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.
Isn't this a clever way to make users buy into a paid upgrade for a stable version of an editor they already bought?