> Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit.

I agree, but considering the "editor space" has progressed a lot in the past decade or so, i would hardly call Sublime Text "done".

It has it's strengths and weaknesses, and while it was a great editor 15 years ago, and had it's share of innovative features, things have stagnated quite a bit in recent years. ST4 felt more like a minor update to ST3, and ST3 was probably also just a minor update to ST2 (i forgot which one was the big rewrite, but i think it was ST2).

Compare that to what has been going on with VSCode and Zed in recent years, which far surpass Sublime Text in many ways, and doing it for free.

So, in the end, for me, it turned out to be a subscription based "slightly better than average" editor. Yes, i still love it, and i would love for it to get a revival and spring to life again, and i would switch back in a heartbeat, but sadly the "maintenance mode" has been going on for almost a decade now.

I can empathize with your take, but my sentiment is the polar opposite. I like the toolchain shuffle - exploring this, trying out that - but I always, always come back to Sublime specifically because they have not implemented major changes. I _deeply_ appreciate the fact that it has remained essentially the same for years, and I very sincerely hope that it doesn't change much going forward. This boringness is what keeps me coming back, and is what I'm paying for.

Sublime has become my refuge from the crap that other editors are trying to cram in to every available nook and cranny. Zed was pleasant at first blush, but the way that AI is central to the platform was a huge turn-off and disabling that (and a few other things) was not intuitive. Same goes for many other editors I've tried over the years.

I would like to see more activity in plugin development and maintenance, but always peripheral to the core Sublime experience. Give me a stable, quiet, boring platform and let me choose the features and noise!

I similarly switched from ST4 to Zed after using it for several years. I agree that good software eventually becomes "bugfixes", but if you expand the universe of ST4 out to popular plugins for specific programming languages, it starts to become really buggy. That's something I wish ST would focus on, make the most popular plugins more stable and continue doing that for the next decade.

I posted in the ST forum that achieving a stable configuration of plugins in ST4 seems more difficult than it should be, but they declined to take this on as a problem.

Meanwhile Zed made it pretty easy to achieve a stable set of plugins very quickly, particularly around language services, shell integration, etc. That's what prompted me to switch; however Zed has taken a few steps backwards in that department since they started spinning out language extensions into plugins that require more configuration and are more prone to breaking.

The Apple macOS model of implementing useful features from apps (in ST's case: plugins) stands out as long as there are reasonable trade offs.

Without it, you have to use so much glue for a good experience. So, look at the very popular extensions and see if they can become native.

Well, Apple is giving me more and more reasons to switch away from their default apps (which I used to love) with every release. They focus too much on new features, too little on stability and good experience.

I've already ditched Music (macOS: Cog; iOS: Decoupled), I'm holding off upgrading for Photos' sake, Home on macOS is an absolute nightmare, Mail is meh but ok (fingers crossed they won't accidentally break it), and I'm hoping they will never go after Notes - it's central to so many things in my life.

Meanwhile, I'm still using Emacs, because despite its many shortcomings (mostly the legacy architecture), ELisp makes writing simple plugins simple, and the few that I use are too excellent to get me to switch.