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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs, and it's pretty shady to ride another project's coattails when their intent is essentially to cannibalize it by being sublime-but-free. You can discuss the merits of open source and paying for tools all you want, but basically their goal is to put a man out of business who's made something that a lot of people love, because he has the gall to charge $60. Anyway. I'm all for competition, but do it under your own banner with your own ideas.

Also, I think it's weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch. I mean, unless I'm contributing... I don't care. You could write it in brainfuck if it does the job.

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> I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand

They aren't claiming to be associated with Sublime - they're saying that they're trying to make something _like_ Sublime. And that is actually a pretty good way to explain it. When I first found LimeText (about a year ago) I was searching for an "open source ST2 clone". I already knew that I wanted something like Sublime, I just wanted it to be open source so I could contribute to it. Having to compare the features of LimeText to the ubiquitous features of Sublime would have just made it harder for me to "get" what LimeText is.

> because he has the gall to charge $60

I don't think that the 60USD was a big deal. I was fine with that, I just wanted something that's open-source.

> weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch

I think that the reason why is because LimeText is marketed towards people who want to contribute to their editor. Sublime is probably a more stable solution for people looking for something like Sublime, so right now the big feature is that it's open-source.

* Also, I should note that I've never used LimeText... I ended up switching to Atom instead. My primary experience with it is just finding it and evaluating it as an alternative to Sublime.

Sub-LimeText

They use wordplay on the sublime editor to name themselves.

It's up to trademark lawyers to prove if the name is associated with Sublime Text or not.

I agree, but the main reason for most people (I can't comment on the author's intention) is that Sublime is lacking updates and transparency about the development.

They did announced something recently, like getting ready for ST 4. And 3 is not even a major upgrade from ST2, IMHO.

I've been using Sublime Text 2 for a few years now. I'm not sure what a major upgrade would entail when it works so well already. Do Emacs and Vim get 'major upgrades'? [actual question]

no, but emacs and vim don't charge 60 bucks per version. I'm not saying this is necessarily negative for ST, but its the point he was making. I frankly think 60 bucks is worth robust support which ST certainly did not have.

Anyways, theres no satisfying HN. When Atom came out, the consensus was that they should've come out and said it was an ST clone upfront. Now someone does that and it seems the tide has changed.

While we're on Atom, since switching I've found its everything ST should've been. Its open source and has a huge community developing very useful plugins (not to mention, they're well integrated from a usability perspective - git/terminal status/linter/etc). Also, I have yet to run into a serious bug/versioning issue which ST plugins were rife with before I dropped it.

>> no, but emacs and vim don't charge 60 bucks per version

Not that it matters much, but it's actually $70 now: http://www.sublimetext.com/buy

I don't think Atom is ready to replace Sublime yet for me. The way it renders text just bugs me for one. The other thing is that it's lacking a good way to do syntax specific settings like in Sublime. Aside from that it's a matter of the plugin ecosystem not being as mature.

Yeah, every font I’ve tried on Atom really doesn’t look good compared to ST on my mac. Even with css tweaks for antialiasing.

Atom is awesome, but I agree that the plugins aren't mature enough yet.

> Do Emacs and Vim get 'major upgrades'?

Yeah, they do. It's very hard to do in both cases, for different reasons - licensing for Emacs, code quality/style for Vim - but it happens. For Emacs just read this: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ant... and this: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ant... (or look at normal changelog, but I kind of like this "backwards in time" format, it's fun :)) to get a feeling for what you'd miss by not doing a "major upgrade".

This isn't a "fork" though or at least it doesn't look like it from a cursory look at their website. So they shouldn't be riding the coat tails of sublime at all. I understand a fork doing that but not this.

I guess it depends, at least for me, on how much it looks and feels like Sublime Text and whether it is compatible with the numerous addons there are.

Yea, I'm still using v2.0 because I don't want to get burned again. He released v3 a few months after I bought it.

I understand software development isn't cheap but it's kind of annoying that $60 doesn't include free upgrades.

I think it does include free updates. At least, I just copied my code from v2 into v3 and that worked.

  Expiration Date
  Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however
  an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.

From: http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq

What the hell? Sublime Text 3 isn't even out of beta, nor featured on the Sublime Text homepage.

> And 3 is not even a major upgrade from ST2, IMHO.

From a development standpoint it likely was. Doing a plug-in rewrite is a ton of work.

As long as Sublime doesn't go the Jetbrains way where they never reach a stable status, but they keep increasing the version number every year, I'm fine.

I don't think people care so much about how it's 60$. At work that makes little difference to me. The big thing is how this is open source.

> The big thing is how this is open source.

And how does that make a difference? You could already contribute plugins to both to add/remove/alter functionality, so other than a warm fuzzy feeling, what does Open Source add to your productivity?

If something breaks or development stalls or he wants new features and the developer has abandoned the project he can then pick it up himself if he wants.

I'm sure that if he were to abandon Sublime, then he'd open source it. The community is too big not to. Besides, $60 is not a bad price for something that will always be ahead of Lime's curve.

$0 is not a bad price for something that will always be behind of Sublime's curve.

I used closed and open source software. It just feels much better if I see a bug, fix it, place a pull request and be done with it, than discuss with some devs in a bug tracker if and when they want to fix a bug I hate.

And that's the problem. Every single open source software looks like it was cobbled together with no vision or coherency in design.

It's no surprise that most open source software is clunky and hard to use whereas closed products always have that visual polish.

> Every single open source software looks like it was cobbled together with no vision or coherency in design.

Creating a Pull Request doesn't mean that the developer of the open source project has to accept it verbatim if it doesn't fit with the 'vision.'

[Also, I'm pretty sure that the parent to your post was talking about bugs that probably don't involve visuals.]

Yes, many projects lack a style guide for UI and/or coding.

And often big projects have, similar to closed source software, rather ugly workflows where you have to discuss stuff before you're assigned to a bug and then have to send it patches and what not.

A good review process is important or else everything ends in chaos.

Every single? You sure you want to make that claim on HN?

Yeah, take the go language, for instance. No vision, cobbled together by amateurs without any clear goals, and no real-world experience. Awful. /s

A lot of open/free projects are indeed "hobby" projects (and not in a good way) -- but to claim that all of them are bad? Compared to what? The shareware scene from the 90s?

    Closed products always have that visual polish

Wow. You must use different closed-source software to me. I agree a lot of open source software is very ad-hoc and seems to have no overarching design in place, but the same seems to be true of most closed source software in my experience.

> for something that will always be ahead of Lime's curve.

What makes you so sure of that?

In my experience, when a project starts out of the gate by riding on the success of another project, it never fully catches up. To me, it means the maintainers are not capable of creating something themselves that is their own. They will likely always rely on Sublime to come up with new features and ideas first, and then copy them.

That wasn't what they said. They said:

> At work that makes little difference to me.

Clearly implying that Open Source is a productivity increase. I am asking why.

I'd put what you're saying in the "warm fuzzy feeling" department as in the real world the majority of developers, even if Sublime Text died, would just sit by patiently and wait for someone else to release a replacement. Most lack the skills, time, or both to develop a project like Sublime Text.

> Clearly implying that Open Source is a productivity increase. I am asking why.

If something breaks or development stalls or he wants new features and the developer has abandoned the project he can then pick it up himself if he wants.

You just repeated what the person said above who I replied to. Repeating something doesn't add clarity and is not conducive to a conversation.

I read it as "At work, I'm happy to pay for software." and "I prefer to use open source software." as two separate thoughts.

That said, I agree that just because people can contribute to software doesn't mean they will. I'm certainly guilty of just living with bugs or functionality gaps in open source software that I use, lazily waiting for someone else to address it the same way I would if it were something developed privately.

You can contribute plugins, sure, but the direction of the entire project is in the hands of one person. As others have said, updates have become more scarce in recent times. For example, it was almost 6 months between build Build 3061 and Build 3062.

Open Source doesn't imply that there's a productivity gain. For obvious reasons I'm a lot more comfortable using OS tools at work.

I don't know how much it being open-source will help though. The open-source world is chock full of libraries and tools that have been abandoned long ago, despite having numerous contributors listed on the project. I'd say that about 30-40% of Rails gems I come across everyday have not been updated in a year if not more. Sure, they have forks, but unlike the original gem, they are not mature enough to be used in a production environment.

Can I ask a really silly question? Why do updates matter unless there are either serious bugs or glaring missing features? If a tool is relatively bug-free and has a plugin ecosystem which handles added functionality, why does the state of the core program matter all that much?

The real issue is that of nomenclature. If you are a professional software developer (ST target audience) then you are careful about how you use a #1 development tool that calls itself "unstable". It implies certain things about whether it is a good idea to install on a mission-critical server for example, or whether it is a good idea to invest time in writing plugins against its API.

The product itself may be relatively bug-free, but that is not really the issue. RHEL7Beta was relatively bug-free, but I would not advise you to use it for most purposes.

I'm stuck using RHEL5 and it would be nice if I could run sublime text. If it were open source, I could probably build it against RHEL5 libraries. The official binaries don't support my platform.

Oddly enough, I've been using ST2 for a while and have been too lazy to actually buy a license for it (or Divvy).

I think I'll do so now for exactly this reason.

I can't because still after all these years the only payment option is still Paypal. Trying to buy a serious development tool here I'm not shopping on grandma's home sewn teddy bears and scarves.

It's ridiculous in my strong opinion.

This is like someone trying to get me to buy a domain on Godaddy just because I like to use Heroku for hosting. I don't use Paypal.

From the second section of the Sales FAQ [0]:

Alternative Payment Methods PayPal is currently the only way to purchase a license for Sublime Text. However, for most countries a PayPal account is not required; you can purchase as a guest using a credit card. Unfortunately, PayPal requires users in some countries, such as New Zealand, to create an account.

[0] http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq

> I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs

Its competition. Thats the market segment they are aiming to attract and serve. They aren't claiming to be Sublime Text, they are claiming they want to be better than it. Its the market leader in that area, and if that is the segment they are interested in serving, imho it wouldn't make sense to not compare themselves to Sublime Text.

> Also, I think it's weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch. I mean, unless I'm contributing... I don't care.

Play the other side. You're interested in an open source alternative to Sublime Text, and you love working in Go. Is it relevant now? Because I'm willing to bet by its open source nature, they are as interested in attracting committers as they are users at this point.

> They aren't claiming to be Sublime Text

Pretty close, calling your project Lime text is pretty sketchy IMHO.

> it wouldn't make sense to not compare themselves to Sublime Text

But they aren't comparing themselves, that would be a feature page showing how many features they have. Instead they are branding themselves in a very similar way.

> They aren't claiming to be Sublime Text, they are claiming they want to be better than it

Sure, but, they're using sublime text's brand to draw attention to their own project. If they called themselves, say, "Cherry edit" and just had a comparison matrix to sublime text without saying "we want to be sublime", I bet this wouldn't have made it to the front page. They're piggybacking off the other projects success by invoking its name and lineage, while positioning themselves as a competitor by undercutting the price (in this case: free).

That's what I mean. It's not illegal or whatever, it just feels like poor sportsmanship.

I see your point of the not liking "sublime-but-free". But isn't that what basically everyone does with "it's like uber meets airb&b for x"?

I think it would be fair to say that it was inspired by sublime, I agree completely with your sentiment. It does seem that Sublime will end up open sourced most likely, unless author is willing to continue development with same intensity he did before.

As for price, I was happy to pay for the editor, even though I use vim most of the time, I am happy to support modern editors and use them.

Go is part of the pitch because the project is still is its relatively early stages (I believe it's about a year old). It's just as important for them to attract developers as it is users.

You've got to hand it to them for the clever name. They manage to imply that it's better than Sublime while using fewer letters.

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