New dev release of Sublime Text 3 | Hacker News Reader

New dev release of Sublime Text 3

sublimetext.com

85 pointsdiggan54 comments

According to this blog post: http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/upgrades he expected to ship ST3 in 2013. As someone else mentioned, its been 6 months since the last update - Has there been any mention of an updated release date for ST3?

According to Kari, you can email sales@sublimetext.com if you have specific questions about the future of Sublime Text.

http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&p...

I've been in touch with Kari recently regarding the Net Awards Ceremony (I'm representing them on Friday in London) and I've been told that Jon is heads down working on it. I believe and trust Sublime PTY on this.

This release is bigger than some people are giving it credit for.

One of my favorite things that Atom does better than ST3 out of box is its git integration, especially in the tree view [1].

Adding sidebar icons is exciting because it paves the way to similar functionality (either out of box, or via plugin) in ST3.

[1] http://blog.atom.io/2014/03/13/git-integration.html

Indeed. Hopefully the developer of https://sublimegit.net will add support soon.

You're not alone:

https://github.com/kemayo/sublime-text-git/issues/204#issuec...

I've taken a bit of time to look through the new sidebar icons feature, and explained how it's working http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15971

For everyone who is saying "oh, how big can a sidebar icon implementation be????" well read one of my forum replies: http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15915&s...

There is more to it that just adding an icon, I'm sure.

Well, this is refreshing. With all the "Is ST3 abandonware??" threads out there recently, this is welcome news.

That said, only four items on the release log in 6 months? And sidebar icons, at that? Not that I think you need to crank out a new version every six months, but... I wonder what's been going on there since Christmas.

Hope this is just a sign that they're getting back in gear and we'll get some improvements soon!

The following will answer some of your questions about what has been going on: http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&p...

Said every dying product ever (and, to be fair, some non-dying ones).

Interesting. Last year, he had another employee, one that coded. Hasn't worked out, it seems. That's a shame. Not only would he get more work done, I do think another dev person could shift the priorization a little more towards fixing long standing issues. Maybe.

I'm kind of wondering why a 4 item change log is even worth reporting news wise lol.

Sidebar icons aren't just a case of adding an image. I've listed some reasons here: http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15915&s...

Well, in development in general, even an 1 item changelog can represent months or even years of work. E.g

Foobar Language: * Now has a JIT

It's not like the changelog is a "commit log". It represent 4 new features.

Plus, the real news is that ST3 development shows signs of starting again after a hiatus.

lol.

>That said, only four items on the release log in 6 months? And sidebar icons, at that? Not that I think you need to crank out a new version every six months, but... I wonder what's been going on there since Christmas.

How about taking a break because of burn-out? (Previous ST2/ST3 schedule was hectic).

I bet my money those items represent what he did AFTER he started again (like, last 1-2 weeks), not an actual 6-month development period.

Maybe in next 6 months we can get some icon on statusbar.

I've never thought about that as a feature, but it'd be useful for inline build statuses etc.

The author should absolutely do what he wants, there is no problem with that, and I don't claim entitlement to anything beyond what I paid for. The only problem I have is with lack of a minimal status update. I don't expect blogs, emails, honestly not even support from the author. Only a tweet "I'm taking a break for now, will continue when feel better." This is what Ryan Bates did with railscasts, and I respect that. Then again, I don't even claim entitlement to this type of tweet, it just would be a decent thing to do. Saying nothing signals abandonment, while "I'm taking time off" signals exactly what it says.

As a paying customer I do expect support and that includes at least a brief explanation as to what is happening with the product in the longer term. A tweet. A simple one line update on the website. A forum post. Any of those would be fine even if, like you said, it is just to say "I am burnt out, I am taking 2014 off". I am disappointed that if he has returned to work on the project that we just get a silent new dev build without any kind of information about the future.

I'm a paying customer too. I'm ok with the minimal support. It was only $70. Just release when it's ready, even if it's only once every 2 years.

I'm wondering if the release of atom.io started a fire...nothing like a healthy dose of competition?

I've been thinking the same thing. As much as I like Chocolat, Sublime, etc. I think atom will trample them.

We're still years away from HTML5 applications reaching the performance of native desktop applications.

Atom.io is too slow for most Sublime users, especially on hardware that is not bleeding-edge.

My 5 year old macbook pro handles the development version of jquery (10,309 loc) with syntax highlighting just fine. It can be (a bit) janky when scrolling through the whole thing, but it's not very noticeable. Local edits / search are as fast as vim.

I'm not really sure why it would.

I've been using it on and off since the initial release. I'm not particularly impressed by it so far; in particular, the performance relative to ST3 is absolutely appalling in every respect. It's still in development, I understand - but one of the key awesome things about ST3 is how amazing, earth-shatteringly fast it is.

What I'd like more than Atom would be an evolved version of Sublime. There's still a little bit of cruft in there from what I can see - while I've never developed a plugin, I've heard it's a bit tricky. I'd love something with proper support for things like SublimeREPL more extensive capabilities for previewing documents, and perhaps better ways to theme and write plugins using alternative languages.

I'm not totally convinced that Github are going to be able to make Atom a compelling offering on the whole.

Any Code based text editor already has a ton of competition from IDEs, Command Line Editors, not to mention similar products.

Exactly. Atom is a few months of age, Sublime a few years, but Emacs and Vim are both around 30 years old. That's 30 years of work on the core editor, as well as packages and documentation. Plus, they're FOSS meaning thousands of people have worked on them from all over the world.

This makes it really hard for new proprietary editors like Atom or Sublime Text to just come along and be better than these existing monsters. Personally, none of them has what it takes for me but I see reasons to believe they can stand a chance in the near future.

I believe that Atom has been around for quite some time, but it's been internal at GitHub, so it's had time to evolve too.

2-3 years in an internal organization does not even REMOTELY compare to 20-30 years in the active open source ecosystem like Vi/Vim and Emacs have had.

Did it really start a fire? I hardly hear about it, and I frequent a lot of coding communities, both online and IRL.

I subscribe to the new atom packages feed, and I am constantly getting posts about new packages. Sometimes over 15 new packages in a single day, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down.

Yeah, I'd say that it's picking up some steam.

I think that's a vialbe theory only when atom.io ships on Windows and Linux. Without that, I'd be surprised if it represents much competition to ST...yet.

The major thing that ST has over Atom is that it's cross-platform. I develop on a Linux machine most of the time, so learning how to use Atom efficiently is completely out of the question for me until they bring out a Linux release.

As Atom is a Node binary I suspect cross platform will be really easy when they have time.

I suspect there'll be cross-platform issues they want to solve later than sooner and thus why keeping it single platform.

It's coming.

Well, it also fully works and its fast.

Atom is a proof of concept at the moment. I don't even expect a "html5 based editor" getting prevalent.

Has Light Table fallen off people's radar?

It was never on the people's radar on the first place.

Mostly enthusiasts on HN, r/programming and the like.

The vast masses of programming don't care for LightTable (or Clojure, it's core language).

I thought Atom.io might be my new favorite editor... until I needed to open a multi-GB XML file. Sublime handled it without a sweat, and even started loading a different 38GB (!!) XML file concurrently with no issues. (I didn't wait for it to finish loading, however.) Atom.io, on the other hand, balked at a mere 2MB. I've heard that even vim isn't so good at enormous files, so kudos to Sublime for that!

What special place in hell do you live in that opening a 38GB XML file is a thing? I hate opening 1mb xml files so 38GB sounds like a really fun time...

StackOverflow data dump. Thought I'd peek inside...

Wasn't Sublime created because he hated how TextMate 2 never came about? Or was it just got popular then. Because it felt like the former.

Hopefully ST3 comes out soon, but in the interim Sublime Text Editor 2 is perfectly fine. In-fact, I wouldn't even care if ST3 didn't even get released because ST2 does the job more than fine as it currently stands, I don't even know what could be improved with exception of out-of-the-box GIT integration, maybe embedded Node.js too. But you can do all of that stuff via plugins now anyway.

Lets stop blowing this out of proportion for just a moment. You paid for an editor and you got an editor: Sublime Text 2. Sublime Text 3 will be a separate purchase and as far as I am aware, Jon hasn't taken any more money for something he hasn't released yet. So what is the issue here? Lets appreciate what we already have, which is an awesome and highly featured editor.

>Hopefully ST3 comes out soon, but in the interim Sublime Text Editor 2 is perfectly fine.

Better than that: ST3-dev has been perfectly fine for over 6-8 months -- and I've even use package control, 8-10 add-ons, custom themes and everything with it.

It saddens me that this is news. I really wish a modern editor like this was more actively developed. It just seems like 5 months and 4 small items in the changelog is insufficient for sustainability.

Well, on the other hand:

1) ST2 worked perfectly all this time.

2) I've used ST3 (dev builds) extensively and professionally for a year with no problems whatsoever, including package management, add-ons, custom themes, linters, etc.

3) It's far more likely he took a break working on it for those 4-5 months, and those "4 small items" just represent stuff he changed after he started again (recently), and not what the actual future pace of development.

My reaction to more ST development these days is kind of "meh", given that Atom is undergoing actually-active development (what with changelogs longer than four items over whatever number of months), doesn't require mucking around with plist files for syntaxes, and actually allows for development of custom sidebars and other UI elements.

I'd be more on the Atom boat if it didn't still feel like the base installed packages were lacking. Having to install a package to get Atom to correctly indent Ruby was awkward, coming from Github, a Ruby shop. That's been fixed now, but speed issues, and the file search(Cmd+T) is just awful.

It's definitely getting better but I've moved back until it's further along.

For me there's also the huge structural flaw of using RegEx to parse large chunks of text for syntax highlighting, etc. while blocking the UI thread.

You can't open large text files easily. To me, pretty important in a text editor.

Be aware that the dev builds requires a license key, while the regular beta builds [1] do not.

[1] http://www.sublimetext.com/3

Loading indicators won't stop spinning. Oh well, I don't use the sidebar anyway.

That's down to the theme. It needs updating to learn about the spinners. http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15971

I just hope that emacs 24.4 comes out soon :)

I've got my hopes on NeoVim with support for embedding.

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