I started to port one of my plugins to Sublime Text 3 beta, but basic things are broken. Importing urllib.request raises an exception on OS X:
>>> import urllib.request
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
File "X/urllib/request.py", line 2456, in <module>
ImportError: No module named '_scproxy'
Except for a few well-documented edge cases, a properly-built Python behaves the same on OS X, Linux, and Windows. I really hope Jon Skinner gets better at building Python. Dealing with these random platform-specific issues is very frustrating.
That said, I am a fan of Sublime Text. (Otherwise what am I wasting my time writing plugins for?) It's like TextMate, but cross-platform and not abandonware. :)
“It's like TextMate, but cross-platform and not abandonware.”
This is no longer true since Textmate 2 has been open sourced. Textmate 2 is now very active, it is common to see a release every few days. See the changelog [1], or the activity of Allan Odgaard on GitHub [2].
I know. I was just poking some fun at TextMate. TM2 was delayed by what, 6 years? One can't not joke about that.
I actually use TextMate 1.5 more than I use Sublime Text. Unfortunately, TextMate 1.5 was never open-sourced and TextMate 2 broke plugins designed for 1.5. So for me, it is abandonware. :(
I've been building my own products for years. Burnout is a fact of life.
Sure if you built something people loved, theres ton of pressure to follow up with something just as good.
But it's biology. People get bored, exhausted or uninspired with their projects.
At the end of the day he made a ton of money and built something thousands of people use everyday. That should be more important than having a good sequel. There will always be competitors who will keep customers happy. Thats not his full responsibility forever because he did it once.
Besides, he'll get motivated again one day and do something interesting.
Let me use language that will perhaps resonate with people here more: doing this makes you a bully.
People do take things personally. This isn't constructive criticism we're talking about. It's not even a criticism of the product itself. It's making fun of someone for getting burnt out.
I hate that I turn every debate into "it depends on where you draw the line" but it really does. There is a continuum between my-first-open-source-project and Apple. It would be absurd to suggest to someone that they shouldn't make fun of Windows 8 because Steve Ballmer might get his feelings hurt. It would also be absurd to suggest that every kid who proudly uploads his/her first program to github deserves to be slammed for its shortcomings. It's a continuum.
While I see your perspective, I think it's going to get pretty boring around here if we have to walk on eggshells for fear that somebody who probably isn't even paying attention might be offended at a jovial (if accurate) characterization of one of their shortcomings.
He called it abandonware. He didn't say "fuck you." He didn't say "he's a shit developer." He called the program abandonware. Have a sense of perspective already. Frankly, I'd find it insulting if you were defending me from the tiniest barbs like this. Onlookers couldn't help but conclude I'd be knocked over and bruised by a warm breeze.
Downplaying burnout of mixing burnouts with boredom, or exhaustion gives the wrong impression. Most people that think they had some kind of burnout if they are not motivated or exhausted is plain wrong.
If you had serious depression going with your exhaustion at least, you might have had burn out.
The trivialization of burnout is damaging to the victims of burnout.
Thats what I'm saying. You shouldn't have be a victim of burnout.
Burnout a temporary state (by nature) brought on by legitimate causes.
If it was depression, then that is a separate issue with plenty of it's own clinical treatments and reasoning.
You can't deal with burnout by suppressing everyone who brings it up.
It has to be accepted. He has to accept that there are fans of Textmate who are disappointed while being able to appreciate that he accomplished something really great regardless.
He accepted he can't finish the project and open sourced it, which was also a very nice gesture and made the fans quite happy.
There will always be people who are ignorant to the effects of burnout and try to make fun of failed projects. But that doesn't mean it has to be damaging to the project creators.
I’ve been very tempted to switch to ST2, but I realized that the TM2 delay could not have happened if it was open source.
Since then, I’m using Textmate 2 and Vim, and I plan to fully switch to Vim soon: open source, powerful, extensible, large community, lightweight, and multi-platform.
Odd, then, that if you visit http://macromates.com/ you'll see that you can purchase Textmate 1.5 (or download a 30 day trial), and no mention or link to Textmate 2 or its home on Github.
A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay the ST developer to make ST open-source.
If ST becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with ST, especially those coming from a vim/emacs background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.
A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay Microsoft to make Windows open-source.
If Windows becomes open-source, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with Windows, especially those coming from a Linux background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.
A Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to pay The Government to make Everything Free.
If Everything becomes free, that solves one of the biggest issues many people have with The Government, especially those coming from a Poor background. This is something I know I would pay for, and I believe others would as well.
I think paying to open source SublimeText is a bit more ridiculous than paying the government. SublimeText is a license to print money at this point. It's the _default_ editor for just about every (non-bearded) engineer and costs $60 (soon, $70). The government, after all, is just a representation of its people. If the people want communism, then that's what happens.
"It's the _default_ editor for just about every (non-bearded) engineer and costs $60 (soon, $70)."
Without going into whether the open-sourcing is good or not, I'd just like to point out that you're wrong about this. I sincerely doubt that Sublime Text has more than, say, 5% marketshare in terms of what people are using. It gets a lot of talk on HN because we tend to a) know about new things and b) overly use Text Editors in favor of IDEs, but this is not reflective of the world at all.
I know. Hence the lack of true, pure socialist countries in the world today.
It also requires a post-scarcity economy. Which, supposedly we could achieve if we worked towards it, but again, that human thing keeps us from doing that.
If you're suggesting that this won't work because the numbers don't make sense, then I think a better way to go about it is to do exactly what forrestthewoods did in another comment - talk about actual numbers.
Much more convincing than making analogies which most people can dismiss pretty easily.
I tried that one on a gun nut with no luck. "If you think it's your right to own and carry a gun, then why don't you think North Korea should be allowed to have its own nukes?"
How much would you be willing to pay and how much do you think it'd take? The sublime text package manager has been installed 1.1 million times. Lets assume 10% of those are to a unique paid user at $60. That's $6 million right there. Sublime Text's popularity is only rising and if not a single update were released can expect good sales for several years.
What do you think the odds are that Sublime Text sells a million licenses in the next 5 years? I think the equation solves itself from here.
I'd probably be willing to pay at least $200, especially if it's spread out over some milestones. For example, I'd rather pay more after I see that people are actually actively working on it after it becomes open source. In fact, spread out over reasonable milestones I can imagine spending far more.
Of course, I'm probably an outlier here.
I think your assumption of 1.1 million installs belonging to 10% users is way off. Many people probably never purchase ST, but still install the Package Manager, especially since ST remains basically usable without paying. I'd think it's closer to 1%.
Of course, that still leaves us with quite a lot of money. To be honest, I hadn't looked at the figure of how many installs the package manager had - I'm pretty surprised (and happy) that ST is this popular. Guess I'll have to keep dreaming.
I still can't see how on purely financial terms, open sourcing ST becomes a better outcome than keeping it closed source.
The open source avenue (awesome as it would be) is effectively stopping any future income for releases.
That means finding an alternative business model for the developer to sustain himself. Sounds like a lot of risk and hassle, if i were the developer, why should i expose myself to that?
The flip side is, for long term adoption, it pretty much has to open source itself.
>The flip side is, for long term adoption, it pretty much has to open source itself.
Really? I don't see IntelliJ Idea suffering much from NOT being Open Source. Or even TextMate for that matter, which still has friends even while being mediocre at launch and 7 years late to show any improvement.
>TextMate was suffering from not being open sourced, and hadn't shown any improvement in 7 years. So he open sourced it, and it is now actively developed by the community.
I follow the repo but I don't see any exciting action. Maybe in a few more years (which is my definition of stagnating).
>IntelliJ CE has been open source for quite some time now.
Yes, but that's just a gimmick. All the interesting stuff is in the commercial edition, and it's not like IDEA is managed like an Open Source project, it's just released as one (like Oracle's MySQL).
TextMate was suffering from not being open sourced, and hadn't shown any improvement in 7 years. So he open sourced it, and it is now actively developed by the community.
TextMate was suffering from a lack of development. Someone else took over development, in this case the community.
Had TM continued in its previous, active commercial mode, it may be ever more popular today, not having given alternatives a chance to in turn become popular.
>> Really? I don't see IntelliJ Idea suffering much from NOT being Open Source
Yeah definitely. Idea & Visual Studio (among others) are top quality products, and yet both nothing more than a chapter 11 filing away from being vague memories.
Contrast adoption of Idea vs Eclipse.
Consider when Windows is no longer relevant, VS will necessarily degenerate to being a niche product (even though it is arguably one of the finest IDEs available at any price today).
Every Idea product I've used, with the exception of Rubymine 3.0, has been top notch. PHPStorm, ReSharper and IntelliJ are great. Some times there are benefits to having a small closed source, private paid team of professionals writing software. Some times it's beneficial to opening it up to the whole world and saying "what do you want to see added?"
I don't think anyone's disputing the quality of the products, Idea's ItelliJ, Microsoft's Visual Studio, ST2 - they're all quality software.
I just wanted to pick a bone with something you said though:
>> Some times there are benefits to having a small closed source, private paid team of professionals writing software
This is a comment about development methodology - the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Take out the words "closed source" (e.g. think Chromium browser) which have no baring on your statement, and then i agree.
Not a gimmick. While it's true that a lot of interesting stuff isn't there, you can happily develop Android apps using IntelliJ CE. Also, having source is extremely useful for people writing IDE plugins; doing this before IntelliJ CE was quite painful.
I must have installed the package manager a good 10 times across all the installs and different platforms I used to use ST2 on and I only paid for ST once.
I'm probably an outlier in that I work on lots of different systems, but I wouldn't be surprised if the 1.1 million package manager installs represents far less than 1.1 million uniques, and that's before you start adjusting down for pirates and non-paying users who just live with the nag dialog.
Textmate 2 is open source now and I've been using it as my primary text editor for the last couple of months. It's become really solid and it's definitely worth a look (if you're on Mac).
Is there a precedent for making something that exists to become open source using KickStarter money? I proposed this very thing to KS once and they rejected me. But I don't know if they make these judgments by their perception of the product rather than the nature of the transaction.
In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR, as a one-time fee so that the NaN investors would agree on open sourcing Blender. To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday Oct 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Maybe it'd just be better to make it "source available" and allow licensees to modify and share the code freely amongst themselves, but not grant unlimited redistribution rights.
One of the reasons it works so well is that it has a lot of code written in C++. With a very specific feature-set of C++, as all single programmer C++ codebases are.
An opensource project would focus in the slower Python part as most open source developers hate C++ and swear by scripting languages. Or would go on countless religious wars about what specific subset of C++ should the project use. They would even waste a lot of time editing out perfectly valid preprocessor macros simply because 'macros are evil'.
So far it has been proven to be better managed by its owner than it could have been by the community.
Let the OSS people improve on Notepad++. You can even setup a Kickstarter for them, and it would be good enough for that project.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean the community gets to directly decide features for the official release. The original developer would almost certainly be a Benevolent Dictator for Life. If some other people wanted to fork it and do stuff that you disagreed with, then you could respond simply by not using their fork.
A closed source project (as it is as of right now) can ONLY focus on the "slower Python part", as it is the ONLY way of extending Sublime Text. I really can't see how open sourcing ST would make it slower.
If I wanted to extend it in a way that is not supported in the Python API, I simply can't.
My point is that just because it's commercial software doesn't mean it should be closed source. If it was open source it could be 'easier to steal', but I bet most people seriously using it would still buy it. Anybody that took the time to patch the source would never have bought it anyway - so there is nothing lost.
I'm not sure why I'm getting down voted. For a bunch of open source evangelists that's pretty hypocritical.
If it was open source it could be 'easier to steal'
My point was that it's already freely available today. Just go to the site and download it.
For a bunch of open source evangelists that's pretty hypocritical.
wat?
Two levels of wat, really. You think Hacker News readers are open source evangelists? And you think downvoting is hypocritical for open source evangelists?
But in another sense, people are still using vim/emacs 20+ years later. Not everyone, which is why I think a modern reboot of them is in order, but I don't think you can say the same for much commercial software from 30 years ago.
First I'll point out that I'm open-minded and I'll try ST seen that so many people say good things about it.
However I'm not sure that's one of the biggest issue from people coming from a vim/emacs background.
I'm using Emacs because there is more than one million line of elisp code in Emacs and all its mode and there's no way anything is going to offer anywhere near close what Emacs has to offer.
Just an example: you can search and replace on a regexp and use friggin' Lisp substitution in the replacement. Say I've got this:
foo = 1
bar = 2
... = . // 96 more lines come here
baz = 99
I'm not saying it would be good style or anything to have "code" like that, but if I want to replace it with
foo = 5
bar = 10
... = . // 96 more lines come here
baz = 495
Well.. This is trivial under Emacs. And it's not trivial because that particular use case has been thought of previously: it's trivial because search and replace can use Lisp substitution, which is wild.
There are too many to names but I'm regularly using, under Emacs: real-time validation of XML files using Relax NG, ace-jump-mode, paredit (sweeter than sweet), magit, org-mode, etc.
But, most importantly, instead of having to adapt myself to the "text editor", I can adapt the text editor to myself.
Is ST3 as extensible as Emacs?
How complicated would it be to, say, implement the equivalent of vim's easymotion / emacs' ace-jump-mode to ST3? I'm not asking if someone did it: I'm asking how "complicated" it is for one to be able to adapt his too the way he needs.
In general, ST is pretty easy to write plugins for, as its got a simple API and everything is in Python. It was so much easier that even I wrote plugins for it, back in the days of ST1. I've since written some vimscript, and, let's just say, it's nicer to use a "true" programming language like Python than vimscript.
Here's what I think you should focus on with ST: Multiple Cursors. I've been beating the Multiple Cursors drum for a while, but a vast number of things can be done with them, and they're amazing. Many macros in emacs/vim can be done using Multiple Cursors, with the advantage that they usually work right the first time, and if you make mistakes, you get instant visual feedback so you can fix your mistake, instead of "record and pray" the way you do with vim/emacs.
Seriously, Multiple Cursors are ST's killer feature, in my eyes.
And for everything else, ST simply does all the things you want an editor to do well, and it does them beautifully, easily, and by default.
If we do a vim/ST comparison, I'd say ST wins the "I just want to install something and get to work" battle (easily), vim wins the "I can be amazingly productive with the actual text editing" battle, but ST wins the "I want to do cool manipulations to lots of similar text" because of Multiple Cursors.
The killer features that led me to TextMate and Sublime Text is that they open instantly and they render fonts nicely. I need the features you named a lot less than I need those two.
Are these changes really worth the "3.0" tag? Goto to symbol is great, but all other bullet points taste like what I expected 2 to have once it left beta (basically, speed and not letting plugins crash my session).
Isn't this a clever way to make users buy into a paid upgrade for a stable version of an editor they already bought?
I wouldn't argue that its "clever". Its a direct and honest way of asking people to pay for Sublime Text.
I'm happy to pay Jon as long as he keeps cranking out fast, high-quality software. Think of it as a subscription where you still own the software if you want to get out of it.
It's not a direct and honest way of asking people to pay for Sublime Text - it's an indirect way of asking people to continue to pay for something they thought they'd already bought.
I paid for Sublime Text 2 with the expectation of continued support of the quality we had during beta, but instead we have waited months for bug fixes which have never arrived. ST2 was essentially abandoned after it left beta, and now we find our money hasn't gone into supporting the product we paid for, it's gone into funding the next one.
As a developer I know this makes excellent business sense, but as a user it feels like I've been tricked. The changelist looks more like a point release, but one we have to pay another 50% for in the hope our bug reports will eventually be acknowledged. Given the past 6 months I have no confidence that'll happen.
Perhaps I'm being unfair - after all, I use ST2 all the time, and I've certainly got my money's worth out of it, even with the bugs - but something about this just doesn't feel right.
I paid for Sublime Text 2 with the expectation of continued support of the quality we had during beta, but instead we have waited months for bug fixes which have never arrived.
Rationally, as a software guy, this seems somehow unfair. After all, even as it was launched and without any further changes, ST2 is a good product at a low price.
But the reality is that I feel the same way as radiac. When I chose to spend real money on a text editor -- not exactly a field where the free competition is lacking -- I did so because I wanted to support and encourage a project that did seem to have a lot of nice little touches and did seem to keep coming out with them. The obvious and abrupt end of the stream of incremental updates the moment ST2 went final does irritate me.
Unfortunately, contrary to the post I just read about how stable ST2 is, I have seen irritating crashes that stopped me using it for some work, and I haven't seen a bug fix even for that, nor any other improvement since I sent the money. I probably won't pay for ST3 at this point, because at least now I've figured out what does crash ST2 and how to avoid it, and fairly or otherwise, the assumption in the back of my mind is going to be that ST3 might make a few minor improvements of the kind we used to get anyway, but if it has any sort of crash or data loss bugs they won't get fixed.
I felt this way about Ultra-Edit32 for a long time on Windows. I bought in college, and I believe it had a "... and future upgrades are automatically free" clause. It made me have a LOT of faith that this would be a useful and awesome product, and I was a happy user for many years. (In a sense, I bought it twice, as I asked my employer to buy it for me later.)
As a prospective user of Sublime Text (3, now), it's interesting to think about how I would feel had I bought ST2 a year ago, and now felt compelled to upgrade. The price is semi-negligible, in terms of how much one pays for a quality tool -- it's a fraction of the price of Komodo IDE or PyCharm, for example -- but the hassle is still annoying.
As Silhouette points out, it really makes one wonder about how long "support" (bugfixes, etc) will last for the current version. I think one of the more interesting questions to arise from this thread has been what the difference is (or should be?) between a point release (vN.5) and version N+1.
If you subscribe to versioning schemes like for instance semantic versioning [1], then the major version number must be incremented "if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API". In that sense, the change from Python 2 to 3 could warrant it.
I'd rather Jon ask for more money by ticking the version up and cranking out stuff than let the editor fester like TextMate 2.
That's what I view as honest, "I'm going to work on ST3 to convince you that its worth buying."
I haven't faced the same quality issues you speak of. TM2 has been rock solid for me. The only thing that never felt right was the theme (install Soda) and icon (Yuck, reminds me of Comic Sans)
I'm not saying that he should keep pumping out new features for ST2 - it's totally fair to draw a line under it on the day it leaves beta and say "no more features". My complaint is that he took ST2 out of beta while people were still complaining about bugs, and has subsequently only issued one bugfix release.
As both a user and a developer, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect paid software to get support and bugfixes for a while - at least until the next version leaves beta. "Pay an extra 50% and maybe I'll fix the bugs" doesn't seem fair.
Good point about expectations. I wonder if the problem really is that it was in beta for so long, instead of being released in a slightly more buggy state, and then having most of the bugs fixed in point releases after that.
I'd been wondering about the recent slow pace of updates, but I shouldn't have doubted. I've been consistently delighted by the quality of Sublime and the frequency with which it improves. For the amount of work I do with it and its quality premium over competing tools, at least for the features I value, it feels underpriced (on a US salary).
I'll happily pay for the upgrade if it keeps the author cranking away at a similar pace.
The change from python 2.6 to 3.3 would probably affect some plugins, so one could reason that, by adding the "3.0" tag, plugin creators would more easily accept the need for porting.
Yep, my thoughts exactly. Sublime is one of the few pieces of software that I rely on that has not only never let me down (so far!), but has really pleasantly surprised me on several occasions, saving my ass when I thought I'd just lost a lot of work.
- I run it on Linux, and had an unstable distribution for a while. I had a couple of occasions where the OS hard-locked, but on reboot Sublime started right back up to its last state -- including unwritten changes to multiple files.
- During a move to a new distribution, once I got my old /home remounted, Sublime amazingly did the right thing and again reloaded all of its state from the last operating system. I was expecting to have to re-open 30+ tabs/files and redo all of my user settings. Nope, Sublime did the right thing again.
- An update on my current OS has caused a problem with fuse which is causing my development directory to get unmounted on a regular basis. Sublime doesn't have a problem with this; any files that it loaded from the now-unavailable mount point are still there, the content is still all there, it doesn't freak out, it just marks the file as dirty (letting me know I need to remount that directory again).
- An rsync went afoul and nuked a pile of changes to a local development copy of a site. I was able to retrieve a bunch of my work from Sublime's open tabs.
None of these things are really examples of brilliant new engineering, but, in my experience they're all the kinds of details that too many other programs don't get right. Sublime just always seems to do what I would expect software to do in 2013.
That, plus ctrl-D is beautiful.
If I had to think of something I don't like about it, about the only things would be that occasionally the autocompletion is a nuisance, and occasionally I'll need to open a really really big file and a plugin causes it to stall for a bit. It sounds like the latter problem has been taken care of now in v3.
If Sublime were a bro, I'd always buy his beer. Instead, I'll be more than happy to pay the upgrade price.
For example, the "autosave" can be pretty handy. You enter some text into a tab, close sublime. You have no annoying dialogs asking you to save the file etc and the comtent is saved so that it is available in the same state when you reopen.
If not for the save your ass by not losing work bit, I like it for not being annoying.
I actually use "autosave" as a temporary clipboard. When I need to keep something over multiple days but don't need it forever (i.e. big, hairy command strings) then I just open a new tab and paste it in. That way I can continue to copy/paste the command whenever I need it and as long as I don't close that tab I'm good to go. :)
I think it is a valid point. If it provides the value to you.
I don't get these price discussions. If you earn your money by programming, I think it is crazy to be cheap on your tools if you can get the job better done using them.
If you program occasionally, then use some free open source editor.
People on construction sites don't use the cheapest tools available for a reason. If you use it to earn money, you shouldn't be short sighted.
The valid point is "it's worth it to me," not "lots of other things with less value cost as much or more and I willingly pay for those, too."
If you tell me a Ford Taurus costs $40,000, justifying that by telling you I spent $100,000 on a broken bike doesn't make the former a good deal.
The way I see it, $70 on its own is meaningless. A lot of people are taken aback because it feels like $70 for an advanced text editor. And in many ways, it is that with some IDE flair built-in.
I own a license and honestly still find myself in Notepad++ for a bunch of things. As a professional programmer, I have come to the conclusion that for my purposes it's overpriced. Your mileage ... well, it should vary.
I'm not sure why you go from "provides even less value" to "that 'even less value' < $30".
A $30/month SaaS app is usually paid for because it saves/brings value of $100+ per month to your tasks. A good editor easily brings more value to a developer.
Actually my comment there ignored "value" altogether, really. The value is irrelevant.
My point is you can't quantify the value or justify the cost in this way. Surely, a $40,000 Ford Taurus provides more value than the $100,000 broken bike, but that doesn't mean the Ford Taurus is priced appropriately for needs.
The editor was already pretty stable, but maybe not the plugins, which are optional. I'd agree that the price is a bit high to upgrade, but for people like me who didn't own it yet, now is a good time to buy.
But if you don't think this upgrade is worth it, do you want to invest in a product that is likely to make you pay for upgrades you don't think are worth it in the future?
Well considering the large development in terms of plugins and this is currently a BETA, we'll have to wait and see how many new features come out with ST3 to justify the 3 tag. Or it can become a Firefox and have ST18 in a couple of years.... ;-)
Might be worth pointing out that the version number is no longer on the application name. There was "Sublime Text 2" and now there's just "Sublime Text".
>Goto to symbol is great, but all other bullet points taste like what I expected 2 to have once it left beta (basically, speed and not letting plugins crash my session).
I bought ST2 without expecting all these features. Taking the effort to add out-of-process plugins? That's more that the TextMate guy has done in all 6 years of dabbling with 2.
On top of that, it has other nice stuff I want. It might be OK calling it 2.5, but it's not a scam by any imaginable stretch of the word.
>Isn't this a clever way to make users buy into a paid upgrade for a stable version of an editor they already bought?
No. Did you find ST2 any less stable than any other editor out there? I use it for a year for working on 3-4 different languages and it never has crashed on me.
So, I appreciate the cynicism but it's misguided here.
^ this reply can be summarized as "turning on the fan to spread shit on everyone else".
This is a discussion about sublime, not other editors. And if other editors have shortcomings, it's not an excuse.
I also think that after paying for software the least you can expect is relatively bug-free code or quick updates to fix them, and a reduced number of crashes. That is, for software that has left beta to be labelled stable.
I personally find the 70$ price tag rather high for a text editor. However, this is not my main issue
For this premium price I do not only expect features but as well documentation and if you are a plugin developer the current ST2 documentation is just plain bad because it misses too much. In addition, even though ST2 is highly configurable nowhere are all the options explained that you can use and manually set. I fins this rather annoying and think this was something to fix along the ST2 life cycle.
I'm not sure if the beta will conivince me in paying another 30$ for hope that this will some days come.
I couldn't agree more, I'm not a wealthy person and while $70 might be chump change to some users, to me that would represent a large amount of money - I couldn't justify to myself to spend it, I would love to be able to pay like $25 or $30 because I would probably be okay with that.
I just don't see the differences between the two being enough to justify me spending that amount of money, especially not when I'm doing just fine with Sublime Text 2 (and yes, yes, the old Hammer being used as a screwdriver argument will inevitably pop up now I've said that) and have no real reason to switch.
Even though I'm not earning money using ST2, I'm still loving it. However, there is always a feeling about price. And I think 70$ is a lot. Compare this to 30$ for Mountain Lion, 99$ for Aperture 3 and 129$ for Lightroom 4. Does this feel right? I'm not against paying in general rather I want to have a good feeling spending the money.
My pet peeve with editors is how they handle files changing underneath them. I do this regularly enough (eg I might make a quick change using vi, source control update), there could be ssh or sshfs involved, or another tool might be better for doing whatever it is that I wanted.
Emacs has been the only editor that has never lost a change for me. Whenever you try to make a modification it checks the underlying file is as expected, and tells you if not. I tried SL2 and it quite happily ignored the fact that the file had changed. I'm also evaluating AppCode and it has perhaps the worst behaviour - it silently updates the editor window. But some of the time it doesn't notice the change and hence overwrites it. Consequently you can't trust the editor.
gedit also notices changes proactively (compared to emacs' reactively) but I don't use it regularly.
> I tried SL2 and it quite happily ignored the fact that the file had changed.
Weird. I use Sublime Text 2 exclusively across all three platforms. Whenever an open file changes (e.g. I sync to Perforce), it pops up a modal dialog box when I bring that file's tab back into focus. If you're referring to a file that's changed in the background as you're actively editing it, I admit I haven't tried that.
Yes, that what's I was describing. It works just fine. When I tab back to Sublime, I get the "<filename> has changed on disk. Do you want to reload it?" modal dialog box. (If there are no unsaved changes in the Sublime buffer that could be clobbered, it just reloads the file silently as you'd expect.)
My test just now was on Windows, but I use it regularly on Mac and Linux as well, and I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if it silently clobbered changes like that. You're sure you had unsaved changes to the Sublime buffer for the file when you conducted your test?
I'm using btrfs. In any event it sounds like my test must have been flawed. Perhaps I didn't notice it doing an auto-reload.
I don't know what mechanism SL uses. A lot of my current work is using sshfs with editing happening on Linux and the endpoint being MacOS. inotify won't work for that, but more paranoid and repeated stats will.
The only problem along these lines I've had with it is in renaming files, where it doesn't appear to be locking onto the inode and the previous-named file still remains in editor and can be saved with the old filename. OOB edits do get reflected back into the editor somehow, though.
Vim produces a warning whenever you focus on the window, asking if you want to keep your current work or load the changed file. If you keep your work, it reminds you yet again if you attempt to save over the changed file, just in case.
If the fine hasn't been changed in SL2, it just reloads it with a message displayed in the status bar. If it has been edited in SL2, it asks if you want to reload the file.
You can find out the (highlighted) differences between the in-memory buffer and the on disk version one via "Show Unsaved Changes" on the context menu.
When I halted my evaluation of SL because of this issue I did send them feedback about it, but never got a response. I did have some other far lesser concerns like wasted space if you turned line number off.
I'm a Sublime Text 2 owner, but the continued lack of a Linux/ARM build nor any announced plans for the same mean I won't be upgrading. It is a shame because I like the editor a lot, but if it doesn't work on all the platforms I use it ultimately has zero value to me.
Why do you need ST to be involved in building? I use ST for all text editing and then click the build button where ever it may lie - python script file, Xcode, or VisualStudio.
You do lose the ability to jump to the exact line an error is on which is a mild nuisance but nearly enough to make me stop using ST.
ARM devices are happening.. without having seen your codebase I can't speak for how hard it'd be to build for a new target, but given that you're targeting win32 and posixy systems already it seems achievable.
Wouldn't you much rather be the badass that works everywhere than snrk at a growing niche?
Sounds like a perfect business opportunity. Offer the author, say $50,000/year in exchange for being allowed to port and support the editor on Linux/ARM and take all the licensing profits from there. You only need to sell a few $79 licenses compared to the number of Android devices there.
A complex resource-hungry IDE is just what the Android platform has been missing.
While you're at it, add Common Lisp support. That is literally the #1 request on the announcement.
>Linux/ARM is bigger than iphone, apple, and dell combined.Android. It's sitting on a desk near you.
Most Android devices are sold free with contract or with low tier phones to people who don't care much about smartphones. As for Android tablets, they don't sell that well, period. That's the huge majority of Android users. A minor one is geeks like us, open source fans, etc, that prefer it to iOS. (And that still leaves tons of geeks preferring iOS).
You didn't even make it one whole sentence with a correct statement. You stink of an OSS troll in this thread.
There have been plenty of interest in Sublime Text 2 builds for Android, I've seen people ask about it for both the Exynos Chromebook and the jailbroken Surface RT.
Amazingly, I can use ALL of my desktop software (except VirtualBox) on Linux/ARM and it's just like using an Intel machine. The only thing missing are proprietary apps like ST that can't have an ARM build generate for it automatically.
Nope, I'll be upgrading! ST2 is great (even without ARM support). But I'll second the request for an ARM/Linux version. I just got my ARM Chromebook set up with Chrubuntu and I'm already missing ST2 (using Emacs for now ...).
I'm not near a computer at the moment, can any body tell me how the performance is with very large files (>20mb) compared to the previous releases?
If there was one thing that disappointed me about ST2 it was that it wasn't very competent with massive log files and the like. ATM I use an ide for Java, ST2 for nearly everything else (other languages, random text) and less / vi / others for logs and other massive files.
Bah, yeah, so that's my biggest gripe with ST.. it seems to want to load the whole file into memory before it lets you work with it. I'm not sure if that's a philosophical thing or a limitation of how ST works, but it's really annoying.
If he worked out a robust way to have file open performance on par with the likes of vim then I'd upgrade in a heartbeat.
Sadly, in the announcement comments, John says this:
"How well large files are supported is mostly a function of the syntax definition being used. Sublime Text 3 does have performance improvements compared to Sublime Text 2 here, but not significantly so."
It would be a couple of lines to check if the file is above some limit and offer an option to open it without the syntax definition applied.
If I work with many small SQL/XML/whatever files, then I want it to look pretty; but if I open a 100+ mb datadump, then Sublime should be able to open it as plain text without waiting for half an hour.
There are valid text files floating around with sizes above 1gb - why shouldn't I be able to open it, run searches and browse the contents? The computing power can do it, you can map it to memory if needed, I can spare 10gb ram if working on that size of data; but it needs to work reasonably fast.
I was unclear in the description - my datadump gb's tend to be sql or xml.
Turning syntax off helps; simply it's a real pain to switch it on/off manually every time, as I'm working both with small and large files of the same type. I'd like the software to do that automagically based on file size or loading time estimates.
Yes, I am very disappointed. I cannot comprehend how the handling of large files hasn't been addressed yet. I really hope at least there is a setting for toggling the syntax on/off based on file size, if nothing else. I mean seriously, DOS' EDIT.EXE is better than Sublime Text in this regard. It almost makes me want to punch a wall or something, all because of a text editor.
I'd say files up to 100MB work reasonably well, but when getting to the 500MB/1GB range, I need bust out a more performant editor, especially for find/replace. This is one of my main problems with this otherwise excellent editor.
I just pushed a ~100mb SQL file into it and it doesn't seem very pleased about it. The progress bar is crawling along, it's probably going to take like 5 minutes or something.
Vim does perfectly fine for the odd occasion I need to do something like that (very large files often mean you're Doing It Wrong™)
Sublime was never very good with large files in my experience. UltraEdit has always been the best for that (if you are a Windows user, I don't know if the Mac and Linux versions perform as well).
I am disappointed to see that Vintage mode hasn't really been touched at all for this edition. It's what is holding myself (and likely others) back from switching away from Vim. Unfortunately, development of Vintage mode seems to have stopped (the repository hasn't changed for about six months).
As someone who only used IDE debuggers all his (short) programming career, I was wondering, how do you debug without a visual debugger?
I've seen how GDB works, and debugging this way seems much less productive. You don't see your whole source code, and you don't constantly see the values of watched or local variables, etc... Is there a different debugger you use for this task when developing using only a text editor (vim/emacs/sublime)?
I found that I wrote much better code once I ditched the IDE debugger, and stopped writing enterprise code... Perhaps the latter outweighs the former in terms of impact.
Firing up GDB for those rare segfaults which I don't immediately know the cause of (the last 2 lines I wrote, usually) gives me a stack trace very quickly, and lets me dump the values of the variables in that frame. I rarely need more. That wasn't the case back in my enterprise days.
GDB is very powerful, check out its integration with emacs for example (not something I've used).
When I moved from Windows to Linux development I was concerned how that would affect me. Turns out not so much, I just don't debug as much on Linux :)
IDE debuggers make it far too easy to press F5 and see what happens, make a change, press F5 etc without really thinking about what's happening. Iterative coding gone bad.
The only time I use GDB is for the occasional segfault that I can't figure out from back-stepping a few revisions, and it always nails it (which is more than can be said for MSVC)
I use Vim/Sublime for rote text editing and scripting languages. For most statically typed languages (C, C++, C#, Java, Objective-C and so on) I tend to use an IDE with a Vim emulator.
But honestly, visual debugging is nice and all but I don't know if the debugger is really the biggest loss of not using an IDE - for me it's more the code completion, navigation and refactoring support I'm after. You can get most of that going pretty well with Vim but it's a bit of a hassle.
>As someone who only used IDE debuggers all his (short) programming career, I was wondering, how do you debug without a visual debugger?
I'd ask the reverse of you. Why do you spend time in a debugger at all? For 99% of the bugs logical thinking and a few printfs work faster and better ran blindly running around setting breakpoints and examining values.
Adding printf statements implies recompiling or rerunning code. A good debugger lets you set breakpoints against your app while it runs, and have the breakpoint log a message instead. So even if you just want to log messages at certain spots, a good debugger works better (to say nothing of following program execution through long sequences of source code files, which is even handier when the source code is some open source component that you didn't write).
I agree that printf works better than "blindly running around setting breakpoints", but so does pounding a 12-pack of beer and then hitting yourself in the face with a mallet until the solution comes to you.
On the other hand, learning to use a modern, advanced debugger and then applying that skill along with some of that logical thinking can be extremely effective in finding the cause of bugs as quickly as possible.
For languages like Objective-C or Java, I think the 'real men don't need a debugger bro' attitude is nuts. It is different for a lot of newer and/or more dynamic programming languages, which simply don't have debuggers anywhere close to as powerful as those of IntelliJ or Xcode/lldb.
Though learning how to use the debugger is a good skill to learn, these days I don't know anyone around me who has ever used a debugger, or even finds a use for it. I think the best tools of our age are really REPL's, which allows you to test out your guesses/hypothesis in the form of snippets.
Personally I have probably used a debugger 5-6 times in my whole programming career, these days I hardly find a use for it.
Depends on your use case. If you're trying to find an issue in Java code running on an app server somewhere where you're not allowed to update code (say, if you work in B2B and it's a customer site), being able to remote debug does wonders.
I think it very much depends on the language and platform/environment.
I've been programming professionally for nearly 20 years, in languages ranging from Perl to C/C++ to Javascript, and the only times I've used GDB in the last 15 years have been when C/C++ code is segfaulting and I want a stack trace. The rest of the time I use print/printf statements. I've built some pretty successful software this way, some of which you've probably heard of or used.
On the other hand if I were coding exclusively in C/C++, or Java, or using an IDE for my work, I might use a debugger more.
I think the use of the word printf makes which ones we're discussing pretty clear.
I'm getting up there too. And I know lots of older programmers with very bad habits. Many who have also working on household names. Age+popularity != skill/quality.
Doing that in anything but interpreted and micro applications seems like a massive waste of time and effort(both placing the printfs, recompiling, removing them recompiling.
We've all done it. It doesn't mean its a good way to do it.
And like I said above it can introduce bugs into your code doing so. I remember one case where a printf for debugging changed the memory in such a way as to make an uninitialized variable work. After testing when the printfs were removed the application would stop working.
Introducing code into your code base with the intention of removing it later when there is an easy way to not do so is asking for trouble.
It can be nice to pause the execution and think, then continue one line at the time and really see what is happening.
Also I hate writing prints over and over. Sometimes it is imply faster to put a breakpoint, look at the value and then pop it away. As opposed to manually writing the print, then check, and then removing it.
Debuggers are handy for the last 1% of bugs. And anyway there is nothing about debuggers that precludes logical thinking or requires "blindly" placing breakpoints.
I'm also Vim user who has considered jumping to Sublime several times, but never quite managed to achieve escape velocity. (Though I hadn't realised until now that the Vintage package is an open repository)
While a couple of things are missing, mostly it's that things don't work properly.
Some random things off the top of my head:
* No block cursor (the block cursor plugin doesn't really work)
* When you switch between files, it keeps jumping back to insert mode, but you don't immediately notice (especially since there is no block cursor). There's a setting, but I've never been able to make it work.
* Autocomplete and the dot command don't work together
* Macros are flakey
* Visual mode and the dot command don't work well together
While I agree that vintage lacks some refinement, the source for the plugin is sitting in your sublime directory and is fairly easy to hack on. Things like the one-off cursors are fairly easy to fix. I'm not sure what you mean about switching files; I don't notice that particular problem. Do you have '"vintage_start_in_command_mode": true' set in your config?
As far as a vim-style editing plugin goes, vintage has by far been the best I've encountered. It's one of the few where it's fairly straightforward to add in the hacky things I've done to vim and still get a similar experience.
The code is quite nice indeed, and oh so small for a vim emulator - I've contributed a significant chunk to XVim which is positively massive in comparison, so I have some frame of reference.
The problem is that if you want all the fixes you pretty much have to compile a version with all the pull requests yourself as they don't get merged into mainline in a timely fashion. I would personally be much more keen to fix these things if I knew that my efforts along with everyone else's were expediently dealt with.
I do have vintage_start_in_command_mode set, but that apparently only works on startup (I read somewhere on the forums that it's a per-file setting, whatever that means).
Vintage is pretty good, but I don't agree that it is top shelf - ViEmu and jVi are both better Vim emulators IMO, and Vrapper and XVim are better in at least some regards.
For me it's the flexibility of window splits. In Vim I use both vertical and horizontal splits constantly, sometimes having 6 open at a time to deal with, for example, a Rails model, controller and view along with a CSS and JavaScript file and associated tests. Sublime has some window splitting but compared to Vim (or Emacs) it is pretty weak. If that is ever changed I'd consider switching.
not really, but the man spent all his time on S3 development, I think it's the reason that we haven't seen any progress in vintage mode. With S3 beta released, I guess he doesn't need to stick to it every second any more.
I hope that some of this increase in price is used to support Package Control from wbond. Certainly Package Control has contributed to the usefulness of Sublime.
Myself having registered less than a year ago, thinks this update is a little premature. Users in the official forums have been worried for months that development had stalled and all of the sudden an announcement of a paid update for seemingly incremental features? Are we to expect a beta period similar to ST2 or will be be expected to pay for what seems should be a minor release? I for one expected at least 2 years of support for my ST2 purchase. Coupled with the increase in price (which now compares to JetBrains IDEs) I see much fewer reasons to upgrade and/or recommend this to others.
IMHO sublime dev/s should be charging double (like $149) for product and require a paid upgrade every year to pay for continued development and features. I would happily subscribe for this software like I do for the adobe suite.
It's all about release cycles: Textmate was to slow, ST is too fast in changing versions. Releasing beta major version after half-year no-updates for the current major version looks silly to me. Price changed to $70, while JetBrains RubyMine IDE is $69 now with much more features. I am sticking to the ST2 with no no intentions for upgrading.
Coming from someone who has never used or tried Sublime Text, how does this compare to Vim in general? It's taken quite a while to grow familiar with Vim, is it worth the learning curve to ditch it now and try Sublime? Are the two really that different? A lot of what I'm seeing looks like things that can be done in Vim, but I might be missing something.
I've tried it when the first public ST2 builds were released. I kept downloading new builds from time to time out of curiosity but I ended up removing it definetely a while ago.
What I liked: well, I didn't actually like anything beside the ease of modifying/adding keybindings.
Some of what I didn't like:
* The whole UI felt wrong from alpha to omega and overly gimmicky: the whole thing relied too much on the mouse and the things that relied completely on the mouse like the options in the search panel were poorly sized/designed. The many roundrects and shades and gradients created a mess that left a very bad impression.
* The underlying engine is very poorly used by ST: just activating vintage mode is enough to tap a lot deeper than the default UI lets you. The engine is great but it only shines when you try to use it as another app. That's weird.
Using Vim is a spoiler, I guess.
I can't reasonably tell you to not make the switch. I have no idea what knowledge you have of Vim but I can say that I find Vim not only extremelly more powerful than ST but also a lot better designed on almost all fronts.
Once the beauty of subsitutions, :global, ranges, Ex commands, text-objects and motions is ingrained in your brain, using ST2 may feel like using (a pretty) TextEdit. Hell, even folding is nicer in Vim.
In the last year, I had the impression that a bunch of people blogged about their decision to switch to ST2 from Vim. Each time, I felt that the blogger didn't use much of Vim to begin with so switching may have made some kind of sense. If you are reasonnably advanced, I don't think there's any reason to switch.
The UI looks very much like a programmer wrote it. But I can ignore the gradients and the Soda UI theme makes it look more like a native app.
But the find panel is the sole reason I cannot use ST2. Every time I bring it up I can't remember what button does what. And then I get stuck in the panel and have to click to get rid of it. Or hit escape.
But if I hit escape before hitting enter it assumes I didn't want to search after all and scrolls the viewport to somewhere random. Even though the term I wanted to search for is clearly highlighted on the screen.
It's a very very frustrating experience and even my co-worker who uses ST2 every day for the past year or two still gets tripped up by the find panel.
If I had a way to import the TextMate 2 find dialog into ST2 /3 I would buy a license.
Agreed, the find and replace UI in ST2 is extremely frustrating. The essential functionality is all there, but the changing behaviour of different keys depending on context drives me crazy, particularly the way you need enter vs. escape to get back to editing, and the meanings of F3 and Shift+F3 swapping depending on whether your last search was forward or backward. Also, it's silly that you seem to need to mess around with the mouse to change basic find options like case sensitivity or using regexes, and to set the locations affected when finding/replacing across files. Tidying up the keyboard shortcuts in this area would bring a huge benefit in usability for a relatively small change in behaviour, IMHO.
Sublime works better out of the box and is arguably prettier. But if you like modal editing then Sublime may not be for you.
There is Vintage mode, but IMO it doesn't work very well. The differences are small but numerous, and it's very annoying when the behaviour doesn't match Vim's. Others have rightly pointed out that many advanced features are missing, but I'm not talking about those - I'm talking about your bread and butter navigation/editing commands.
To make matters worse, while there is the occasional pull request, official development of Vintage mode seems to be at a complete halt.
I purchased Sublime and really, really tried switching to it (I think I gave it about six months), but I had to switch back.
I'm in the same boat. I still think NERDTree, NERDCommenter, surround plugin, modelines and ability to use the same editor AND plugins in an SSH console is unbeatable combination. I can edit from my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard on my Linode VPS.
I really liked Sublime but VIM like a good pair of Levis' 501 never goes out of style.
I'm a vim/textmate user and I found sublimes UX to be lacking polish and the UI overall needed work.
I like textmates uniform OSX style and VIMs uniform terminal style, using the "Tomorrow" theme on both [1].
Although I'm also a part designer so the aesthetics matter to me as much as functionality. If you're measuring functionality I can't imagine sublimes better than VIM.
With a few basic JSON edits I was able to make Sublime look pretty sexy. Its spartan appearance matches it's utilitarian nature. I find it very comfortable and trusty. I agree that TextMate has the OS X polish that I too prefer but it's development has stagnated a bit in comparison. There is definitely a place for ST right in the middle of Vim and TextMate. Heck, if the Sublime guys could whip up a better Dock icon that'd go a long way.
You can use a vim emulation mode in sublime so all your hard work wasn't for nothing but I believe some of the more advanced vim features don't work in sublime.
The advantage of sublime is that it works well out of the box and with package control it is very easy to install any package you may need.
If you decide to give it a try, try sublime 2 with package control (I believe the trial is still free for sublime 2).
It's not just the advanced features. Even basic features are completely broken. Pressing undo several times can occasionally break out of undoing and start editing your document on your behalf - spewing a slew of "uuuuuu" into your document, which - guess what - ruins any hope you have of reverting back to the original document state.
Gvim always used to work fine for me when I was developing a C# system, the awkward thing was the naming conventions being broken for everything so I had to go on a renaming binge.
The vintage mode is excellent. It's the best emulation of vim that I've used.
Sadly I can't run ST2 on our work machines as the RHEL version we use has a libc (glibc?) that is too old. I'm unable to host my own libc due to a binary format change that is incompatible with the system dynamic loader.
Which ones have you tried? Vintage mode is most impressive considering it's so small (code-wise), but I don't find it particularly good at even the basics (a lot of commands have subtle behavioural differences).
It's better than IDEAVim, but certainly ViEmu and jVi are better. Maybe even Vrapper and XVim beat it too.
"Sublime Text has always had speed as a feature, but version 3 addresses some weak points. Startup time is now virtually immediate, and plugins no longer have the opportunity to bring this down. Replace All performance is also significantly faster"
couldn't care less about startup time while the speed problem on windows lies in loading/editing files greater than a couple of mb. I start ST only once a day but I load files like a hundred times and I'm not the only one with that workflow :] so to me the last one seems like a higher priority?
The start-up time on some slower machines is horrendous.
On my work laptop (which I have no option to upgrade, and is encrypted) takes a good 9 seconds to start sublime. (Without even giving it a file to open!)
I have to contemplate if I need to open sublime sometimes, and just use notepad instead.
Goto definition and goto symbol? Oh my! Quick test and it works fairly well already. Definitely some enhancements I want (text preview) but I can already tell this will be a glorious upgrade.
Can't quite figure out this goto definition thing, though of course I'm trying it using a dynamic language, JavaScript. Was praying he worked some secret SublimeText magic into it :/
I was thinking the opposite. I'm glad he's charging for upgrades, and charging a decent price for something some developers use all day everyday. I hope this will enable him to continue developing ST.
I'm growing fairly dependent on plugins, though -- I hope the new API isn't too hard for plugin devs to upgrade. Although with most plugins hosted on Github these days, compat is just a pull request away.
So you don't think a ~640% pricing increase rather large? I'm not saying the software isn't worth $70. But relative to it's previous price, I think it's a pretty significant increase.
Edit: My mistake - I just can't read. It was an $11 increase in price.
I'm pretty sure you are right, I don't remember it being $11 because I could have afforded that but $50 was harder to do at the time I was looking into it
It's not a pretty big jump. It's only slightly more than what the author needs to keep up with economic inflation. Assuming 3% inflation per year, Sublime would have costed 59*1.03^5=68.40 USD now.
I think that ST gives good value for the money. Unless you are a developer in second or third world country the price tag is hovering around an hour wage.
And because of the sublimely generous trial model you can use as much as you like it if you happen to be on tight budget.
I remember when TextMate's author announced he started working on TM2 and that it would be $big_cat_name-only. I had a heated debate in the comments because I thought paying a full system upgrade (the computer could not run $big_cat_name) was too much for getting a free upgrade to a simple text editor.
I eventually bit the bullet and bought a new Mac. But TM2 never came and I paid thousands of euros for nothing.
Since then I've moved to Linux at home and I use Vim everywhere. For some reason, I can't imagine being unable to build Vim 7.4 on this machine.
And now that I feel very comfortable in Vim, I can't imagine switching to ST or back to TM.
I am certainly concerned that they might give it the official arse.
The only thing that gives me hope is that the Pro fits a small but important niche in the overall ecosystem: a system better suited for the developers of iOS applications than the iMac is.
The initial version of ML was terrible on my 2008 MBP but they made performance enhancements and now 10.8.2 works fine. Spending $50 for gb/RAM didn't hurt of course (best investment of my life btw).
I'll second that. I put an SSD into a 'poor performing' laptop as a stop gap before buying a new laptop. I still haven't bought that new laptop 2 years later.
I tried using Sublime text and it's a great editor, extensible and moldable, but I just keep coming back to emacs since that is always available wherever I am, logged in via ssh.
A ssh/text-only version of sublime text would be interesting ;)
> A ssh/text-only version of sublime text would be interesting ;)
That's "vi".
All kidding aside, I've no idea how someone would pull this off. A lot of the best features in Sublime wouldn't translate well to a terminal. The minimap, for example.
This point shouldn't be understates. Currently I use a mixture of Sublime, Intellij, emacs, and VI, on Windows, Linux, and OSX. I'm sure this hurts my flow.
As I started off with Emacs, I would love to return it to it for this reason. However, I've never been able to smoothly recreate two or three of the features that I need, despite spending hours playing around with different plugins.
1) For Dynamic language development, a 'goto arbitrary file' as slick as Sublime is all I need. This one feels simple to achieve, but I haven't been able to find anything similar.
2) For Java, a working tags or 'goto symbol' implementation with disambiguation and even the slightest awareness of the language and scope.
I would probably have more success writing own editor from scratch that learning emacs lisp however!
And still no option to print? I've been a happy ST2 licensee for quite some time, and the inability to print is probably my biggest complaint (though, admittedly, I don't need to print things very often).
More like $20 after you write it off on your taxes. Seems like a steal to me. Intuit wants $170 to upgrade QuickBooks, Adobe wants $200 to upgrade Photoshop, and this little text editor adds more to my bottom line productivity than either.
I have been curious for a while about how ST 2|3 is architected. I know it uses C++ but how does it work so well as cross-platform application. Does that stem from being built in C++? What UI framework does it use?
I bought it when Sublime Text 2 came out of Beta, which wasn't all that long ago, was it? As somebody that very rarely buys tools, it's hard not to feel a little incensed.
It's $30. What sort of development are you doing that isn't worth $30 for the single tool that allows you to do it?
I can't imagine carpenters are incensed when Ryobi brings out a new $300 drill. You either buy the new drill, or you keep the old one. Nobody expects new hardware for free, why software?
"What sort of development are you doing that isn't worth $30 for the single tool that allows you to do it?"
I do light programming, mostly web stuff. Sublime certainly isn't the only tool that allows me to edit code, I used Notepad++ for years, and I'm sure there's a dozen other options. I also just use it as a regular old notepad.
I suppose what I'm saying is my expectation was that for a premium tool, I would be supported with updates and bug fixes for a longer period of time. I probably will buy the upgrade, but I would hope for a longer period of support with version 3. If this turns into a recurring payment model I may need to switch back to strictly free and open source tools.
It's not uncommon; Visual Studio's release cycle is around every two years.
To work out the math a bit, say the developer is looking to make 70k a year (which is quite low IMO, especially if you are self employed). If his release cycle is every two years, he needs to make 140k over one version. At $59 for S2, thats around 2400 sold copies over two years. Not a small number for a product that is tailored to such a niche market. Also considering that there comes a point where the purchases trail off, so the developer needs to find a way to sustain an income. Upgrades seem like a very reasonable way to do that.
With S3, if the developer wanted to offer a reasonable way to allow S2 owners to upgrade at a discount, it comes at a loss of income for the next two years. Given that the amount of people who would buy the editor have already bought S2, so the pool of possible purchasers decreases. So it seems like a reasonable balance to allow that discounted upgrade, while increasing the full price to make up for the loss of new purchasers.
If you have an old drill and buy a new one, you own an old drill and a new drill. If you have old software and update it, you only have the new software.
In the first case, the value of your goods and of their use to you is more than just one drill.
In the second case, you end up paying more than the price of the newest software, for just the newest software.
From this, one could make the argument that the most fair upgrade price would be $11 - the difference between the old and new software.
By that argument, the best strategy is to hold off buying any software indefinitely until you are absolutely sure that there will be no future paid updates.
I don't see why that argument equals that strategy. It's an argument for expecting a specific price, not for waiting for a specific product or service.
Completely agree. If you don't need it, don't buy it. It's that simple. You can't shell out $30 for one of the most important parts of your development environment?
Python's "2to3" utility helps a lot with the mechanical parts, like spotting renamed modules or print statements. After that, it's a chore of hunting down small semantic changes involving strings. Since everything in Sublime Text should be using the same flavor of string, at least that part should be straightforwards.
I like ST and have tried it a few times and liked aspects, but it doesn't make it easy to get started. For example a proprietary editor in 2013 it should have a gui for prefs and color scheme implemented. Also, not certain I want a package manager just for my editor.
If it had gui options and supported apt or pip I'd be sold. Still sticking with geany or notepad++ for standard text editing tasks and the heavy-duty ones for more.
Edit: looks like it may be in debian, but not ubuntu w/o ppa.
This is actually that distracted me away from ST2.
It's 2013 and we generally still use text editors to work with code. The result is that code is typically tied to plaintext buffer by hacks and kludges in a quite awkward way. Highlighting is done by one subsystem, code analysis (if any's possible) is performed by completely another one (so highlighter output may accidentally contradict code analyzer), folding is totally separate from all those, and so on.
JetBrains has another approach to this, as most clearly seen with MPS.
JetBrains has a bazillion different versions of their products for specific uses. There is no reason to believe they wouldn't continue maintaining ST as a separate editor. And assuming they did, it would be pretty great.
The fact that JetBrains is written in Java would mean they'd most likely port the Sublime engine to it. And that would leave the original version in a very bad situation.
...what I'd kill for in ST would be a nice code browser that also properly shows nested function in Javascript and other languages that support them (like Idea does). It really makes a difference if you're trying to make sense of some else's messy code base and you happen to be a visual thinker like me.
I think that your hammer must be open source if possible if you develop software. Learn from mistakes of the past, like TextMate. We're lucky that the developer open sourced the project in the end, but that's not the way it usually goes. It's Vim or Emacs IMHO, ( Vim in my case )
JPS could do a better job of keeping in touch with the community, if only to post "I am still alive" from time to time. So many similar projects have dies on the vine that when an author goes very quiet for an extended period of time, its a bit troublesome.
A subtle but neat feature on the ST3 download page -- http://www.sublimetext.com/3 -- there's some JavaScript that automatically detects your platform (eg "Windows 64 bit") and highlights the correct bullet point.
I love the addition of better pane management. With a few slick keyboard shortcuts I think this sounds like a nice improvement to working with multiple files in a project. If it's implemented in a similar way to my beloved tmux, I'll be loving this feature.
Installed it on windows 8, but lots of things started to fail. The sidebar was lagging, package manager didn't work, files opened blank randomly from an ftp server, and finally, it messed up my ST2 installation. I'll wait for a stable.
The replace all performance increase is a great addition, sublime was just painfully slow at managing large simple replacements for when you didn't want to go out of the editor to use sed.
I bet he wasn't amused by the number of ST2 users who got the ST2 beta and were using it without having got round to paying, in fact I'd bet this was the majority. The trouble with honour systems is that not enough people are honourable.
That is such a great news. Can't wait to try out the indexed Goto Definition feature. The current implementation is not so great. Hoping this will be improved with the new version.
With the upgrade to python, anyone relying heavily on packages is definitely have to upgrade. Not may package devs are going to want to maintain ST2 AND ST3 packages.
> I already paid $59 for this software and that's enough for a text editor
This only makes sense if: (a) I guess you're not a software developer, so you don't actually "make money" from the productivity increases of a text-editor good for you? or (b) you plan to switch to some other editor that's open-source (emacs? vim?) or (c) you're and IDE guy and rarely use a "simple" text editor.
Please mention your use case before saying "that's enough for a text editor", because for most that's really pocket change compared to what others pay for other services or software licenses (think designers!).
There is the factor of diminishing returns though once you've already paid for one version. The next one has to be that much better for it to make it worth it. With text editors it's difficult to add enough value in future versions since everything a good one does to help you work should be there from the start(easy navigation in and between files and easy modification of data once you're there) the rest is just fluff.
I love ST2 - it's the first editor I've really sat down and learnt properly, and I've got a tonne of value out of it. The features ST3 are bringing to the table - at this point - don't seem worth the upgrade. I dislike the idea of paid upgrades for just about any software, even though I understand the economics.
Ultimately, I think continued development of plugins will force the issue, and upgrades will be required.
I'd have agreed until I experienced TextMate. Everything basically ground to a halt for years. I know not everyone is fuelled by money but I suspect if it had been more of a priority, updates would have been more frequent.
Suppose that you cost $50,000 a year. If a new Sublime Text would only make you 2% more productive, even an upgrade for $100 per year would be peanuts. Start talking to your boss!
If you use Sublime Text privately, I can see your point.
I don't see what is wrong with that justification. Unless you are saying that he/she is incorrect I don't see why you wouldn't opt for that productivity increase, as long as (salary * perf_increase) > total cost.
If you are saying there are efficiencies elsewhere for which that formula yields a higher number then you should do those as well.
I should state that there is nothing wrong with charging money for upgrades, especially if it motivates the developer to continuously improve the product.
And yes, you are right. Every bit counts, and I'm willing to pay for software that will help me. I just don't think it gets much better for me and ST.
> A 2% increase isn't very good IMO. I'd rather look for other efficiencies that won't cost me more money.
A 2% improvement is a week's worth of effort in a year at a full time job. Even a small improvement will be worth it unless there's a larger opportunity cost (such as using a substitute text editor that will yield even larger improvements), or if there's a risk of something going wrong (such as it being buggy and wiping out a week's worth of work). There's also switching costs of learning new features, which may be significant, depending on what you do and how you you'd use it.
You should obviously make your own choice, but the rationalization can be valid, and 2% productivity improvement is nothing to sneeze at.
I started to port one of my plugins to Sublime Text 3 beta, but basic things are broken. Importing urllib.request raises an exception on OS X:
Except for a few well-documented edge cases, a properly-built Python behaves the same on OS X, Linux, and Windows. I really hope Jon Skinner gets better at building Python. Dealing with these random platform-specific issues is very frustrating.That said, I am a fan of Sublime Text. (Otherwise what am I wasting my time writing plugins for?) It's like TextMate, but cross-platform and not abandonware. :)