing to complaint about ST, I've been using the version 3 regularly for a few months. Off course, I want new features (and a few bugfixes, damn you single quotes bug), but I'm pretty happy.
Unless you're using Mac. There are very good editor/IDE that run on a single platform.
I get your point, you don't have to be multiplatform, but your two examples aren't good ones.
Perhaps you are 1-2 years behind in the news. What you refer was based on the FPCX release back in the day. Since then it added the missing features (multicam, library management and tons of other stuff), and has regained market share. Actually it has been one of the top sellers for Apple. Professional editors that bashed it, have changed their tune -- you can find several articles and posts to that effect.
The whole backslash were because FCP7 was discontinued and initial FCPX didn't have 100% parity. Plus, editors didn't know how development works (can't blame them), so couldn't understand that a newly developed engine, re-designed to be future-proof, will have dropped features and might lunch without 100% parity.
>and OmniFocus is a toy piece of software... there are probably more users of Atom.io than Omnifocus ;)
You seem to have a very bizarro notion of what's a "toy piece of software".
Actually Atom.io is as fringe as it gets. Most people have checked it out of curiosity and returned to their editors.
Omnifocus, OTOH, has been featured on the Mac Store, and has been on the top list of best selling apps.
Really? I guess you never spent time outside of Windows-user circles. Understandable, since they're the majority. But I've been whining and have heard others groan about Windows-exclusivity precisely since I was introduced to Linux.
What's not to love?
It seems to be slower than ST, but I didn't use it enough to see if it really is slower than ST in a all day work.
I read somewhere that there is a beta release now, I'll upgrade and give it a try again.
Furthermore, why is Windows and Linux only an afterthought here? That suggests to me that further down the road, new updates and bug fixes will be released for the Mac version, with the Windows and Linux versions left to suffer.
I'll stick with Sublime and VIM for the foreseeable, thanks.
While Windows/Linux are also fairly easy to implement using CEF, they didn't do that. And instead opted for using the Mac built in WebKit libraries.
So I adapted, and I really do like ST. Got the features I want, and a clean interface.
My biggest gripe with UltraEdit is that it basically has zero ways to extend it. It has no plugin system and their macro system is horrible. This is where Sublime Text is really great.
How do this kind of threads get to 1st page at HN?!
Roughing it with Notepad++ now.
Not even sure what you mean. You can continue using ST2, and you can also go use ST3 betas (which have been stable from day one, and have been more feature-full than ST2 for half a year or so).
Sublime though looked and felt really super polished, something to fall in love with. I guess I put that comment out to see if I was mistaken, and it could move back in...