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Comment by oddevan | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder why it wasn't this way from the get-go

As I saw it, GitHub was trying to see if it could become a business. Developers will pay decent money (as in "desktop software" money, not "mobile app" money) for a quality text editor.

I wouldn't have blamed them for going commercial, but I'm happy to see them releasing this to the community. :)

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I paid for Sublime Text, and there were enough rough edges and bits I didn't like about both vim and Emacs that I felt justified in paying for it, but nevertheless seeing development slow to an absolute crawl on a product I paid for makes me nervous.

What rough edges?

If you still feel like maybe vim could be something for you if the rough edges were removable, come talk to us at https://github.com/neovim/neovim in a couple of months when we'll be ready to start implementing new features. The refactoring is going great and work on the VimL -> Lua(JIT) translator is already quite advanced.

Neovim seriously has me so excited that I could scream like a little girl.

On a list of software projects I wish existed, a modernized Vim would be numbers 1 through 10. I enjoy core Vim, but the pain of Vim's limits when adding in new functionality with plugins (like pauses running Syntactic checks, or the hiccups and lack of smoothness of every autocompletion plugin ever) are a downer.

The biggest pro about Vim[1] is that I can open a hundred instances[2] without having my OS gasping for oxygen. I would very much love to see a modern UI, a clean plugin interface, etc., but I fear that those changes would make Vim as heavy as the competition.

I wonder if Emacs will eventually compete, though, both UI-wise and for cleaner plug-ins.

[1]: In my humble opinion

[2]: and I do, actually

on [2] assuming gvim, try --remote-silent, vim buffers are much easier to work with than whatever app switching your os provides.

> I can open a hundred instances

What's your use case? I'm curious.

When I am done working on something, and want to start working on another project, I don't close the previous project. I leave it in a virtual desktop. That way, when I wish to resume work on that project (or component of a project), switching to the correct virtual desktop is way faster than opening the console, going to the right directory, opening Vim, and opening all the relevant files. Besides, the local shell history is also ready to grab to start running all the tools I need for testing, debugging and general dev aiding.

Project switching, I find, is really hard, but it is made way harder by having to remember all the unique locations of files, directories and commands related to the project, and having to wait for everything to load.

I really like Sublime's workspaces system as a solution to this problem.

If you have a project open and need to switch to another one, Ctrl-Alt-P opens the project switcher. If you switch to another project, the previous project's workspace is saved. So when you come back to the last project, everything is JUST as you left it.

Alternatively, if you need to have it open in another window (for comparisons or whatnot), just open a new window before opening the project switcher! (Ctrl-Shift-N, Ctrl-Alt-P)

> VimL -> Lua(JIT) translator is already quite advanced

Does that mean NeoVim will support Lua for scripting alongside VimL?

Yes.

Vim already has support for Lua, although you tend to have to compile from source and enable that option as most distribution packages don't have that option enabled.

Yeah. I went through that with TextMate. It was worth what I got out of it though in the long run.

It can be both commercial and open source, they are not mutually exclusive.

Developers will pay decent money for a "code" editor (an IDE), not a "text" editor.

Text editors are dime a dozen and in that space, you are competing with much more than tools that are geared just toward developers.

It doesn't have to be a full IDE. Sublime Text and Textmate before it have both been very successful while charging a respectable fee.

Maybe the slightly-snarky lesson here is "developers will pay decent money for a text editor... on OSX".

I've paid for Sublime and I run mostly Arch Linux systems.

Developers will pay decent money for any editor that helps them create better code (and thus more money). :-P

Any particular reason you chose sublime over Vim?

I can't speak for the other poster, but in my case gentler learning curve (I've been using vim for about 10 years and I still don't know 10% of what it can do), smooth scrolling, a real GUI (vim's text menus can be pretty confusing at times), and the features vim didn't have at the time like multiple cursors, command palette and go to anything.

Why do I keep using it? Because generally new functionality requires about 2 minutes of readme.md and then it is working, rather than half an hour of hacking with vim config files.

Overtime I just found myself being more productive and 'happier' while using Sublime. A lot of that comes from the extra functionality it offers (built-in and from numerous plugins). Eg, Markdown preview, image preview, color picker, various project search and management features from SidebarEnhancements.

I still love Vim and use it for editing single files or whenever I remote in to another machine but this new generation of text editor / IDE hybrids just fit my project workflow a bit better.

TM is now open source and a lot of ST users are stuck at V2. I dont think there is a lot of room for another product.

I'd say there's always room for a product that works well. Textmate, back in the day, had to come in and compete with well-regarded software after all -- even if we ignore vim/emacs as being insufficiently-Mac, there was BBEdit.

I don't know that I'd say Sublime users are "stuck". The long beta on v3 seems to be splitting the community, somewhat, but it wouldn't be surprising if the final release resulted in it consolidating again.

Perhaps, but either way as a ST2 user I'm looking for a replacement and once ST2 does not meet my needs I'll either go back to emacs full time or look towards something else for light weight stuff.

I've already movers most of my we stuff to IntelliJ/WebStorm. I really liked ST2 but was a little miffed that right after I bought my licence ST3 was pushed to the forefront of the site without a reasonable upgrade plan.

I do certainly agree that the new-version / upgrade thing has been poorly handled. If nothing else, announcing it and causing the split should have been followed by rapid development instead of over a year of slow beta releases.

I thought that was one of the big plus points for ST.

It looks and works the same on all platforms, OSX, Windows, Linux.

So maybe there is something in that the OSX crowd will pay for tools.

That said, I find it far easier to get up and running with a myriad of free software on OSX than I ever did on Windows (much love to homebrew)

Code is text last I checked. I see what you're getting at, but "text editor" encompasses that already. For everyone I talk to anyway.

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