Sublime Text Development Status
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sublimetext.com
But now Textmate is open source, and now there is Atom, I am not so sure any more. Neither Textmate nor Sublime Text, nor Atom seem to be able to stand up to the two old ones in term of development community and community involvement.
Maybe it is a question of novelty. Vim still has unmatched key bindings. Emacs atill has unmatched total flexibility. Textmate had snippets (which now everyone has), Sublime Text has multiple cursors (which is maybe not a big enough improvements over macros to matter). Light Table seemed interesting, but probably too narrow in scope. My hope is that Atom's openness will finally allow it to transcend its brethren. But I don't see a compelling reason for that yet.
I know people will scream that Emacs (and vim) have windows ports, but they are utter crap compared to running them under a Unix. I can tell that from experience. Emacs on Windows is unbearably slow: it took 10 times as much to start as on the same host, same SSD, when it is run under a Linux VM! It also relies heavily on standard Unix tools (wget, grep, ...), whose ports for Windows are extremely outdated to the point that they are unusable (Emacs 24's find in file relies on features not provided by the standard non-CYGWIN grep). There only solution is to use CYGWIN, which is a mess: it's extremely slow, behaves weirdly (wrt path names, notably), and it doesn't play well if you already have a standard MSYSGit installation for your git needs. (I have tried using Emacs at least 4 times already, and I have never managed to stick to it, for these kind of reasons.)
I love ST. It boots fast, is gorgeous, modern (unlike Emacs, you can have your cursor outside the region you are viewing!), trivial to configure (with auto-reload of config files), has sane defaults and great support for most languages out of the box, it has a great community, and a nice language choice for moddability. It might have been born has an OS X éditeur du jour, but I'd say it's more of a blessing for Windows developers where good, modern editors are rare.
I don't think you have much experience with Vim on Windows. I use Vim on Windows every day for years (terminal and gVim) and the experience is the same or better than mac/unix, except for the lack of a good POSIX shell (which is a problem for every Windows text editor).
> you can have your cursor outside the region you are viewing!
That means you're using the scrollbar. It would be nice if Vim added a jumplist entry when the scrollbar was used though...
It is a lightning fast next-generation editor. It changed the game entirely when released, and still nothing comes close.
I would be pleased to be proven wrong here, but how exactly did it "change the game entirely", and how exactly is it a "next-generation editor"?
The synopsis seems to be that development is continuing, there are long term plans, but that development is slow and will probably continue that way at least until 3 is released (which there is no date given for).
So basically nothing has changed :)
[Edit: Title fixed to be less link-baity. Thanks!]
The race for 2020 President of the US is in the works too, if your bar is "someone is thinking about it what it might be like."
[original title was "Sublime Text 4 In The Works"]
This is a community project, stop being a bottleneck.
Besides, going open source doesn't mean that you lose the keys to the kingdom. There are plenty of open source projects that make money; Linus is gainfully employed and he gives everything away. I'm sure there are ways to monetize ST beyond charging for binaries.
Use Kickstarter to open source it and you both cash in and do the community a favour.
Sublime must be the most mismanaged profitable company.
I admire what he's done, and respect his choice if he's really not expanding because he likes to code and doesn't want to deal with running a business. But I also now use Vim because I didn't trust Sublime's future.
It is unusable without a license.
Popups cause a huge break in my concentration especially when I am coding so it is unusable to me.
But I still find it usable since it's not arbitrary pop up during typing or navigating.
Plus this is the raw number: I know that I have a license, and I have it installed on a number of computers and VMs. I assume that I'm not alone in taking advantage of this.
So sure, if he has sold 50k licenses then that's $3.5m, and for that sum you expect active development (its like 580k/year), I doubt that he's pulling in millions a year..
The TextMate saga is a big part of the reason why I have become reluctant to make any non-OSS tools part of my daily life. (Although I might not say that had I not seen the vim light.)
The forums unfortunately also deteriorated to bickering between the "you're paying for future promises" and "you payed for a working editor up to date". Why people bicker at all is beyond me, but I guess both camps has enough opinion to engage.
All in all, Sublime Text is excellent software – just as TextMate was (is, if you prefer) – before the business of "one man bands" most likely removed fun from the equation.
They're not going to get any more money from me.
BUT! It's run as if it was a hobby project coded in mom's basement. He surely must be earning enough money to get more people on board.
I don't think it will survive after Atom becomes popular and stable.
He had a lot of customers at some point. That's when he should have brought in more people to do things right. He chose to do it all on his own, get himself burnt out and completely stop communicating.
I don't see a future for this project if it doesn't get open sourced. The main problem is there's absolutely no support once he releases a stable ST version. You never have anything stable they support.
Which makes me worry I will have to continue to use Vim for next decade. Vim is great, but we need to find something better.
I think, if I were author, I would try to find a way to incorporate what makes editors like Vim awesome, what makes Emacs awesome is already implemented several times. This other part is still elusive and could benefit innovation.
I've came to like it while pondering dropping 70$ on ST when i got Chocolat for free in some kind of software bundle (can't recall which), so there's that..
I believe Atom will run laps around ST before 4 development is even started.
Really, how many version does he need to reimplement the same features again and again?
I'm all for him getting my money more than once for Sublime Text. But is it really that hard to at least evolve the Same editor instead of rewriting it over and over just so he can get another round of money?
Which is exactly why I'm still running the evaluation license of ST 3; I paid for ST 2, but shortly after it got out of beta it was pretty much abandoned in favor of another years-long beta period for ST 3. I'm not falling for that one again.
Likewise I fell into the 'early access' trap for Steam games, where a developer gets rich without any obligation to deliver. It worked (and was successful) for Minecraft, but other games have yet to deliver.
I do the exact same thing. I might pay for ST3 if the developer can convince me that he is going to put some update in ST3 after it is released.
> Sublime Text 3 is currently in beta. The latest build is 3059.
Yep. Which makes this announcement extremely odd.
ST4 hasn't been announced yet, just that it's something they want to do - which is great! I look forward to the August releases.
Don't see much of a reason to buy 4 either - 6-8 seems like the sweet spot. /s
I'll gladly pay when I see that they updates some minor version for a while after release.
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