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Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

I hope Sublime Text isn't going the way of Textmate: after making lots of profits during a short period of hype, the product enters a period of complacency.

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Textmate 1 was in support for quite a while and I feel like it has ended up in a very good state. Textmate 1.0 was released in 2004, and the last release was in 2012 - I call that a solid support for a 50$ product. I certainly don't see a "period of complacency" there.

Textmate 2.0s failure is a sad one (although I still often use the OS version), but hey: that happens, projects fail.

I didn't notice any major changes in TextMate since I bought it in 2008. All kinds of issues that I had with it was never resolved over all those years: slowness when opening large files, the uselessness of the open-file-by-typing-a-part-of-the-filename dialog, weird scrolling behavior when I press Up or Down when the cursor is not in the visible area, lack of good key bindings, etc. Sublime's improvements over the course of half a year steamrolled over 4 years of TextMate development, from 2008-2012. I don't see how that isn't complacency on TextMate's part.

Why do you consider TextMate 2 failure? It's being actively developed as open-source by the original author:

https://github.com/textmate/textmate/commits/master

It's lost the "great new editor" mind think. Too long between "I am developing the new one", long pause, "I am open sourcing it".

Too little, too late, thats why.

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.

Because everyone who got fed up of waiting for a solid release of TM2 moved to Sublime Text.

And it looks like the same is happening to Sublime Text, which is why I've moved to PHPStorm.

ST has been even in version 2 far more ahead of TextMate feature wise (and speed wise).

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.

Almost like selling your soul to proprietary software for critical infrastructure bites you in the butt in the long run.

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.

>Almost like selling your soul to proprietary software for critical infrastructure bites you in the butt in the long run

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.

I've been using TextMate 2 "alpha" for a while now. It's pretty usable.

I would go as far as to say it's VERY usable. I and many of my colleagues use it every single day. I can't recall it ever crashing on me.

It's my editor of choice at work. I use it daily. Have never experienced crash.

It's been more stable and usable than TextMate 1 for me for about a year I think (maybe more, my memory isn't so accurate); it's been my editor of choice since then, replacing TextMate 1 which was my editor of choice since it first came out.

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