While I know it might be a little hidden, I'd just like to say I'm really glad Will Bond of Package Control[0] was able to join[1] the Sublime Text team. Having first class support for Package Control in ST is definitely one of the features I value the most out of Sublime Text and IMHO one of the things that still keeps it very competitive with Atom other text editors.
I use packages from ST almost every day and plus I wouldn't have gotten my first job without Will (thanks for hiring me even after seeing all that terrible code I wrote), so I can actually say my life would be a lot different without his influence. I'm really happy he's officially part of the team.
Sorry, bad wording on my part. By update issue I meant something where you had to have the version already installed prior to updating, vs. a fresh install (which worked for me).
The Sublime community is blessed to have his work supported in a way that lets him dedicate his time to Sublime Text as fully as he does. Given he one of few people who can work directly on Sublime itself, I am glad his focus is there.
Sublime is probably the first GUI text editor that left me satisfied. Everything else over the years was either non-portable, slow or lacking features. After two months of use I just had to buy it, it's worth the price.
- It's fast and responsive, can handle large files and personally I've never seen it leaking memory or crashing
- Love the goto anything and command palette, brilliant
- Text editing is great and can be easily enhanced with existing plugins
- Theming is great
- Project handling is a bit weird, but once you get the hang of it it's fantastic
I don't do use IDE-like features (auto-complete, linting, compiling, etc.) nor integration features (version control for example) so I can't say how it fares in that aspect.
Recently I tried VSCode and Atom. They are portable and feature rich out of the box, but God are they slow and memory hungry. I can definitely see the appeal for web devs but it doesn't work for me, I value responsiveness above all else (that's the main reason I avoid dedicated IDEs)
Have you ever seen UltraEdit? I dare you to try the trial, actually go through the exquisite configuration dialogs to make it yours, and then to ever look back :)
This isn't as a knock on ST, which I also like, and might even sometimes prefer for pure writing or temporary notes. But it doesn't even have printing out of the box, come on. For me that's too modern.. plugins are nice, but I guess I prefer UE to ST like I preferred old Opera to Firefox.
Could you mention what you're likely to be printing? What sort of uses do you have where you write notes in a plain text editor and print them out? I can't think of the last time I printed anything -- actually, I should say I can't think of the last time that I printed anything that wasn't a contract or HR paperwork type of stuff, which is never in plain text. I'm curious what else is still being printed these days. Also, they have plugins for that, if you're interested. You're correct that it's not built in, though.
I print code reasonably regularly! Makes going through it with a highlighter and red pen to get a sense of what it does and what should be changed quite nice, and it's good to get away from a screen every now and then.
I mostly do it when I'm examining modules in a codebase I'm unfamiliar with.
That's interesting to hear. (Since this is the internet, let me be clear: that's not sarcasm)
Theoretically I really like the idea of reviewing code on paper.
But typically, if I'm trying to familiarize myself with a codebase, we're talking dozens of files. Usually I'm going through three, four, five levels of code to see how a request is served up, and then my search will fan out sideways into even more files as I attempt to see what other processes in the application might affect the data I'm concerned with.
For example with songs I'm in the process of making, I like to have a list on me with just the titles so I can note down acoustic observations made while listening to them on various speakers or headphones, for the next iteration of "mastering". Or little bits of info for my wallet, e.g. when a handwritten thing gets so old that I want to refresh it, then I'd rather make a printout and stick that in there. I like to make "cheat sheets" too, for work stuff or for all sorts of things, which aren't elaborate enough to warrant desktop publishing efforts, just proportional text. Granted, I don't print a lot, but for me it's still some of the very rudimentary things one might do with text.
IIRC there's a Sublime plugin (obviously) that supports copy pasting formatted code with syntax highlighting. I definitely remember using it at university. Printing to PDF to get syntax highlighting just sounds like an unnecessary step in between.
I switched from UE to ST entirely because of UE's licensing/activation model.
Maybe it is different now, but UE used to require an internet connection for the registration... or you had to email your info for offline codes.
I have a bunch of isolated machines at work, physical and virtual, and got tired of dealing with UE and its registration requirements. Especially when ST gave a license key file I could copy around as needed.
So I switched. But yeah, I remember UE was a really good editor. Now I'm happy with ST.
I fell in love with UltraEdit about ten years ago, and then I forgot completely about it. It amazes me how "obscure" it is when it's a fantastic replacement for ST, VSCode, Atom, Brackets, and dare I say, even Emacs/Vim.
I use it in the office (on Windows) and yes, the column mode is the best I used.
I did try the Mac version (of UE) but I think it was still in beta mode and I was not really impressed. But on Windows is really great.
First: I love ST. It is an amazing software that runs just as good on Mac/Linux/Win. In a pinch I will download and use it and never complain. Python extensibility is also great, since Python is the language I do best.
That said, and I hate to be this guy (not really), but... Emacs?
* Text Editing: It is what emacs does best as a program
* Themes: Yes
* Project Handling: Projectile
* IDE Features: These exist
* Source Control Integration: Many people use emacs purely because of Magit, it is a great git UI that people won't know about in general because it is runs on emacs
I copy my ~/.emacs.d to a server, literally my whole environment minus some tty nuisances just works. Everything. All my package versions. Emacs is stable enough that not many things break between big versions 23/24/25.
There are two areas ST wins: Out of the box configuration and performance on very big things. It is true the learning curve to settle all of these features I am mentioning is non-trivial, but Emacs is open source and, like I mentioned, very stable. It has gotten enough right in its initial concept that it will always be a fine environment to mangle up some text in files into whatever you want.
This brings me to my next point, there is nothing really new under the sun regarding text editing. Atom/VS Code/Eclipse/IntelliJ/Emacs -- you want to edit a bunch of files in a directory structure, navigate quickly and easily between files and get context important information about the code. Everything else is just flavors of those same chores, often specialized to a few programming languages or whatever new things are popular at the time (JavaScript / Can we build an editor in JavaScript).
I have seen very little innovation in the field of text editing. Light table was interesting, and its no surprise it is very Clojure/Lisp oriented. I am in a giant lisp machine when editing code in emacs, I can whack out a lisp expression anywhere and emacs will faithfully evaluate it for me.
Next point: If you work in a language or big project you need a way to navigate and generate lots of boiler plate in some languages (Java). IDEs help there, but...
Final point: The speed with which we write text as programmers is not the limiting factor of how much software we can produce and never has been.
My conclusion was to invest in one editor that has been around a long time and just not worry too much about it. I can use emacs in 20 years probably. Who knows about atom or vs code or whatever. So it isn't a pro emacs, you should use emacs reply to you, but that over the long run, using the same system to edit text is probably worth it. Stick with one thing and ignore everything else unless you are forced to use some IDE, and even then really try to avoid it. Even then I am pretty sure I could do my job with Gedit or Notepad without much of a productivity hit.
> there is nothing really new under the sun regarding text editing
This may be true in for single heroic innovations, but sometimes the 'new' can emerge from successive refinement. I find this to be the case for IntelliJ. Working in it in static languages (at least the ones it knows well) just feels to me quite different from merely 'editing text'. The depth of code intelligence, combined with hundreds of small refinements in the way commands like refactoring work, affords a sense of working with syntax and structure, not 'text'.
> The speed with which we write text as programmers is not the limiting factor of how much software we can produce and never has been.
Again what IntelliJ adds for me isn't 'speed', but a cognitive sense of moving up the abstraction hierarchy. I'm thinking in terms of things like 'add a parameter to all call sites' much more than I am editing 'text'.
(caveat: I did use vim quite extensively many years ago, but never got beyond the learning shortcuts phase with emacs. It's possible either of the big 2 have similar refactoring and code intelligence packages available now)
> Working in it in static languages (at least the ones it knows well) just feels to me quite different from merely 'editing text'. The depth of code intelligence, combined with hundreds of small refinements in the way commands like refactoring work, affords a sense of working with syntax and structure, not 'text'.
These days, out-of-process, editor-agnostic code analysis engines or "language servers" provide many IDE-like features to any text editor that is scriptable and can do basic IPC. Examples include:
* Tern for Javascript
* rtags for C and C++ (I use this all day, every day, at work, it's remarkable how good it is)
* Go's oracle tool
* racer for Rust
* tools.nrepl for Clojure
All of these have solid editor support; at the very least, a good package is available for Vim, Emacs, and Sublime Text.
IDEs tend to be all or nothing. I'll open one on occasion for a particularly nasty debugging session. I wish, though, that half the development effort going into IDEs were instead directed towards better editor-agnostic tooling.
The only one of those I have tried is tern, which didn't come close to IntelliJ's analysis, but obviously Javascript's a harder beast in this respect than Java, kotlin, Objective-C etc.
> I wish, though, that half the development effort going into IDEs were instead directed towards better editor-agnostic tooling.
In principle I agree. I like the thought of composable tools. But I wonder in practise. I'm trying to picture the vast array of facilities integrated in IntelliJ (analyses, many refactorings, syntax-aware snippets, amazing code navigation, structural search & replace, data flow anaylysis, syntax-aware select, omnipresent code generation, etc) integrated into a text editor via external tools. I suppose it could be done, but it seems unwieldy. And with how much work (setup and maintenance) on the part of the user? How often would things clash or need fixing? And with how much discoverability (a critical feature of IntelliJ)?
What I do know is that working with code (not mere text!) in IntelliJ is quite a joy for me. For now, I'm glad someone has built it, even if the 'ultimate' composable set of tools might have some advantages.
Not everyone has this luxury, but I simply avoid languages that require an IDE to be productive or think abstractly. Alas, not everyone can get away with this. Also, IntelliJ is also a very nice editor. I have used it a decent amount and liked it well enough when editing Java.
I've used IntelliJ IDEA since forewer and I can only agree, and add a little bit of my own.
Having worked extensively with primareliu Java in IDEA, I have come to consider syntax something that is more a presentation layer issue than something actually important to the core differences between languages.
I suspect that this shift in what I consider important parts of a language is at least partially down to an IDE that for the most part lets me think about the concepts I am expressing, rather than their superficial expression as text on a computer screen.
I agree that finding an open source, well established and powerful editor is an investment worth making. That basically means vim or emacs. Once over the learning curve, you're setup for long term productivity gains and stability. Since neither editor is going anywhere and they run on pretty much anything.
But for many people, the initial learning curve just isn't worth it. Sublime, Atom and VS Code are all very popular because you just install them and start coding.
I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.
> But for many people, the initial learning curve just isn't worth it. Sublime, Atom and VS Code are all very popular because you just install them and start coding.
This does a great disservice to the quality and functionality of Sublime.
I was a fluent vim user before switching to Sublime and have never looked back. The smooth (i.e. not line-by-line) scrolling and powerful multi-cursors were enough to draw me. The little things like a beautiful file explorer sidebar with icons-per-filetype, great package manager you can launch, search, and install from right in the editor, and yes, occasionally even the mini-map, all keep me here.
There's a pervasive meme on HN that Sublime took off because of its lesser learning curve, and that if you're a professional programmer you should make the investment to learn vim and emacs. But this ignores that a lot of people who have already made that investment still find Sublime to be a better editor.
While I can understand the importance of using an open source editor, that particular argument doesn't sway me since I'm happy enough using Sublime for now. If it stops getting updates or whatever, I can always switch back to vim, but for now I will use what I feel is the best editor for the job.
Sublime took off cause it just works and it has a nice default color scheme and just enough batteries included to make it a functional programming environment for the 80% of programming situations. And it now has enough addons to increase quality of life in many areas and or solve the other 20% in many cases.
If I install emacs it is just okay. It probably has syntax highlighting, depending on the Linux distribution. It probably doesn't have any quality of life improvements for language X. I can drop in a theme and colorize it pretty quickly to my liking. From there, emacs is still very powerful, but there are a lot of things I really love for long and deep editing sessions when I am going through a lot of files on a code review or what not.
ST. Python is the popular language. Elisp is... not popular. But you can do CL in emacs.
As an aside I found the Leo editor not too long ago. http://leoeditor.com/ -- one of the few editors that made me think "that is a little new". Leo is implemented in Python.
I wish there was a modern equivalent of emacs, only all Python. :)
Yuck. I prefer what Neovim did: editor comminicates using RPCs with arbitrary external programs using over a socket. Zero language lock-in and maximum extensibility.
> I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.
This sounds like the micro text editor. I've committed a few features to it and use it daily:
I think you should forget the whole "terminal based" thing. TUI text editors don't make much sense anymore. Native GUIs are much less clunky and much more discoverable.
I have my development machine at Digital Ocean. My local machine is an under powered macbook air (underpowered now that I use lots of docker for development). I'll probably just get a tiny chromebook next as I just want a dumb terminal.
I run emacs over ssh/tmux. I love it, emacs never shuts down, all my shells run through emacs as well. I can use any machine with my sshkey and be back to work immediately. I can increase the size of the machine, have public access to my dev box if needed. If I have a bad internet connection it doesnt matter since its just sending low bandwidth over ssh. All the real bandwidth comes from DigitalOcean and is super fast.
TUI still has advantages. Editing files over SSH is simpler, the app is easier to build cross platform, and for me personally the lack of a context switch when I'm in my terminal is nice. Even tiny little differences that keep you in your flow add up.
I wish people would learn to appreciate that UX is subjective. I find most GUI-based editors to be RSI inducing. The level of effort required to change that is not worth it for me. Others may disagree. And that's fine.
Just because it's a GUI doesn't mean you have to use the mouse. I find gvim much faster than vim in the terminal because it doesn't have to print a screen full of glyphs for each update.
On the other hand, vim + tmux is pretty awesome, and for that reason I prefer vim on the terminal. I've never particularly liked gvim, even if I'm not using tmux. In Linux, hitting the start or end of a buffer causes some sort of screen redraw that I've never been able to fix, but that might have to do with my configuration.
Well let's not generalize on the clunky part; there's always Visual Studio ;-)
I would generally agree with your point, especially on the discoverability front - this is why emacs and vim have an often dreaded learning curve. But OTOH, there are also a couple of rather nice benefits to the terminal focus that I don't currently see in more GUI focused editors. It would certainly be doable to replicate them, but it seems like no one's trying currently.
So I would hold off on forgetting about the terminal until there's a viable alternative around.
Oh, and: I've seen my fair share of botched remote access solutions on the Windows side of things and would probably use any TUI editor short of ed over any IDE in those situations. At least SSH is responsive.
But for many people, the initial learning curve just isn't worth it.
I don't believe that. The people who snub Vim and Emacs, but are willing to sink time into learning new editors, new languages, and new frameworks have no excuse. If they were less susceptible to marketing, then they'd be able to learn something old every once in a while.
I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.
People have been attempting this for years with little success. The only projects I know of that have traction are Spacemacs and Neovim. The former is just an Emacs distribution and the latter is backwards compatible with Vim.
This is still a project in its early stages. The Mac build has basic editing functionality (it was used to write this README), but looks very spare and is still missing essentials such as auto-indent. At the moment, it’s expected that its main community will be developers interested in hacking on a text editor.
But when you're on Windows, boy you have to do a LOT to get it to just work. I tried it (and spacemacs, as I'm quite familiar with vim) last month for doing some python work on Windows... I just gave up after 2 days.
A couple of things that normally annoy me are that it's just a .zip file not an installer so the user has to figure out a "sensible" place to install it is ... and that there's like emacs.exe, emacsclient.exe, runemacs.exe or whatever - a bunch of .exes and it's not clear unless you've dug around a bit[0] which is "correct".
But after that it was relatively plain-sailing for me. What else was troubling you? Note: it's possible that we've got totally different workloads and needs - not saying you're doing anything wrong, I'm just curious
>That said, and I hate to be this guy (not really), but... Emacs?
I intentionally didn't include console editors, totally different beasts. Never used emacs, only learned vim and only touched the surface, mostly use it when I ssh to remote machines. The pinnacle of flexibility and responsiveness but the learning curve... it's just too much for me.
You're right though, it's a great investment and as the years pass and mouse usage takes its toll on my right hand fingers, keyboard only editors look even more appealing. Whenever though I sit down and try to code in vim I find my productivity plummeting. I know once I ride the curve things will improve but unfortunately I find it hard to persevere
You don't say what editor or IDE you're currently using [ed: unless you mean ST? Which would be odd, because it doesn't need a mouse for anything], but few require mouse usage for much nowadays. You might be better off, at least in the first instance, just learning the keyboard shortcuts for the tool you're currently using.
ST is not a modal text editor. I know there is a vim emulation plugin for ST that's reasonably good, but at face value someone who has mastered vim can edit text faster than vanilla ST because of vim's modal and compositional nature.
Maybe grandparent poster just likes Sublime better. If he was an emacs user, would you have posted basically the same thing with "...and I hate to be this guy (not really), but... Sublime?"
Gonna take advantage of having an emacs wizard around -
I love vscode, but agreed, it's bog-slow sometimes, especially when I run in ubuntu. I'm looking around at emacs and I like what I'm seeing, but something that perhaps seems silly is still a bit of a turn off for me - it's pretty effing ugly. I don't mean in the theme sense, I mean in all the stuff cluttering the codepanes.
In VScode I usually ctrl+k z for "zen mode," where the only thing you see is the tabs of your open files, and the code. ctrl+shift+e opens my file explorer when I need it, ctrl+b puts it away (or ctrl+p to go straight to a filename). Same for terminal, ctrl+`, do a git thing, ctrl+` buh bye. Anything similar for emacs? That level of quick control over the UI?
...what? You're gonna take away the scrollbar just like that? Implying that the scrollbar is worthless? Scrollbar is very important to me at least, (especially a well-implemented one). It gives me a quick and instant visual understanding of how big the file is, where I am currently in the file, etc. The only improvement I have seen on the scrollbar is Sublime's minimap... I knew there exist emacs methods to get it working, but I could not get it to work (on Windows) in less than a few days so that's of no use to me.
The wonderful thing about the list provided by your parent is that it's optional. Pick and choose the pieces you want. Those may not be the same pieces your parent wants. Fortunately both of you can choose without inconveniencing the other.
Worth noting also, with the default settings, Emacs tells you what your position is in the buffer in the mode line (Top, Bot, All, or a percent), so the scroll bar is redundant as a visual indicator.
There is two default UI elements in my emacs config:
Line numbers on the left and two lines at the bottom. One for the status bar and one for the "mini buffer" (where you put commands, search text, and receive short messages). Everything else is just the buffer (file) I am editing. You could turn the line numbers off with a simple configuration and key binding if you wanted, along with all the other UI elements.
This goes to the "Zen" of my emacs config. Its always just the buffer I am editing unless I need another dialog or UI element. The trick to making this work with no tree based folder explorers are Projectile and Helm. Projectile adds "project" concept to emacs and Helm adds fuzzy searching of everything almost everywhere that matters. Both can be taught to work around git repos. So you can say, whack some keys and see a list of files in your project. Then start fuzzy matching in the helm buffer that results by typing say three letters of a file. If its unique you press enter. File is open. If I really need a tree or explore a directory there is `dired` mode which lets you walk around the file system. There are even tree modes that I find pointless after using helm and projectile.
There is nothing built in by default. That is the biggest problem with emacs. You don't just sit down at it one day and get a polished environment that fits with what you like. It is something that is worked at. You eventually learn at least a little elisp and your customization powers keep growing. Eventually you either quit emacs or are good enough at lisp and configuring it that it becomes obvious, if not trivial, to do most things other editors can do.
Generally speaking it is almost certain you can customize it if you are asking a question like, "Can I do X.". Everything in emacs, even configuration dialogs are just text buffers. You just teach emacs how to interpret different text buffers in different ways to implement special functionality. Most of the heavy lifting of integration with most languages is already done if your language is remotely popular.
This was a long answer, but that goes to the heart of emacs. If you want a zen mode, emacs is there for you. You want a mode with weird little widgets and build output things everywhere, emacs has your back. :)
C-x C-f opens files, but will also open a file explorer if the path is a directory. The 'q' key will immediately close the file explorer. I'm not sure about git interaction. I usually just use the Emacs shell to enter git commands.
Just get emacs prelude and configure it to use helm everywhere. It is so close to my previous custom emacs setup that I just install prelude now on a new system and run with it.
I guess I never understood the custom emacs distributions for long time users. If you had a system that worked... lugging it around isn't hard. It is usually a few hundred lines of elisp plus packages, which you can freeze and zip up and they are probably going to work on an emacs release 5 or 6 years in the future.
I don't worry about it cause I just backup my .emacs.d and restore it anywhere I plan on editing very long. My whole .emacs.d with tons of modes and add ons is 73MB.
There /is/ something to be said with not making a mess of your initialization file and customizations. It is also very possible to keep glomming addons in and eventually get to a difficult place where various elements of extensions/modes/packages are fighting and that can be frustrating and I can see why many turn to well tuned emacs distributions.
I think if you work on servers a lot, then it's a major advantage to use something like emacs or vim, because your editing environment is 'just there'. But heaps of developers rarely, if ever, find themselves in a terminal, so the portability advantage just isn't there for them.
Exactly. Many people want their editor to be very flexible and configurable and micro-optimizable to suit their particular needs, and that's awesome if it's what floats your boat. On the other hand, there are many of us who want to think about our editor as little as possible.
Sublime isn't perfect and it still requires tinkering from time to time, but its power vs. time investment equation is absolutely fantastic. It's a very get-shit-done style of editor. Emacs/vim are amazingly powerful but they are also big time sinks, both in terms of the initial learning curve and later customization.
You are right. I view emacs as a sort of religion or philosophy of computing. I don't use the metaphor lightly. It is pretty apt. It is my religion, so I would never put it on anyone else. I will share the cool stuff about it, but not in an annoying way.
The philosophy of using it is that eventually, in the long long term, the productivity gains should be reasonable or at least competitive with any other editor or environment. It should be a joy to use. Since I know I will probably only ever make a living crafting text I view it as an imperative to deeply master my primary tool. The other aspect is that it is free and old and stable. I can't ever achieve an RMS level of using open source things, but everywhere I can, I want the truly open thing, even if it isn't practical. I run Linux for this reason, even though it was a giant time sink making it behave and getting everything just so. But I can make things just so.
This fits in also with creating a distraction free environment. i3wm, emacs, I barely even see application menus these days, but I still use a GUI, I am not crazy. But it fits with my philosophy/religion of computing, so I am going to do it this way. If others agree, great. If they want to know about it, I will share. If they think it's crazy, from their perspective they may be right!
Learning curve can be a pain. Customization afterwards not necessarily, but I see where you're coming from. But once you are competent at Vim and you have it looking like you want it, it is nothing short of delightful. I feel motivated sometimes just because I get to work in Vim.
spacemacs is solid if you want to try out a well configured emacs. magit, org mode, helm are amazing tools and part of the killer feature list of emacs. magit is so good even if I stopped using emacs tomorrow I would still use it for my git gui.
I try such distros every two years or so to see if it's gotten any better. Usually it's not worth my time from the start (fun thing is, I used to use Emacs for a year or so in uni, before turning to Vim and never looking back -- until I had to do Java, which meant Eclipse. I got back to Vim, but the last 5 years it's all ST with some sporadic attempts to like VSC).
Let's do this in realtime. I downloaded the latest Spacemacs.
1) Opening. Hmm, it's a zip not a DMG. Already losing me, but I'll stick, I'm not that shallow.
2) Hmm, it's just a bunch of source files? I guess the prominent "Download" link just gives you the configuration, not a bundled editor. I have to get Emacs from somewhere else. Grr... Lemme check their "Quickstart".
3) Yeah... the Quickstart link just gives you some BS that assumes you already know how to install this, and the "Install" button just gives a git command line to clone their repo. Back to square 1.
4) Fuck it, I'll use brew to install Emacs. Spacemacs doesn't even say which version of Emacs it works best with. I'll risk with what brew gives me.
5) Brew installation ends fine, with a caveat: "Please try the Cask for a better-supported Cocoa version". Now you tell me?
6) Anyway, I have an emacs, lemme git clone spacemacs now. OK, comes up, nice logo. Now, I have a huge emacs window -- so why is it asking me "first time" config questions in a tiny space at the bottom? And why doesn't it explain better what the various options (distro flavors) entail?
7) Let it do its install, then play around a bit. Close the window in evil mode (q!). I open emacs again, greeted with this:
Found 1 new package(s) to install...
--> refreshing package archive: gnu... [3/3]
--> installing package: evil-unimpaired@spacemacs-evil... [1/1]
An error occurred while installing evil-unimpaired (error: (wrong-type-
argument package-desc nil))
Oh, and:
Warnings:
- Cannot find any of the specified fonts (Source Code Pro)! Font settings
may not be correct.
8) I open some local source files to check. A buffer window appears on the right side with "warnings":
Error (use-package): helm :config: Symbol’s value as
variable is void: helm-bookmark-map
you clicked on download instead of install. now, to be fair, download shouldn't be on the main screen imo but still install is more in line with what you were looking to do so it should have been the thing you clicked on. Cloning the repo is installing it if you have emacs installed already.
It's open source so this can verbiage can be fixed. It's not a stand alone editor as it's a bunch of configurations to emacs.
At the end of the day it's a question of how much customization you want out of an editor. Reading the tone in your comment seems like you didn't want it to be successful at all anyway.
That's actually a pretty good barrier to entry. With emacs/spacemacs, if installing it is too frustrating for you, then configuring and using it is going to be way too frustrating for you.
My opinion is that emacs/spacemacs is more optimized for day to day work, than for the out of box experience. Personally, I'm fine with that, and there are some great editors (like sublime) that work out of the box if you prefer that.
However, the people generally working with/on emacs are not looking for that, they are looking for an editor optimized for customisation. They have already gone through the experience of setting it up, so why would they spend most of their time making it easier out of the box?
There is a cost to everything, and so far most people on emacs side have decided to spend their time on improving it's power, not it's ease of use.
For the most part it is completely optional to configure it and use elisp... it will ask you if you want to install a layer (group of packages) when you open up a filetype that it knows about and can handle. there is some configuration akin to setting up completion backend, linters, formatters etc that are applicable to your language/filetype of choice. The benefit of that is that the external tools are kept external where development of them can continue unimpeded by the development of the main text editor.
similarly, once you get to know the language quirks, it's a decent language that is basically a DSL for text editing. The power you get from being able to lookup how something was implemented by the text editor developers easily is extremely powerful.
If you like vim's idea of modal editing, emacs is 100% all about that. languages are major modes, minor modes are functions and keybindings that can be enabled and grouped together at will. transient buffers are used to send output to and are treated as normal buffers that you can do things to. The architecture and extensiblity of emacs is pretty amazing actually. Every key press is just a function and every key can be rebound based on current context using things like mode maps that get layered on top of everything and have precedence based on where you inserted the binding with sensible fallbacks when required.
Disclaimer: I love vim as a concept but hate viml and the plugins that were hampered by the lame programming language that was designed by bram.
if you have not tried magit and org mode you just don't really understand the power of emacs and the power of having everything be a function. spacemacs just makes setting up that powerful environment fairly painless but it's still a very old architecture with some warts.
Yes. I actually have a hard time using control now if it isn't capslock, heh. On other computers IT IS NOT UNCOMMON FOR ME TO END UP TYPING IN CAPS. That said, caps to control is a great quality of life improvement for anyone that uses CTRL for anything, but especially emacs users :)
Recently, after some corporate IT crap required handing over my laptop for a weekend, it came back with a post-it note attached that said "your caps lock key is broken, let us know if you want a new computer."
> That said, caps to control is a great quality of life improvement for anyone that uses CTRL for anything
I agree. I've been a vim user for over a decade, but a few years ago I decided to try mapping capslock to ctrl and have never looked back. It's a much more natural place for a key that gets used as often as ctrl, while capslock is a key that is rarely used (as a matter of fact, my keymap doesn't even have a capslock at all anymore, and I haven't missed it!). Anyone who uses ctrl more often than capslock ought to give it a try, but beware:
> On other computers IT IS NOT UNCOMMON FOR ME TO END UP TYPING IN CAPS.
I'd recommend this even for non-emacs users who use terminals a lot. The tiny bit of extra comfort from ctrl-C in a shell alone is worth it. Add in tmux ctrl-B, or any readline shortcuts you use a lot, and you're onto a winner.
I prefer VSCode if the hardware can handle it, but otherwise Sublime is my goto. If Sublime ever had as good Git support as VSCode I would permanently switch back to Sublime
Honestly out of the box Git management for VSCode is really good. I'm surprised how quickly it got integrated to my regular workflow, and I'm a terminal gitter to boot.
The ability to see side by side diffs and which files/lines I've touched is what did it for me. I still use git CLI for squashing, rebasing etc, but basic staging and committing I do entirely in VSCode now.
If you want git support out of the box, please give me a thumbs up on this PR.
https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/pull/1126
If you can read sublime-syntax files, code review is appreciated as well.
With this package, you can set Sublime to be your git editor like this:
I prefer VSCode mostly for the intellisense/auto-complete.
As far as git is concerned, I use it from the command line an cannot understand why anyone would want to interact with git from VSCode or any other text editor.
I don't know if these editors support it, but being able to access git blame from editor is convenient, also the editor can highlight all the changes you've done since the last revision (especially useful to hunt down unnecessary whitespace changes).
Have you ever tried TextMate? Since like me, you don't like "IDE-like features" I can imagine TextMate 2 could be a better fit than Sublime, especially in respect to file management. And a lot of Sublime bundles are compatible with TextMate (and the other way around of course, since these bundles originate from TM)
Sublime Text is among the best pieces of software I've used. I bought the license a couple of years ago, and would gladly pay the same amount again.
I love its core functionality: speed and stability, search, command palette, file navigation, Goto. I've used a number of editors over the years, and none have felt as fundamentally sound as Sublime Text.
The best feature of all is the Python plugin API. Sublime lacks some OOTB functionality of newer editors, but the plugin ecosystem makes this a non-issue if you're willing to invest in extending your editor. If you write code 6+ hours a day, you should be. Git integration (GitGutter and GitSavvy) is awesome, as is linting (SublimeLinter) and project management (ProjectManager).
I wrote an HTTP client plugin for Sublime called Requester (https://github.com/kylebebak/Requester) in a few thousand lines of code. It matches Postman, Insomnia, Paw et al. on features, and in my opinion handily beats them on usability. It's the plugin API that makes this possible.
Here's my guess on what Jon Skinner set out to do with Sublime Text: build a rock-solid text editor and make it as extensible as possible. Until someone does this better, Sublime is the best editor out there.
Sublime just makes editing fun for me. Especially with the ctrl+d multi-selection.
When it comes to editors, there's definitely a big spectrum of how much it does vs how lightweight/simple it is, and I think Sublime Text, for a majority of my usecases at least, is in the sweet spot.
Don't get me wrong, full fledged IDEs are useful sometimes too, but every time I go to use them, I always spend half my time searching and fighting the program instead of being productive. That's what I mean by Sublime making programming fun. Things don't get in your way and everything is very clean. Sure it may do less, but at least it doesn't drown you in features you don't use either.
The plugin API seems powerful enough but last time I tried to play with it, I didn't get into the groove of things because docs were incomplete/not-up-to-speed/blog-posts-elsewhere-also-often-outdated, all this combined with Python-the-language it felt a bit too fickle/messy to me to get serious --- there was no comparison to the quite brilliant docs at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensionAPI/overview when I weighed my options ---
But now that 3 is out of beta, I'll take another look and once again hope for an exhaustive, complete, up-to-date and comprehensive documentation of plugin development
I've found the docs to be complete but lacking in examples.
Examples often say more in 10 lines of code than a page of docs, but I didn't find this to be an issue. To write Requester, I cloned plugins with features I wanted to implement (e.g. GitSavvy) and used them to complement the docs.
I think the docs could be improved with examples of small useful plugins that touch on various areas of the API. This might be a good project for the community.
In the past few months, I see some popular linux softwares started to using AppImage (https://appimage.org/) to distribute prebuilt binary. Not sure if it is a good option for SublimeText.
That's what electro-build does by default. It's a terrible solution for end users, because it results in huge bloated statically-linked images, but at least it works everywhere.
I do prefer what Sublime Text is doing here though. Kudos to them, it's a lot of work.
It's easy to write a PKGBUILD for Arch, and IDK RPM but writing a Debian package is not that hard too, I've written a .deb that installs all the software I use on Ubuntu Gnome and it's just a directory and two or three files. Its docs could use a bit of help though, the Debian handbook is sometimes very superficial.
I vastly prefer it to hunting for executables on websites, thank you. And there isn't that many relevant distress to target, especially with things like Flatpack etc.
I agree, too many just ship a deb or a simple archive, which is not the best update experience for non-Ubuntu users, even if i.e. the AUR solves most of the pain.
"One of the areas I'm especially proud of in Sublime Text 3 is performance". I totally agree with this statement. Writing software in sublime has certainly made my life easier. Kudos to Jon and team.
I opened 70mb file on a macbook air the other day, and apart from around 7 sec loading time, i didn't notice that it is any more than a 100 kb just by the UI feel. Really great job.
It's a superficial reason, but I've gotten very used to them in Emacs, IntelliJ IDEA, VS Code and Atom, yes, I'm still using all of them interchangeably :-(
I find it as superficial as enjoying your editor font. It definitely matters to many of us I think. Sublime has a lot to be desired on the font rendering front from my perspective. I will definitely revisit Sublime once they tackle that presumably in 3.1 or 4.
Kudos to the ST team for never trying to patent or sue random companies for using the multi-select feature. That feature alone has helped improve so many editors.
No, it wasn't. I believe TextMate had a feature where you could edit multiple lines at once, but it was part of a column selection mode, it certainly wasn't free form multiple selections.
Multiple Selections were one of the earliest core features built for Sublime Text, and weren't inspired from other software. I don't think TextMate existed when I implemented this.
I can't comment on how well it was implemented in PC-Write but it won't be far-fetched to say that Sublime made multiple-selections mainstream. I had seen some references to vim plugins that offered that feature but it had limited abilities. The three ways of doing multiple selections—selecting multiple instances of a word, placing multiple cursors downwards in succeeding lines, and using point and click—made Sublime's implementation vastly more powerful.
Back in the day (early-mid 80's), PC-Write was kind of like the SublimeText of the era.
Multiple-select was indeed one of the key reasons to use it, as a programmers editor, even though it was intended for more general-purpose word processing tasks.
Anecdotal experience: my first unboxing of ST2 led to the proclamation: "finally, someone has done multi-select cursors again, almost as good as PC-Write back in the day!"
It had already been implemented in the alpha versions of TextMate 2 earlier. But it’s quite plausible that the two implementations were independent.
... Unlike most of Sublime Text which was a close copy of TM features except for the ability for users to edit customizations, making the Sublime community a giant leech that sucked all of the air out of TextMate bundle development without ever contributing anything back.
EDIT: Leaving the original comment below for posterity, but it looks like the TextMate article I found on this doesn't predate ST's multi-select, so I have no idea which is true. I'll just take the ST devs at their word :)
Interesting. TIL
It even looks like TextMate implemented the individual copy/paste buffer for each cursor correctly as well, something that VSCode had horribly wrong the last time I tried to use it.
Do you know if this only worked with the cmd+click cursors, or did it also support the cmd+d mode to select the same word in multiple places?
Indeed, they at the very least made it known / very popular to use. I realized JetBrains IDE's have support for it as well and it comes in really handy from time to time.
I honestly can't believe I'm saying this, but: can you please enable me to buy a new license for 4.0 even though it may not even be on the road map yet? Or switch to / enable a subscriber model which is paid yearly and gives access to all upgrades?
I rely so much on sublime for my day to day work and I fear the $80 or whatever I paid for it whenever ago is too cheap for the amount of value I'm getting out of it, and I'd hate to see this magnificent piece of software fall by the wayside because of an unsustainable business model.
Of course, if the business is perfectly sustainable then you know, carry on as you where.
I understand your appreciation for the software but begging for another subscription fee? One feature here is that the authors charge a normal fee and are not greedy in your pockets, like 1Password and many others.
I really do appreciate the classic software pricing.
It could be a higher fee, or more frequent but I'm really tired of all the Recurring costs!
Thing is, software unlike say a book or a movie has sometimes significant maintenance costs. There are always bugs to be fixed, security vulnerabilities are found, third-party libraries need to be upgraded and so on.
The danger of the one-off model is that it sometimes creates the wrong incentives. Features and even bug fixes get pushed into newer versions, which may even delay their release until there's enough of them to justify a new version.
A good example of this going awry is the RAW file processing for Photoshop (pre-subscription). Newer cameras would get added to new versions of the Camera Raw plugin but you needed a new version of Photoshop to use the newer Camera Raw versions.
I honestly don't mind the subscription model and I think Jetbrains has about the best one of all: you get constant acess to upgrades. When you choose to stop subscribing, that simply locks in the latest version you can use (ie you don't lose access entirely).
The problem is many companies price subscriptions wrong. They say "our software costs $600 so we should charge $50/month". Because, you know, recouping that cost in a year is somehow reasonable.
Well, in contrast to a physical thing selling two copies is exactly as costly as selling one. I'd argue that that more than covers the cost of continued development.
I can't say I recognize that wrong incentives in real life and I've yet to find a single piece of software that I'm willing to pay a subscription for.
It all comes down to business ethics, are you trying to rip off your customers? Most can't afford to piss off their paying users so they play nice (and I hope that is not the only reason they are being reasonable).
Not everyone feels that way. Some services are worth it of course, but there are a lot of pretenders that have entered the picture who do not sell things worthy of a subscription. There is an older model of software as eternal, you finish the program and then move on to the next bigger and better program. At least then your old userbase doesn't get as shafted.
But those are entirely different measures. Not worthy of a subscription does not mean not worthy of my money, it simply means it is not worthy of my money on a recurring basis. Perhaps I am one of those seemingly rare consumers that did not mind high one-off costs, even in my poorer years -- in the end you still own the thing, or at least it's bits. Subscriptions net nothing over the long term and their recurring spikes will eat people to death.
Well, I didn't mean to say that people buying subscriptions are being ripped off.
But rather that companies that don't offer subscriptions can't game on features and bug-fixes just to fish for upgrade fees before people feel (rightly so) ripped off. There is an implicit agreement on the support provided and if the company fails to deliver that people won't play along.
Isn't that the other way around? If I buy a license and I find a bug a year later, there's no guarantee of a fix. If I am subscribing, I can threaten to cancel.
Also, if you loose access when you stop subscribing that is actually much harder to do compared to not paying for an upgrade if you "own" a license of the software.
Software is something that needs to be continuously developed and maintained. Charging a one-time fee is a fundamentally unsustainable approach. We all have to face reality and start paying for software as a subscription.
Now, that will likely end the bubble of "I can buy 100 apps, most of which I'll never use", which we have been in for the last 20 years or so. But perhaps the few apps that people will pay for will become better as a result. I'm hoping for it.
> Software is something that needs to be continuously developed and maintained.
Not always. Sometimes software is "done" and warrants no further changes or maintenance. I have run into this issue with mobile apps that worked perfectly to my satisfaction until the authors decided to "redesign" or "improve" it. I think subscription is a valid use case for customers who want active maintenance, but it should be opt-in. I detest the forced-subscription model that JetBrains attempted ("Didn't pay the latest subscription? We'll brick the application you've installed and are running on your hardware").
" I detest the forced-subscription model that JetBrains attempted ("Didn't pay the latest subscription? We'll brick the application you've installed and are running on your hardware")."
They never attempted that. You were always able to use the version you paid for, even if you stopped your subscription.
Oh, but they did[1]. You might have missed the initial drama as it transpired because of their quick U-turn (to their credit). I have reason to doubt the subscription plans they published which clearly stated that failure to keep up with the subscription would lead to bricked IDEs. JetBrains only backtracked[2] after receiving sustained pushback. There were HN posts for the initial bricking plan[3] and the backtrack[4].
Sometimes, sure. But nowadays software is more often than not something that isn't simply done and needs continuous updates, in the face of security vulnerabilities, changing requirements (people using the software for changing use cases), platform updates (new version of macOS or Linux that breaks compatibility), etc.
Quite honestly, I don't mind paying a subscription for updates. But I detest having to pay a subscription when all I want is a single copy and don't require rolling updates and support.
Charging a one time fee works just fine for lots of folks out there making software. It's especially good for anyone who's doing it in their spare time as they don't have to provide updates for every little niggle someone may find. Some offer a subscription alongside the one-off model, which is the best of both worlds if the developer(s) are continuously working on it. Others ask you to purchase the major upgrades but give minor upgrades for free.
There are lots of payment models out there, and the developers should pick what works for both them and their customers. There's no way most of my colleagues who have a license would have purchased sublime if it was a rolling cost, so that model seems to be working in their favor right now, at least for single developer purchases.
For a piece of software that enables your career, helps you to provide for yourself and/or family, that you probably utilize for thousands of hours over a given year?
ST3 is continuously improved. They are developers. They eat. They have families. Just like you receive a salary, because the software you work on, probably is never done. Why would anyone feel entitled to improvements for a flat rate? Is that not greedy?
Gratuitous appeal to emotion. Sublime is already paid software, they are already eating, the commenter wasn't asking for it for free. It is not on the cheap end either - I have paid less for way more powerful and man-hours-consuming image/vector editors. Everything is fine.
Well. As a long-time Sublime Text user who sort of drifted off to Atom and VS Code in recent times, here's the thing: ST really hasn't been continuously improved; the sole developer frequently goes incommunicado for months, and there have been long stretches when there weren't any builds released. There are certainly substantial improvements between ST2 and ST3, but it's been over five years between ST2's initial release and ST3's. This is--kind of a worrisome pace of development.
So, this leaves me of two minds about a hypothetical subscription model. If it meant that ST's developers had an ongoing income that allowed them to work full-time on the project, set a regular release schedule, and be more open with communication, it would be worth it. But if users had been asked to pay, say, $49 a year for the last five years with ST3 on an "um, they pop up once a year to say they're still working on it, I guess" schedule, I'm pretty confident it would have gone over even more poorly than what actually happened.
I have a family and I have to eat, so give me your money and I'll give you a copy of VSCode that I worked on. I'll also give you the source code with that.
It's a way better deal (and arguably a better tool) than what you get with Sublime.
>For a piece of software that enables your career, helps you to provide for yourself and/or family, that you probably utilize for thousands of hours over a given year?
The first line is the part I'm quoting, which is obviously what I'm addressing. He's making assumptions about the commenter that are completely unwarranted.
So no, he doesn't speak for the people who use ST.
If the description of the parent doesn't fit you then maybe you weren't his/hers intended audience?
No reason to tell everyone about it.
If someone comments: "It's not much to pay $70 for something you use professionally, and get value out of it everyday etc" -- it only adds noise to chime in "I don't use it professionally" or "I don't use it everyday".
It's a conditional sentence (even if implicit). If one is not on that category, then yes, obviously the argument doesn't apply to them.
Exactly, for every one person like this there are probably many who would not renew if they went subscription. It's not like they rely entirely on new customers, the company only has two employees and I'm sure ST3 will be out for a few years and then ST4 will come along. Software companies existed long before "cloud licensing" became the norm.
I am not fan of replacing classic pricing model with recurring payments but instead of forcing recurring payment, allow that option for extra feature. Make the base app as it is now and add something on top of that for small fee. Like I suggested earlier, make small cloud service for syncing configs, addons and projects between installations. It's not a big thing, not deal breaking, it can be even done using rsync by user but I would happily pay couple dollars for that functionality and I would support devs. Development is recurring cost. Without aggressive marketing, like for example Microsoft, it's very hard to pay developers from selling not recurring licences every 3 or 4 years.
I would be okay with them having an optional cloud service for syncing settings.
But the issue you talk about is where major version upgrades come in. Sublime text could cease all development tomorrow and not pay another cent towards development, should people have to continue to pay to keep using it? If new major feature are requested then that is grounds for charging and upgrade fee, otherwise I don't see why people should pay.
I was using MiniKeePass but it was hard to keep sync.
I'm worried about using the hosted version of KeeWeb, also it doesn't seems as practical as a standalone app. But I'll definitely try to host myself (or use locally on the phone?) and give a try. Thanks.
Take a look at Enpass (https://www.enpass.io) it has a free desktop app and one off fee for mobile apps. I've been using it for tree or four months and it's been great.
Noone's stopping you from buying more licences, if you really want to support the dev. I think it's overpriced as it is (as another commenter mentioned, considering the competition is FOSS), but I might buy it one day, when I have more disposable money (assuming I won't have switched to VSCode or $hotNewThing by then). I really do like Sublime, and I'm happy 3 is out of beta, but seeing the userbase migrate to Atom/VSCode is worrisome, and makes me doubt $80 is worthwhile investment (I'm mostly worried about third party plugin devs, which was once Sublime's biggest strength).
I use Sublime and paid for it a few years ago. That said, I also use VS Code which I really like for certain things. I actually use both of them daily and simply get different utility from them. If Sublime went to subscription then I would make do with other products. VS Code has a robust plugin ecosystem and I see that growing in the near future. I honestly think Sublime will eventually end up as FOSS. Whether that is from a drop or increase in subscribers I don't know.
I don't live in the United States so my purchasing power from two hours of work is exponentially smaller, but I get your point. Truth is, I don't really use Sublime (or any other text editor) that often anymore, because I'm working with Java and using IntelliJ IDEA for that. If I used Sublime Text professionally, I (or my employer) would have bought the licence in a heartbeat.
Can someone please explain to me why $80 for Sublime Text is a good price for a text editor?
I'm not flaming, I genuinely want to know. I've tried Gedit, Atom, VS Code, Notepad++ and I fail to see what Sublime offers over those to justify the price.
>I'm not flaming, I genuinely want to know. I've tried Gedit, Atom, VS Code, Notepad++ and I fail to see what Sublime offers over those to justify the price.
It's better than Gedit in every way, it's way faster and more lightweight than Atom and VS Code, and it has a far better plugin ecosystem and functionality than Notepad++.
Not only does the editor need to track project folders and open files, even something seemingly simple like syntax highlighting can be surprisingly complex[0]. The editor needs to be able to read your inputs (mouse and keyboard) and represent those changes onscreen just like every other piece of software. It needs to repaint the screen with your changes and, depending on the complexity of the editor, load and implement a host of features (auto-complete? bracket matching? code indentation? code standards a la pep8? updates to source control?), with every single keypress and ideally in a matter of milliseconds. All of that takes memory and different editors make different sacrifices.
Of course the extent to which this happens is the whole reason there are different editors. If all you want to do is write text with zero features, then speed isn't an issue at all and you can just write directly in your terminal to a single file with pico or something.
> even something seemingly simple like syntax highlighting can be surprisingly complex
I was troubleshooting something with a colleague who was using Atom, and every time he opened a new file, it'd take somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds before the syntax highlighting was applied. As someone who's in and out of files all day, that'd drive me bananas.
There are a lot of factors that play into the speed (perceived and real) of an editor. Sublime is written in C, which is generally recognized as a performant language when used correctly. In contrast, Atom and VS Code are Electron[1] apps, which mean they have to deal with browser optimization. They both use a lot of tricks[2] to operate as quickly as they do. And in all editors, one bad extension can kill performance, from my recent experience Resharper in Visual Studio increases startup time by 3x.
An editor is not as simple as displaying lines of text a la Notepad, different editors optimize for different use cases.
The same reason its annoying when any other kind of program is slow, especially interactive ones.
I don't want to see freezes for 2-3 seconds for some GC run, I don't want the letters to appear several 100ms after I've typed, I don't want to wait minutes for it to parse a large-ish file or update the autocomplete suggestions.
I don't use Sublime Text as an IDE (I have Intellij for that), mainly to edit scripts, large CSV files, as a scratchpad etc. but It's always open and increases my productivity a lot.
It's highly likely that OP simply stumbled upon it, or someone recommended it, and now he learned it and is used to it and knows how productive it can be.
Thing is, same is true for any other good IDE, of which there are plenty.
Personally, it always blows my mind that people don't use VIM :) if they actually spent 5-20hours learning VIM correctly they would not touch these inferior pretty looking UIs
Agree! I do almost everything in VIM for file-efficient languages and environments (NodeJS projects, Python projects, HTML, C++ ROS packages, most things that promote DRY coding, etc.)
For file-inefficient environments (e.g. Java/Android -- 79 files for a "hello world" Android app!) I have to grudgingly use an IDE because I have no idea how to update the 78 other manifest/gradle/workspace/resource/etc. files based on the 1 file I change and the IDE takes care of the magic, as much as I hate that way of working.
There are some really great vim plugins for Sublime Text, including one that uses NeoVim. For me, Sublime Text is basically Vim with an nice UI and some IDE features built in. And Goto Anything. I wouldn't want to live without Goto Anything.
Whereas I view vim as simply a necessary evil and I mean "necessary" in the sense that I want to edit something over ssh.
Bret Viktor's oft-quoted "Inventing on Principle" talk touches on this subject where a lot of research has shown that bimodal editors are worse. While I can't argue for how true that statement is, it's certainly been my experience. I always find it jarring to think I'm in command mode but I'm actually in edit mode or vice versa. Any vim user has had the experience of pasting text in command mode. I just absolutely hate bimodal editors.
Additionally, staunch vim (and emacs) users I know seem to spend an inordinate amount of time screwing around with plugins to get some pale version of behaviour you get out the box on any halfway decent IDE or even text editor.
I feel the same way about learning yet another series of keyboard shortcuts for, say, tmux/screen.
You could argue the mouse is slower. I'm not sure if this actually holds up to empirical measurement (or at least not to the degree that's claimed) but the point is, the barrier for entry is so much lower. You can just click around and find things. If you find yourself doing something a lot, you can find out what the keyboard shortcut is.
Thus you don't need to spend 50 hours upfront on a GUI editor.
It's possible to go overkill with learning tons of unnecessary shortcuts, but in my opinion all you really need for tmux is attach, detach, split horizontal, split vertical, fullscreen.
5 shortcuts is a paltry investment for a pretty sweet gain.
And unlike an IDE, this can be readily available on any machine you SSH into. Which is also what makes VIM so handy.
From the point of view of "onboarding" (aka barriers to entry), as you say, point-and-click is miles ahead of the unfriendly-at-first-glance Vim.
But I'd like to say that I cannot honestly recall an instance where I was in normal mode and ended up pasting something -- I assume you mean Ctrl-V-ing and having the paste interpreted as commands? -- once I got used to it after leaving Sublime Text, which I'd say took me a couple of weeks of hating myself. It's a matter of how much effort one thinks it makes sense to put into learning the editor, but IME there is a significant payoff, even if it is hard-won.
I'm not sure if it's harder for some people to internalize (which is by no means a value judgment; it's why Emacs/ST/Atom/whatever exist and are powerful) but once that is done, one never gets confused about what mode you're in simply because one is almost never in insert mode! "Probabilistically" speaking, you are in insert mode for 0 time. ;)
In any case, I don't hate non-bimodal editors, just hope that the subset of those using them who have not seen Vim for what it is yet do so quickly. (And, of course, there are those who are genuinely repulsed by modal editing, and that's fine!)
I can't speak to "inordinate amount of time screwing around with plugins": I have a plugin for each language I use, and perhaps four or five others. The rest of my init.vim (I use Neovim) is about ... 30 lines long? It's my experience that most (Neo)vi(m) users use little of the power of plain vi -- I know that because I myself was like that for almost three or four years after I started using Vim. (This is ignoring, e.g. large Java projects, where IDE-style code navigation is basically a requirement if you want to get anything done.) But there is definitely a culture where a customized-to-the-hilt editor is seen as something to be proud of, and why shouldn't it? It's what you "live in", isn't it? :)
The 'micro' text editor is a fantastic vim replacement for SSH editing. It's a text-ui like vim, but it has mouse support (for selecting text, etc), and keyboard shortcuts that match bio stands, ctrl-s for save, ctrl-q for quit, etc.
> You could argue the mouse is slower. I'm not sure if this actually holds up to empirical measurement
It is slower, and does hold up to empirical measurement. Yes, if you want 'ease of onboarding', then vim is not for you. It's a powerful tool for professionals, and like a lot of such tools, it requires some training. No-one ever complains that Photoshop requires training, yet a brand new user to Photoshop is completely befuddled and it takes a long time before they're proficient.
I've owned Photoshop since it was distributed on diskettes and I'm still befuddled every time I need its impressive power. (I'm not a professional graphics/photography person so I use the program only a few times per year now.)
I think this is a really good analogy to using pro-level text editing tools (e.g. Emacs or Vi). A mouse is great for poking around menus and operating sliders in a new or unfamiliar program, but Emacs and especially Vim are so fast to use without a mouse that it pains me to watch other programmers editing while using one.
ST is a fine editor, and I use IntelliJ for Java, but I've already spent the time (years) learning Emacs. Is it worth it for me to start over? No. I use IntelliJ for Java programming, but I use only its basic Emacs keybindings and the mouse for everything else (befuddled like I am in Photoshop).
I bought a license simply beacuse Sublime Text was the only editor that could open a wikipedia json data dump. I installed many editors before I more than willingly paid for Sublime.
For me, same thing: no other editor gives me the decent UI of a GUI-based editor, but with the speed of vim when working with large text files (e.g. 10MB+).
I will often use sed or other CLI tools to parse through giant files (1GB+), but sublime only takes a short bit to load in a pretty hefty file, or a do regex search across entire projects with multiple-GB of files, and it works natively on Mac and Windows, so even when I'm forced to work on something on my Windows 10 laptop, I can be productive.
It has almost all of the features of the Electron based editors (aka Atom) but with a C++ backend instead of HTML/JS toilet water. So you have all the customization you could ever want with the speed of low level code.
Terminal support? To be fair, sublime text is great and I use it sometimes, but if your job requires you to work over ssh then vim definitely beats all modern editors.
Speed and stability, search, command palette, file navigation, Goto.
And the excellent Python plugin API, which has made the plugin ecosystem so vibrant. Here's one I wrote, https://github.com/kylebebak/Requester, an HTTP client that goes toe to toe with Paw and Postman on features and outdoes them on usability.
I couldn't have have written something like this for any other editor, or any other platform.
I think it is in a similar situation as JavaScript. It is not strictly better than its competitors, but it still manages to attract an entire community of people[1] to contribute actively to the project and its popularity.
Nothing is faster for me when opening gargantuan text files. It's never broken for me and never lagged either. I think that's pretty impressive, not to mention the customizability options.
Define gargantuan. I just opened a 900MB CSV and it choked part-way through and eventually opened after about a minute. Windows 10, 8GB RAM and running on an SSD.
Not to mention if you hit ctrl-f and search for something in the file. Another lock-up for a few minutes while it tries to figure out highlighting. This is something I've reported to them. I have never considered Sublime to be a good handler of large files.
It's an organic, artisanal text editor lovingly hand-carved from gap-buffer wood by craftsmen from a remote Tibetan village. A steal at thrice the price!
What about the idea to sell 'silver/gold/diamond supporter' licences for 100/200/300$ to people who _really_ love your software?
I am not even talking about adding some special features, just enable people to pay more than the normal price and perhaps just add a nice 'Thanks for your extra support' badge to the 'Info' menu.
My local high school will refuse them. The computer science classes use Geany because it “builds character” and anything that looks remotely like an IDE apparently “does too much work for students”.
That is exactly what I would avoid. Don't add any special features to it (vote for features, faster support responses) because that will take time from normal development. Just clearly state: "This software cost x$. And if you love it so much that you would pay double the price then you are free to do so."
Totally. I bought my license in 2013 and just realized that I didn't even have to pay the 3.0 license upgrade fee! I have used Sublime daily for almost 5 years now and I almost feel guilty for paying so little. I'd be more than happy to pay for a future 4.0 upgrade fee now.
I'm not a ST dev, I have no financial interests in ST becoming more expensive or changing to a (for the company) more lucrative business model. I have tried alternative editors, anything from vi and emacs to VSCode and Atom, but nothing hits the marks for me as ST does. It has – in my opinion – great UX, its speed and efficiency is unmatched in the GUI editor space, and my favorite feature: it has rock solid buffer persistence.
I can't tell how many times ST has saved me from system crashes and just me being an idiot and restarting everything before saving anything, or removing a file but ST keeping a buffer. I've come to rely on this, and it's rock solid. Not once in the years since I started using it (I believe I bought my first license in 2012) have I encountered a situation where ST lost my data. I've never experienced this with any other editor (I'm sure vi and emacs can do this, but in years of trying, I can't come to grips with their UX – they're just not for me) and this feature alone has paid for the price of admission for me, many many times over.
In short – I don't care that there are FOSS alternatives. I don't care that there are alternatives that are "better" by some measure. Until they can match these three things, in increasing order of importance, they will never compete with ST for me:
- Great UX
- Speed and efficieny
- Rock solid buffer persistance, even for unsaved files
Someone in this thread suggested I buy licenses and donate to a local high school. I'm going to seriously look into this as a viable way to both support the company producing ST, as well as hopefully enabling kids to learn programming, or write novels, or whatever they want to do with the software.
Agreed. I am a very appreciative Sublime user as well and want to ensure your business is successful.
I started with Textmate during the Rails craze and transitioned to Sublime due to the portability of themes etc. I think I'm still using my 10 year old TM theme.
Thank you for the continued dedication to this project.
Amusingly, your 10 year old TM theme probably shows different/inaccurate colours than it did in TM unless you went to the trouble of converting it to sRGB for Sublime.
It's just your theme opened in TextMate and Sublime. Sublime displays the AppleRGB colorspace colors (the default in the original TextMate) as sRGB. So they come out off. Check out the linked github thread for the gory/inconclusive details.
I concur with this. I'm appreciative of Atom -- and recommend it to folks who aren't professional programmers and can't imagine paying for a text editor -- and I've heard similar great things about VS Code, but ST and its ecosystem has just been so dependable for me. It was inconvenient to switch over from TextMate to ST initially, but ended up being a great move overall. I haven't yet seen anything on the horizon that would seem like the next phase from ST for me.
I left VIM after 20 year to VS Code. I find that the ecosystem at VS Code to be the best I have ever seen. Great job by Microsoft and I use it on my Linux box all day.
I should have stated that I still use VIM mode and bindings. It is the reason why I am there. I tried Sublime, Atom and other text editors and VS Code's VIM mode was on par.
Yes. They could make some kind of small cloud service to pay for on a monthly/yearly basis. I would gladly pay for a service that would allow me to share my Sublime settings, addons and projects across all my Sublime installations. This can be done either way but I would happily pay Sublime devs for that.
You should buy multiple licenses of Sublime Text 3.0
I'm in a situation where if I had $10 or $80 extra, I would use it to buy baby supplies, not software. Many others are in the same situation, or worse (thinking of those in developing countries where $80 represent a week's worth of savings).
I agree on the point that useful software/service providers must have a sustainable business model, but I see your point about $80 being too cheap as just one data point (not that you were claiming otherwise, and you did appreciate the value that you get). There are many people for whom spending $80 every few years may be a bigger burden too. Subscriptions, without significantly lower per year prices, also favor the ones for whom these aspects don't matter as much.
I just wanted to put these points across since a single price probably may not well serve all user classes and the developer/company.
I would also like if the developer would agree to release the source code under a FLOSS license should he find working on Sublime Text is no longer worthwhile for him (could be financial but could also just be because he has lost interest in developing it, etc).
I don't feel like Sublime Text has the development momentum to justify the subscription model.
That isn't necessarily bad; it's a great editor and I've been happy to pay for all versions of it.
But if I am paying an ongoing, continual fee, I expect rapid delivery of updates and new features. I pay for an IDE from JetBrains, and they deliver solid incremental improvements and bug fixes, continuously. So I feel the continual fee is acceptable.
Sublime Text is known for going on hiatus for months at a stretch, with no or negligible updates. That would irritate me as a paying subscriber to the software; it doesn't bug me when I pay a lump sum for the big milestone releases.
I think I'm going to start buying licenses for my interns and students. It's an investment in our future. Today's interns and students are tomorrow's senior devs. Best to start them off proper.
Same here, I get wayyyyyy more than $80 of usage out of this software. I'm very very appreciative of the great work that has gone into this product and don't want it going any place!
Agreed, I just paid my upgrade fee and it seemed too small.
I feel ST could have a checkbox during checkout to add an additional $50 or something in that range. "I'd like to be a supporter for an extra $50". I'm pretty sure I would opt-in to that, but maybe I'm just saying that now because there isn't such an option....
Also, I don't see Sublime in the MacOS App store. I'd suggest it get added there, even if you have to charge more due to the percentage that Apple takes.
It has worked in the past, for example: I would consider the recent FontAwesome 5 kickstarter campaign a huge success both from a funding point of view and the backers getting what they wanted. This was only really possible in my opinion due to the reputation Dave Gandy built up by releasing the open source version of FA prior. One needs only to look at the myriad of failed software kickstarters for examples of what happens when a unknown person who hasn't proven they are capable of delivering what people want tries the same thing.
It fell by the wayside because 2.0 was the HL3 of text editor releases, IMO. Open sourcing it was too little, too late. Even though Sublime Text has had long periods of inactivity, the beta releases every quarter or two were just enough to keep people who loved the editor hooked. TextMate lost people like me because there was, for a long time, zero indication it would continue being developed.
Still the gold standard as far as I'm concerned. It seems to be the only editor that focuses on my happiness by providing a flawless text editing experience. It feels like using a modern iPhone compared to a 2005 Android phone (and yes, the Android phone was probably more extensible).
This is an interesting comparison. Curious as what you think makes OS X better. From what I understand Ubuntu is faster, uses less resources and is much more extensible. All things know to be Sublime-like.
For me, the UI paradigms are certainly more cohesive… but most importantly I don't think any platform has the quality software that OS X has when it comes to attention to detail/usability. Like many with Sublime, I'm happy to pay for other commercial software if its notably better than the free options.
Ubuntu is probably leaner, but in an age of i7s and 16GB ram not sure that matters as much. OS X is aggressive at using what you can throw at it, which generally has made things feel faster than me, but I came from Windows in 2004.
It generally strikes the balance of what I deem the finest commercial software, with a very great open source ecosystem 90% as good as Linux. Makes for a very good dev environment, and the hardware is unbeatable (which is made possible by the software integration)
The new macbook pros are gobsmackingly expensive in much of the world, marginally less so in the US. Apple's obdurate refusal to use touch screens puts them far behind the mainstream leading edge now. I understand their reasoning, but haven't yet met anyone with a touchscreen laptop who would go back to using one without.
And the coup de grace is the new fake keyboard, which is unusable for all-row touch typists. My next laptop will most likely be a Dell XPS 15 with one flavour or other of Linux. I'd prefer macOS, but the hardware isn't worth living with.
In my opinion, Linux desktop environments have historically been missing small but important details, like proper escape angles in menus, and comprehensive / nicely organized settings pages, adding friction to the user experience. My more recent experience with Debian and Ubuntu has been much better though.
I see the author, jskinner, is hanging out on this thread!
Have you ever considered open-sourcing SLT? This is your only route to immortalize this amazing piece of software. I'm sure you'd receive immense community contributions and widespread support. If you switch to a donation model + enterprise support plans, I think you're likely to earn greatly more than you currently do.
I love SLT and have used it throughout my career, but I still feel more comfortable depending on Atom because I know it will be supported by the community in the event that something bad happens with the ownership. If you don't open-source SLT, I sadly believe that open alternatives like Atom will outlive it.
If I were in his shoes, I would open-source the project once I decided I wanted to stop working on it, or when I feel I've made enough, or have it baked into my will to open source the project if the truly unfortunate happens.
Of course, with a team backing the project that changes the dynamic a bit
Blender sorta did that. It was a closed source project that the authors said they would open source if the community raised €100,000. It succeeded and the software was subsequently made open source.
It doesn't even have to be proper open source - just source open! Just dump the source and say people may not sell it, but they may study it and contribute back.
You're not loosing any income - honest people will continue to buy the license, and those who are not honest or cannot afford it will continue to not buy a license. But people will be put at ease about the bus factor. We will learn a lot about how to produce a snappy app with a multiplatform toolkit. And I'm sure people will contribute back great features.
ST2 was the first text editor that really caught my eye. They have also been great with allowing users to permanently "trial" the software. I moved to ST3 beta as soon as it came out and the transition was mostly smooth.
Then VSCode came out and I loved every second of it. It does take more up more memory and is a bit slower but they are quality software and the difference to me is negligible. I cannot see myself going back. SublimeHQ lost me when they stopped updating the software regularly. I know it was rock solid software but the project seemed to be a standstill and VSCode grabbed my attention. Now it has many more features and better support from MS. I cannot imagine a reason to switch unless ST3 gets the same level of love.
Heh, I was confused at first before remembering that what I have been using for these past years was a "beta". Unfortunately, I guess that means all these great new features in the announcement are ones that I'm already completely familiar with. But I suppose I should still go and upgrade my license. It's been my daily driver editor for more than 5 years now, and it's easily worth the $30 to upgrade my ST2 license!
Bar none, my favorite editor. I try to use Vim only sometimes to make sure I keep those commands in shape, but Sublime remains for hardcore work. It breaks my heart that it's closed source.
I do wonder sometimes how much the app makes and/or how much someone would have to pay the developer to open source it.
There is "VIntage Mode" for ST, but unfortunately it's not entirely accurate and also doesn't support some commands. VSCode's VIM plugin is more complete.
Self-plug: https://github.com/lunixbochs/actualvim uses NeoVIM to give you every Vim command/motion in Sublime, and some of the Vim UI (waiting on Sublime/Neovim changes for the rest). VSCodeVim is using it as a reference to drive part of their roadmap.
Correct, I've got Vintageous installed, which is a more feature-complete implementation of VIM's keybindings and its "ex" mode.
It's still not exactly the same as using pure VIM, since some of the commands overlap with Sublime commands, and I tend to use a hybrid of both (for instance, Sublime's Ctrl-D command to make multiple cursors, which is incredibly useful when I'm editing HTML and have to wrap several lines in anchor tags).
Going into "pure VIM" is just to make sure I don't get too reliant on Sublime niceties, particularly as my day job requires spending a great deal of time SSH'd into random RHEL/CentOS boxes.
I think they finally faced the truth that over 90% of users was using "beta" version (actually their words and stats) and listened to some comments on HN. Good job guys! I'm glad that my favourite editor is finally out.
There is more that goes into declaring a release as "stable" than just having it not crash.
For example, take the updated homepage, the licence upgrade process, the proper integration into linux package managers and more.
Couple that with the perception of users of things being "stable" having more reliability and them more likely trying it out and finding rare bugs or issues. Just looking at the forum today revealed a couple issues that nobody on the dev releases has discovered or reported.
That said, you still have to release a stable version every once in a while and they knew that. Unfortunately it took longer than anticipated.
I bought ST2 in 2013, and I'm a littled bummed they pushed the "your license works for ST3" back that far. They deserve more; I might buy another copy anyway.
(My favorite editor is an Emacs clone called Epsilon. It hasn't been updated in a decade, but it still works great. On the other hand, it hasn't been updated in a decade and I think the writing is on the walls, and I'll have to move to something else. 25 years of muscle memory are hard to deal with, though. I'd definitely throw some money the author's way if he ever decided to do a new release).
Steve refreshes the monthly eval (I assume it's got a time-based fuse baked in). So we know he's still alive :-)
Epsilon is still a fantastic tool and you can customize the crap out of it, but there are some things (like multiple native windows) that you can't do, that I'd really like to have. Ah well.
I'm in the same boat, though I find it unlikely that I would go back to Sublime at this point.
VSCode is free, (mostly) MIT, has a unified debugger, great git support, integrated terminal emulator, and a nice healthy extension community.
Sublime is cheap for how often you'll use it, but not free. It's proprietary. Git support even with paid plugins is lacking, especially compared to VS Code.
I'm glad I bought Sublime when I did, but I'm also glad I found VSCode when I did. If there's a choice between FOSS and proprietary, and the FOSS project already works better, the proprietary option is unlikely to make a comeback for me.
Same here. I switched from Sublime to VSCode a few weeks ago after reading some comments here on HN. I don't think I will go back to Sublime for the reasons you mentioned. I also have the feeling that thanks to a fast increasing community the extensions are more polished (in particular, I like the vim mode better).
Sublime is indeed faster and more lightweight but that's not enough for me to keep using it.
Sublime is still the fastest(opens instantly), and personally it looks better than VSCode with the new adaptive themes. Font rendering on MacOS is native in Sublime instead of the fake blurry stuff you get with Electron.
Font rendering on MacOS is native in Sublime instead of the fake blurry stuff you get with Electron.
Wheee, I'm not the only one bothered by this! It's bad on Windows too, though Linux is fine. It affects all Electron based programs, including Chrome itself.
If we are talking about opening big files - Sublime times faster than VSC and miles faster than Code, which still fails at files bigger then 10mb often.
I'm using VCS for some time now (and was at the time of the previous comment), but it's still slow when compared. They did a great job and left Atom (I ment Atom when I said Code, lol) behind, but there is still a huge room for improvement.
I think it really depends on what you're using them for. I know I use both every day. I find myself using VSCode for more of my coding (taking advantage of intellisense and the built in debugger for my python work), while I find that Sublime has a much better "find in files" (as we use CVS for version control), and its general better for opening one-off files or lengthy debug logs with its amazing speed, and having enough respect to not leave little .vscode folders everywhere you tinker.
I downloaded Sublime 3 to try it out, just now. The first thing I did was install Vintageous. I hit `{` and the cursor didn't move.
I love Sublime and used it for many years. It's fast, it looks good, and it's a great editor. It's hard to find an extension ecosystem like VSCode, though. I doubt I'll be returning to Sublime.
For front-end web development, OOTB VSCode is much better, in terms of features (though you could probably get ST to be that way with a number of plugins).
ST is still a lot faster, but now that VSCode has introduced multi-folder workspaces there aren't a lot of features I miss anymore.
Love Sublime Text. Haven't been able to switch to any of the Electron editors because of the horrible font rendering on Mac(Chrome issue). One note: Jon needs to show the new adaptive theme with matching title bar for MacOS on the main page.
What with being in beta for so long, I expected the actual 3.0 to be much like the (last beta) that I had been using. But there are significant changes to the UI, that I'll have to get used to or figure out how to customize (or wait for plugins to customize).
What's with the "/" 'icon' next to many files? I'm not sure what it's supposed to indicate. As you can see in the screenshot in the announcement, some files have a rectangular 'document' icon (unrecognized format?), some have a '<>' icon (html/markdown-type format?), and some have a '/' icon... no idea? Is that supposed to mean "source code"? I am not a fan.
/* means "comment starts here" to me. So now I instinctively feel the sidebar listing has commented out all my files. The fact it's an unterminated comment is blowing my syntax error fuses.
I can override it rationally but there's some serious cognitive dissonance going on. It's configurable, although that's in the bowels of ST3 not in the usual settings, and this won't really help for pair work. Not a great decision I feel.
Hah. Just noticed that myself. It's the icon for "shell script", I think, which includes a wide variety of file types. If you cmd-shift-p and pick "install package", and then install "A File Icon", then that peculiarity is instantly and permanently replaced with meaningful icons (for all the types that I happen to use in my dayjob, at least).
Thrilled to finally see ST3 out of beta, it's like Christmas in September. I've used ST3 beta for literally thousands of hours since 2013, and ST2 before that. I've tried many newer options (Atom, VSCode, etc) but nothing has come close to matching the stability, speed, and reliability. I echo the other comments that I would gladly pay far more than the $70 I spent 5 years ago.
GitSavvy + GitGutter
GitSavvy is a really thought-out Git integration for easy staging/commiting/stashing.
It's one of the things that make people say Wow when they see me work.
Also I use a small plugin to add terminal commands to the command palette which is very useful. Can't remember is name though.
I'm surprised the "minihtml" HTML/CSS engine is buried in the release notes. That sounds like an amazing little component and something that would be extremely useful for projects that don't want to embed an entire browser engine. Even if Sublime itself remained closed, I would love to see minihtml open sourced!
I found an old laptop I hadn't used in about 3 years, fired it up and quipped to my friends "Hah, this thing is so old it's still running the beta of ST3!"
Perhaps because so many developers avoid the touch bar macbooks? Everyone I know here has been buying 15" mbpro refurbs to forestall the dreaded day (ie. touch bar or just abandon macs?)
There's a real danger I think in relying on a proprietary software program for something so key as text editing. For many developers, their editor will be with them for their whole career. Proprietary software has a tendency to not stick around.
I hope to see Sublime eventually released under a free software license. I'd donate to that project.
It's not that hard to switch, especially for a developer that lives in the software. It might take a few days, but if your brain is still fairly plastic, you will adapt.
If you are like my parents that can't get on the internet if the browser icon disappears from their desktop, then there might be a problem.
Something I've realized is a lot of our habits transfer over from app to app. Most authors of new software make sure to follow the standard OS text editing conventions, and windows, linux & macos are all fairly similar.
When you use emacs or vim, which import their 1970s / early 1980s OS conventions with their keyboard shortcuts, you realize you can be dropped into a very foreign 'defaults' context, and they can conflict.
I have a feeling that emacs/vim in some form are going to stick around longer than I'll care about using computers to edit text, so it wasn't even on my radar :)
I used to think that, until I discovered the IDEA suite (PyCharm, PHPStorm, etc). And many devs use Windows as well. The OS is no less important than the text editor.
I still use VIM often enough to stay proficient with it, mostly via SSH, but I'll happily use the closed source IDEA editors when they are available.
> The OS is no less important than the text editor.
Depends what you're doing, I suppose. If you're doing web development, Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, etc... I don't think being on any particular OS is more important than your tools.
Probably not suddenly (unless there's DRM) but over time as other things change, sure. For instance there are plenty of Windows programs from the past, shareware or paid, that simply do not work on Windows 7 (let alone 10). Since they're proprietary nothing can be done. You might be able to emulate or use a VM and get it to run but not as a first class citizen.
It's not "pretty much the exact same thing". ST is much faster and can handle very large files (say, CSVs in the hundreds of MBs) (as an aside, VS Code is much more performant than Atom)
Editing large CSV files is something I do infrequently enough that I'll just use vim or whatever when that need arises. No need to choose my code editor based on that niche use-case.
Then use Atom and don't comment
The parent comment is valid for every software in the world, if you make your living with a 80$ software and you don't want to pay for it, you have big issues
My upgrade was $11 also, which seems way too little.
Unless I'm way underestimating the subscriber base and associated economies of scale, and they really can afford to drive the upgrade rate by making it this cheap, seems like they're leaving a lot of cash on the table. That's actually a touch worrisome, naturally, because it reduces their ability to fund the business through downtimes and make investments into the product (etc). I depend on their product enough that I want their company to be robust and healthy, even if I have to pay more for that to happen. I know they only have a few people to pay today, and I could be wrong about my core assumption, but I don't think they're anywhere near what the market will bear.
I would have paid almost four times as much without thinking myself poorly used. I originally bought sometime in late 2012 and used version 3 since sometime in 2013... which means I've been getting many of the benefits of the upgrade for close to four years. To be honest, I would have even understood if I had been asked to pay the full license fee again and would have done so without pause.
Where do you check? I'm still on the dev build which is one behind the release. I've tried updating in the editor but it states nothing is available. Seems odd that release is 3143 but dev is 3142.
Mine was $0. Honestly thought I'd purchased it before the cutoff date, I can't even remember what I used to use so definitely worth the original price.
One of the reasons I still use both Emacs and Vim (yes I strangely use both) is because I can go execute them on a terminal (terminal, tmux, screen, etc).
There are just so many times I need to SSH into a machine. I know Emacs has some remote file editing capabilities but for some reason I never liked it (I can't recall why now... I think it was the need to sudo).
So I'm wondering what sublime text fans do for remote editing?
Once you set some flags like sshfs -o auto_cache,reconnect,defer_permissions,negative_vncache,noappledouble user@host:/ /path/to/local/ it's pretty robust.
I can then edit files remotely but still use Sublime Text :)
> I know Emacs has some remote file editing capabilities but for some reason I never liked it (I can't recall why now... I think it was the need to sudo).
Most things are in git so work is local; for servers where I have ssh/sftp access I use Transmit to locally edit files using Sublime. It's usually seamless, unless you switch network connections in the middle of a save.
But a lot of the time, I am running vim on the remote server... no simple substitute unless you install some sort of channel to be able to edit locally, or have it available via SFTP (especially with sudo, that's often not possible).
Same solution as you, I use different editors in different contexts. You use Emacs and Vim, I use Sublime and Vim. I also edit locally and push my git branch to the remote server to test/run the code. I do that for most bigger changes and use vim to do smaller debugging changes.
Some people use plugins to edit code over a tunnel using sftp. One of my coworkers edits locally and has aliases to rsync and run his code on the remote machine.
I was involuntarily forced to get the hang of vim back in my youth, and once I got over the learning curve, it's been an indispensable part of my toolkit. I waffle back and forth between sublime3, and tmux+vim, depending on how much I'm working locally vs. remotely
I'll have to try Moom. Right now I use SizeUp which isn't really a tiling manager but does provide some similar features. I use the tmux iterm integration which I must say is pretty badass. The iterm folks did a good job on that.
Finally! I was using Build 3126 just about 2 hours ago and thinking that I haven't seen an update in a looong time. And there it is now. Congratulations to the team at Sublime HQ. Keep up the great work!
Finally bought a license a week ago - happiest I've been to spend money in a long time. Every other editor I use, I end up doing a bunch to try to make it more like Sublime. Congratulations to the team!
Tangential, but is everyone using Sublime comfortable with the sidebar on the left? Moving the sidebar to the right is the first thing I do in every editor, and the few times I tried Sublime I was surprised that for all its customizability that option doesn't exist. I was skimming through the changelog now and it seems like this is still true today.
I usually leave it closed unless I'm looking at a large/unfamiliar project. That said, any application I've ever used that offered a file tree placed it on the left and I never thought to question it. What's your motivation for it being on the right? Do you keep your desktop menu on the left or something?
Depends on which monitor I have my editor in. I try to have the primary text for the editor in the middle so the nav switches left / right depending on the window location.
imagine living in a world where a good software like sublime text was free software...
i know i know, to monetize selling free software is impossible (when people say they're monetizing selling free software they're actually selling services related to that free software, not the software itself), but one can dream...
edit-> some people are confusing the term "free software", i'd like to clarify that i mean free as in free speech, not free as in free beer.
I honestly don't see any reason for Sublime Text to ever be more free than it is. The unlicensed version works as well as the paid version. The only real usability difference is that it asks you about a license every so often. If that reminder starts to annoy you it likely indicates that you are using ST often enough that you should pay for it.
I don't understand why so many developers are willing to pay thousands to upgrade their hardware frequently, but then aren't willing to pay $80 (or $30 to upgrade) once every what, 5 years?, for software that they use in the realm of 30+hrs per week. Sublime text has easily saved me enough time to earn that back.
OP means free as in speech as opposed to free as in beer. He would like the source to be available and to have the freedom to alter or redistribute it.
Sublime is clearly worth the money, but I've been burned dozens of times by non-open-source software suddenly changing business models or getting bought out and then sundowned. On a longer timescale, it seems that open source is the only way to really keep software alive. I wouldn't be surprised if Emacs (or even Atom) outlived every commercial competitor in the field, including all the ones by the big players. And this is especially important with tools you use for your work!
I wish we had a way of collectively and continuously funding open source software. Developers absolutely need to be paid, but it seems that software is better off when it's free.
(With that said, Sublime is one of the few remaining non-open-source applications that I'm more than happy to buy.)
it's not that i ain't willing to pay for its license, its that i prefer it to be free software (the problem is that being free software they'll have to change a lot of things to monetize as much as if it isn't).
about the reasons to be "more free" (as in free spech): collaborative development
Isn't this exactly what JetBrains does with IntelliJ? The core is open source and more than enough for most users. I loved the tool so much, don't touch 90% of the features, but shell out money every month for the Ultimate license because great software is expensive to develop.
Given the value to cost ratio, Sublime Text is essentially free. It costs about as much as most developers make in an hour or two. (Though I suspect if it was a large company it'd be a monthly subscription with cloud syncing and blah blah blah)
I use vim and atom, but most of my fellow developers don't want to use atom because it's heavy and slower than st, vim and emacs are out of question for them i think because things like the amount of work needed to prepare all the plugins to get the same functionality as the other tools.
Did you know that there are rich distributions that have done that for you? You can literally install those with a few simple steps and have fully functional super environment.
Key words for Google search: Emacs Prelude, or Spacemacs
I have nothing but good to say about Sublime Text. I love it. I bought a license for it. It's great.
But.
Its slow progress over the last few years reminded me of the risks of trusting proprietary software for my main work tools - especially when that software has a very low bus factor. That doesn't mean I won't use closed software or that I dislike the authors or anything, but that if I'm going to invest hundreds of hours into solidly learning and customizing something, I want to have faith that it's not going anywhere. That's why I waved a sad goodbye to the otherwise excellent Sublime Text and went back to [open source editor].
I bought my Sublime Text 2 license in 2012. 5 years later and its the best $80 I've ever spent. I'm so pleased Jon finished 3.0. Subscription upgraded.
Looking at the screen shot, I still find it odd that, they use a white background for the file panel on the left. This has the effect of drawing the eye to it, making it the focal point of the window.
That's the least important part of my editor honestly. Would expect it be a lot more low-key.
i had a similar complaint when the github navigation bar turned grey, but I just don't even notice it anymore. hard for me to discern UX principles here from user familiarity.
I took a dive away from Sublime Text over to Atom a few years ago because I was starting up some contract work, didn't want to pay for a copy, and didn't want to continue doing the hokey thing of using a friend's license for work purposes. So I got use to Atom just fine, plus the UI is nice.
I mean, Atom is nice. The package management is all there and frequent updates are great, but...I don't write JS/HTML/CSS/PHP. I typically write Python, Go, Java, and heck even Prolog. Reading the changelog you can clearly see that they have a target audience, and I am not in it.
On the performance side (you knew it was coming!) I am mostly fine except for opening a project directory. I swear Atom has a coded in `sleep` whenever you try to open a file explorer. At first, I thought that this was a cute little quirk that would disappear after an update one day. But that update never came.
So I'll download Sublime again. Spend a morning to get it "just so" for, at the very least, Python and Go. I can easily see Sublime winning me back if I reinvest in it.
There is the opportunity cost of transitioning to a different editor/tool. The second the individual got the 10th "Please Register!" dialog they should have just ponied up and factored it into business expense. Instead a few hours were likely wasted scouring the internet for tips and plugins and tools on how to configure Atom.
And it's not even an expensive specialized software you just use once every few weeks. Sublime Text is literally the first program I start in the morning and the last one I close in the evening. I bought a license in 2011 or 2012 and have used it daily since then. And now I can upgrade for just $30? This is easily the best value-for-money of all the things I ever bought in my whole life
> If software developers don't value software, there is something very wrong with our industry.
Oh, they value it, all right. They just don’t want to buy it, at least not in the customary fashion. They’re more than happy to pay for software using bug fixes, feature contributions, community engagement, or even their own software. Maybe, just maybe, software for software developers isn’t a good product to be sold the way software is usually sold?
The developer giving free licenses to big contributors is a very solid plan. It's an inexpensive way to reward the most valuable members of your community and keeps them engaged.
However, most people just use Sublime Text. If the software were expensive I probably wouldn't feel so strongly. Looking for and fixing bugs in Sublime Text would be a terrible use of my time. For many of us, $80 represents an hour or two of work.
That's one way to look at it. I prefer to adjust to reality rather than hope to change reality to suit my preferences. If people don't like paying for software, then charging money for software is not something I'm going to waste my time on.
A lot of people are commenting on how cheapskate I was. Absolutely! I was still in undergraduate and this was my first contracting gig. I am older, wiser, and ahem richer now. =)
Personally used to the "slowness" of PyCharm, still think it's fast enough and doesn't get in my way too much. If I'm on a system that can't handle a full blown IDE something like Emacs w/ Spacemacs or Sublime Text 3 works for me. I'm not totally married to my tools, though I do use JetBrains software as much as I can. PyCharm has debugging tools and other things which I find useful, though I do agree, it does seem a bit overwhelming at first.
It's discouraging to me that a tool that's excellent, actively developed, and inexpensive still can't get support from professional developers like yourself.
The discussion sparked by it revolves around "don't be cheap" and "try visual studio code". Just like every other discussion about Atom, Sublime or Visual Studio Code.
Except for the fact that there's barely any comparison, and nothing new is mentioned. Atom is cool, slow and not every language is supported equally. Sublime costs money. Hardly warrants 4 total paragraphs where sublime is barely mentioned.
I second this. I meander back and forth between Sublime and Atom, for exactly this reason - Sublime is faster, but Atom has done some key things better (e.g. package management).
As someone who uses both editors daily, Atom is simply better for Go because of the plugins there. go-plus is amazing and its maintainers do a fantastic job.
That said, ST is still significantly better for many other tasks and I end up using it daily, so you should definitely try it out. I'm just saying don't judge it solely on how well it handles Go because you may be disappointed coming from Atom.
Note: if for some reason your b3126 doesn't work properly after running b3143, I found that deleting just the Packages folder from my data folder [0] was enough to get b3126 back to normal.
wow, congrats Jon and Will, this has been a long time coming. I can not think of more than maybe one other piece of software
I gladly pay for and look forward to new releases.
Also, Will: I apologize for being one of those assholes with a moderately popular plugin that still hasn't updated the thing to follow Package Control best practices.
I'm sure you guys have discussed it somewhere in the past, but would you comment on where you see Sublime heading feature wise now that there is, arguably, some competition in the same general editor market (vs code, atom, etc...)? I don't like comparing stuff and saying "why can you just do that" but some of those editors, even with all their shortcomings, have massively benefited from good debugger support (vs code), and a pretty well though out set of features to support plugin developers (dependency management, testing, etc...).
As an enthusiastic Emacs user I can say that Sublime Text is one of the best text editors out there, together with Emacs and Vi-family. I've only sporadically used it but it's really nice. If I was using my "text editor" only for text-editing (I use Emacs apps like Gnus, Elfeed and Org-mode, and really enjoy Elisp and the programmable environment it provides), I'd definitely use it.
One thing that I don't understand is though, when I buy ST, what do I buy? I've only seen others use full versions but as far as I can tell it's only the [UNREGISTERED] bit in the titlebar and the random "please buy me" popup. It's understandable that one would pay merely to sustain its development but is there any actual differences?
With a license, you get access to the dev builds[0].
Most, if not all, of the new features of the 3.0 release were present in the latest dev version (the dev builds get updated much more frequently, as opposed to the public build, which was last updated Sep 2016).
ST is the only editor with non-insane indentation controls: it's right there at the bottom of the window (want to start using 4-space indent in a JS file in the middle of a project full of C++ code that's tab indented? In a project where some C++ devs wrote 4-space indebted JS, when you normally prefer 2, but what to stay consistent? No problem, it's a click away). IntelliJ enforces per-language indentation (what if you have multiple projects with 2 or 4 space indent? Tough luck) and IIRC Atom requires you to download a barely-maintained plugin just to get something even resembling indentation control (and you have to edit a config file to change it - on the fly this ain't!)
Brackets has it the same way as ST: bottom-right of the screen you can switch between spaces and tabs as well as the number to insert with each tab press.
> IntelliJ enforces per-language indentation (what if you have multiple projects with 2 or 4 space indent? Tough luck)
Not the case. You can set it to match existing file indents if you wish (with a notification when an indent style is matched). And you can have individual project-scoped or multiple IDE-scoped language code style presets.
I love Sublime. Tried Atom, but too slow on my 2012 Macbook Air.
One question:
How is sublime sustainable economically? I mean alternatives like Atom is free & open source, supported by a big company. With a infinite free trial model, how can sublime survive?
The "infinite free trial" model surely helps them indirectly. It expands the user base, which expands the plugin ecosystem, which sells licenses... because when you choose a text editor, you're choosing it for the ecosystem as much as for the editor itself.
There are AFAIK only two full-time employees (Jon Skinner and Will Bond) so they don't need to sell a ton of licenses.
If they sell 6,000 licenses a year that nets them nearly $500K/year in revenue.
Please note that the "6,000" there was totally invented by me. I just estimated how many licenses they need to sell to reach half a mil. I don't know if they sell 1,000 a year or 100,000 a year... I'd be really curious to know how many they sell.
It's cheap. I use it ten hours every day. It costs less than I would charge for an hour of consulting. Ok so I do live in one of the most expensive countries in the world but even in a developing country a developer don't have to work long to pay for this license for a tool they would use a lot every day.
Less than one hour working time for the core software used when developing is cheap.
A lot of software is very under priced in terms of value. The App Store and SaaS copycats pricing doesn't reflect the value or the cost of software - you need big volumes and many go bust due to no profits.
I paid for ST2 in 2012. Five years later the upgrade price is only $30. Should have been more.
Very active. I use a fair share of them, and they are updated regularly.
On the rare occasion that something breaks (Seti_UI theme, mostly. But to be fair, I installed it when it wasn't stable yet), fixes are often published the next day or at most in the next handful of days. In the meantime you can just disable a plugin and go ahead. But again, it happened rarely to me.
The only problem (that I'm aware of, correct me if I'm wrong) they ran into was the whole deal with Kite basically paying some plugin devs to hide spyware into their code. But that has been handled and solved, and lead to the creation of basic guidelines for plugin developments and extensive discussion of the forum. Devs were very responsive.
I have used Sublime for many years, but had to switch to Atom for a large mono-repo codebase, because there is no decent plugin on Sublime to exclude Git-ignored files from search. The only one available froze my computer every minute.
Just adding my voice to the chorus of users that love sublime text so much that we are begging you to take more of our money. I cannot live or function without it, I use it for everything I do.
Discovering sublime text was crucial to my early development as a programmer, I can easily see myself losing interest in it without having such a powerful, efficient, intuitive, and FUN tool at my fingertips. Yeah I said it: fun. Sublime text is fun for me. I even type my emails and web form responses in it, just because.
Anyway, congrats on the release, I love sublime text, you already have my money but seriously, I'll give you more
Unfortunately the macOS version still has really annoying issue for virtual desktop users: the editor windows are not restored to their previous virtual desktops after restart/reboot. Instead, all windows will open on the current desktop.
I enjoy a lot of the nice UI based workflows Sublime provides - but always felt that mastering VIM / emacs would provide me a far better pay out. Does any body else agree ?
I disagree. Maybe you might be marginally better off, but if you enjoy Sublime more, that matters.
If you are going for mastery level, that implies you would also learn Sublime's programming model inside and out. If you get to that level of expertise, you are probably going to be more efficient than most when it comes to editing text.
If you are going to be using one of those editors a lot anyway (because you will be ssh'ing into a Linux machine or rely on org-mode, for example), then perhaps that would shift the landscape.
I used to use graphical editors. I used PFE if anyone remembers that and then PSPad. PFE and PSPad were windows only which turned out to be an issue. I then switched to JEdit, but found that a number of plugins had issues and connecting to get a plugin just didn't work on many occasions.
About ten years ago I got a job that required me to edit multiple languages on multiple platforms and I was using about three different editors: Oxygen XML, Eclipse, VS, Python Charm and I just thought this is getting ridiculous. I switched to Emacs because it is cross-platform, fast, and you can edit any kind of file in it. I never looked back. I have edited about a dozen programming languages in it, and used it for markdown, and DocBook and DITA XML editing. Today I am still happily using it. On my latest gig I had to edit TeX - no problem in Emacs. I learn new tricks in it all the time. I have a colour scheme that works really well. Having built in ansi-term and being able to do M-! and then run a shell command save a lot of time in the workflow. There are thousands of features and tweaks you can do. The incremental forward and back search is lightning fast. I use C-r a lot in Bash too. On the whole I'm very pleased with my switch to Emacs. By the way I usually only use the text-only version of Emacs (emacs-nox on Linux). I do keep a copy of AquaMacs installed on my Mac too, but work mostly on the command line.
I did actually try Sublime a few years back and have a licence, but I found myself just firing up Emacs on the command line and C-x C-f to fast load a file more often than not.
I would say, yes, go for Vim or Emacs, but it depends really what you need from an editor.
Why not both? Sublime (and pretty much every other popular editor I've used) has a "vim mode" (Sublime calls it vintage mode). Sublime's is built in and available right in out of the box, you just need to enable it. I've been using this setup for years. It's the best of both worlds, you get all of the plug-ins, UI, and commands from Sublime while still getting to use vim's commands when just plain editing text. There's no reason I would ever go back to just one or the other.
I have sublime installed for double clicking on text files now and then but I doubt I'll upgrade (I never really found it good enough to be an IDE and for plain text I can't beat VIM)
One of the things that I love about VIM is that because I use very few plugins I can edit text just as efficiently on any remote machine without complicated plugin installation.
I need to install VIM style movement in whatever IDE I use (IntelliJ these days) because otherwise I find moving around the text painfully slow.
Sublime, vim and emacs are three different animals. It does pay to know the basics of the latter two, especially if you expect to have to edit files from the console and/or find yourself using a random UNIX environment (which most likely will not have Sublime installed on it).
I haven't used Sublime much but I get the impression I'm far faster in Emacs than work colleagues etc. are in Sublime or the latest flavour of IDE. That is after at least a decade and a half of learning and configuring Emacs to my preferences though.
At least part of that efficiency (apart from Emacs being awesome) is that I've been able to keep getting better at using my editor rather than having to change tools every so often as less configurable editors get overtaken by ones with new features.
Emacs is pretty deep (I keep discovering new things) and configurable in the extreme. I think it's very likely that it will last for decades yet - any killer innovation that another editor comes up with is likely to be quickly copied into Emacs.
These news was a good reminder that I still used the trial version of the app. I somehow managed to getting used to all those "on-save reminder" you'd get every now and then.
I was wondering in the afternoon about when the next sublime would be released and what it would contain. Flabbergasted to see it trending no 1 in HN!!
Sublime is so good, I just started using it to replace my Note Pad app for non-dev related stuff. For example shopping lists, meeting notes, and to do lists.
I found it was just easier to have one app to do everything.
Even though I don't have certain nice text formatting features, I use Code Comments to make certain lines distinct.
That's how you know you LOVE a product, when you still prefer to use it even for things it isn't designed for.
I moved from Vim to ST around 2012, I missed the textmate hype, and never looked back.
Since then it has been my main editor, cross platform for php, then python, then ruby, to java (...yup), and now clojure and racket. And of course all the SQL, shell scripts, and config file munging in between.
Maybe one day I will learn emacs, but for the meantime I am happy and productive.
I think I played Minecraft just before it went into beta and stopped playing it when it "came out". I don't know how long that was, but Sublime Text 3 beta certainly felt even longer.
edit: correction, the beta of minecraft lasted only a year, so it definitely felt longer to me. Weird memory tricks eh.
I was going to say maybe you mixed up the alpha and beta version, but turns out Minecraft was only in alpha for six months. Weird, felt much longer for me too.
Do they support "virtual cursor" yet? (that is where you can move the cursor up/down/left/right over "empty" space and not have the cursor "hug" the text...I really miss this feature and didn't see it in Sublime or VSCode (never tried Atom)
Reading the article it feels like they raised the major number for no reason. But actually if they changed the API a lot and have rewritten parts, then it's really valid. Maybe they should hire a real marketing person, or at least pay for some marketing consulting here and there.
Is Sublime super good for webdev or something? Does it have a bunch of indespensible plugins for webdev? I cant see upside when comparing it to Vim, but I see lots and lots of folks rave about it so im willing to admit I’m wrong but would like to know why people love it so much.
As a try-hard wanna be-learning-programmer. ST leaves me very satisfied and very thankful for the autocomplete feature (im sure more experienced programmers can see the flaws here though).
I work in XML and SQL in my everyday work activities and its highlighting features are stupid good.
I switched to JetBrains IDEs quite some time ago, but Sublime is still my favorite scratchpad. What make sublime so much better than other editors is how fast and usable it is. I don't want it to be as fancy as VSCode, I just want it to be fast.
If anybody is looking for a more "pro" ui theme, try monokai.pro/sublime-text. You have to buy a license though. It's actually made by the same guy who created the original monokai theme. There is a vscode version as well.
As someone who greatly under-utilizes Sublime, I'm still amazed at the ease with which it handles crazy, large files. I never even notice it until someone remarks on how I'm able to open a ~20 Mb file without hassle.
This might be more of a function of some of the more broken Electron editors. Any sane editor can open a 20 Mb file without hassle. Notepad and TextEdit can.
I open multi-GB files often enough in VIM. Just make sure that you've disabled any plugins, as _those_ will often crush under large files. The `-u NONE` option will disable `.vimrc` and thus all plugins as well.
Windows have EmEditor.. unfortunately Linux doesn't seem to have any. Hopefully someone can develop a great frontend for the xi editor (https://github.com/google/xi-editor).
Sublime Text is imo near perfect, only thing I miss is the ability to edit multi-GB files (on a reasonably priced laptop).. sadly I believe it will be near impossible for Sublime Text to ever support this.
One of the best software purchases i have done. But damned be me for purchasing it 25th of Jan and not qualifying for free upgrade. Oh well, the upgrade price isn't that bad.
I've been a loyal user of Sublime until a few years ago when I switched to Vim. Still have this beauty in my computer because of how happily it handles large files <3
For people on Mac, which plugins make Sublime better than current Textmate? I've never switched from it just because, but wouldn't mind switching or paying.
I you care about a decent file manager in your editor, nothing tops TextMate 2. For me that at least is one of the reasons I'm still using TextMate. Although it's sad to see that a lot of bundles move away from the TextMate format, but are continued to be developed for Sublime, Atom, VSCode, etc...
SublimeGit is fantastic. Incremental find (I think it's Ctrl+D) is like multicursor, but it selects the next occurrence of a string, so the cursors don't have to be on adjacent lines. It's been so long since I've used TextMate that I don't remember all the differences, but those two alone are worth switching for.
I also have SidebarEnhancements, Calculate, Alignment, EditorConfig, and Default File Type installed. None of them make a major impact, but they all make the experience a tad nicer.
In stock form, Sublime does not have much "real" knowledge of the code. The syntax highlighting and autocompletion are powered off of surface-level text analysis rather than any hooks into toolchains.
There are numerous 3rd party packages to improve on this for specific languages. Hopefully the Language Server effort takes off and reduces the rampant duplication of effort between them.
I casually switched to Atom for a week or two and although i think it looks a lot prettier out of the box, it just feels HEAVY. Launching can take awhile and it freezes up a decent amount. I've also seen it suck up quite a bit of memory at times. Atom has made some strides in the past couple releases but I'll be sticking to Sublime for the time being.
Thanks for building a great editor that just works and is fast enough. It has the lowest barrier to entry and is mostly free due to unlimited trial. 5 years ago, when I started writing code professionally, Sublime made things so easy because I didn't have to learn an IDE to write code.
Many kudos and one day I will definitely buy a LICENSE.
I make enough to buy any damn License I want. I never said it was not justified. I don't use Sublime these days. I had fond memories of starting with Sublime and so I said and for the nostalgia sake, I will fucking buy the license as well. So stop assuming things and judging people, alright?
my second fav. text editor after vs code.
I gotta say tho, VS Code did get the plugin story better - they don't seem to clash/conflict with each other and with global settings the way they did (for me at least) with sublime.
I don't understand that a product oriented for software engineer use sentence like "Significantly improved startup time" instead of real numbers. What does that mean "significantly"? 10%...50%?
like lots of software, a lot of that can depend on plugins, themes, how many buffers are getting re-opened from the previous editor state, etc.... I imagine it makes it hard to produce meaningful numbers outside of extremely controlled test cases, and might be misleading to some people.
That would probably be a good middle ground. You will still get people saying "what the hell, mine take 3 seconds to start up with 10000 plugins and 20 1MB files open, but you say 350ms?" But, can't please everyone.
I think values like that are more often used by advertisers, instead of software engineers honestly. It's incredibly tricky to measure the increase of start-up time as a percentage since it matters so much on hardware, what files you have open, if it's cached, etc.
Using a single percentage would probably be more misleading than just saying "significantly improved".
can you guys share what you LOVE about sublime? I mostly just use it as regular editor with Command P to open other files. I know I can do more than this...
Woo hoo! I love ST. I think the biggest thing lacking now is a solid package manager. I like how on VSCode and Atom you can kind of see the "stars" or popularity of the package before you install it.
Still no way to learn about the extensions from within the editor itself. VSCode has the edge here, this is one of those things that really makes sense to have a UI for (beyond ST's Command Palette)
I mostly use emacs (having moved to it relatively recently) but fall back to vim when editing/viewing a small single file. On the odd occasion I do hit the wrong keys from misplaced muscle memory (and in vim a bunch of things could happen quickly) but usually I still have the Vim muscle memory and can manage. My main driver is emacs though.
I also use both and I found that keybindings and interaction with text are so different that it almost does not hurt. What I found much harder is using vim-like modes in editors - they almost match the vim keybindings but not just quite, luring you into the sense of familiarity but betraying at the most critical moment.
The only thing I've had to do was to map <C-x><C-s> in vim to ":w".
I use packages from ST almost every day and plus I wouldn't have gotten my first job without Will (thanks for hiring me even after seeing all that terrible code I wrote), so I can actually say my life would be a lot different without his influence. I'm really happy he's officially part of the team.
[0] https://packagecontrol.io/
[1] https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-bui...