Sublime text was my first "in the middle" text editor, more featured than vim/emacs, but lighter weight than IntelliJ. I somehow got my internship company to buy me a license, which I ended up using for several years after leaving.
But then VS Code came along. I was a skeptic for years, as it was based on Atom/Electron, which I found really sluggish, and it was Microsoft.
The thing that converted me was the "it just works" extensions system. Most coding languages have syntax highlighting and intelligent code navigation out of the box, and if not, it's a few clicks away to install very well written extensions. Comparatively, it was a nightmare installing Sublime Text extensions.
And over the years, Microsoft has poured immense amounts of money into developing features for VS Code.
I like the Python support that Anaconda provides in Sublime better than the VSCode alternative I've tried.
I still use VSCode for Rust dev though, and merge conflict resolution, and certain kinds of debugging.
I speculate that this is due to Sublime Text using the native font rendering APIs of your platform, as opposed to chrome's font rendering.
This time I used VSCode for nearly 2 months. Thought it's the end of an era, I'm not coming back to Sublime Text. I decided to push through and customize the configs just right for me, it was really becoming comfortable. Main reason why I wanted to switch is more active dev, more active extension community, and well integrated modern (some ML-backed) code writing and navigation tools.
I was wrong. After all the painstaking customization to bring it close to my ideal experience, while also getting used to things I didn't want to fight, I still had a bad time.
For one, the tab/cursor focus keeps going into weird places. I press a button, like ESC to switch to normal vim mode, and instead it does nothing, or something different, because turns out I'm not in the editor anymore. Keeps happening, maybe my own fault. The nifty AI tools integration is more of a nuisance — they jump in at bad times (with a delay), and their tab/enter functionality is weird, can never get it right. Most of my autocompletes have been unintentional. Maybe my own fault again, but felt super awkward. There is still no good vertical align plugin, despite such an active community (Sublime doesn't have one either, although they have one that gets me a bit closer). The language server stuff that worked badly in Sublime for my language also works badly in VSCode. The extensions, while numerous, are of questionable quality. I tried to stick to just a few well known ones.
After all the effort, I slowly came to realization that I'm back to not really using anything unique to VSCode, sacrificing more than I gained, being surrounded by lots of small moving details everywhere in the UI that make my experience more awkward than helpful, and occasionally getting my cursor stuck in weird parts of UI. I went back to Sublime.
It's not the colors, because obviously there are a near infinite number of themes. It's just a mishmash of text of varying style, size, and spacing and it realllllly all runs together visually for me.
I know some of it is tweakable but a lot isn't and I'm not sure it can be fixed...
It's such a stupid detail and ideally irrelevant to actual development too, but my brain just likes it too much.
The downside is I struggle with plugins.
I could see giving VSCode another go in the future, but it's the 'if it aint broke' adage at this point.
I used VSCode for quite a while. I like it. I just strongly prefer truly native apps with native user interfaces. Not having to build a JavaScript package to add any little bit of extra functionality is also pretty sweet.
> Our software products are available only for macOS. There are no Windows or Linux versions.
Sublime is cross platform.
I also think it tries to do a little too much and has too much in the way of modern UI-isms going on. Sublime Text is basically cross-platform TextMate, and I found TextMate more or less perfect in those regards.
I've been using emacs since 2002 or so and until very recently it needed a ton of third party config to approximate the ux and utility of what was available in other tools built in.
This pretty much still sums it up for me.
As for "Microsoft". It's funny, I use to be a Windows/Microsoft fan in the 90s/2000s because that was the only way I was going to play computer games. Then they lost my trust during the Ballmer era, at the same time I started programming and appreciated linux/apple more.
But VS Code has singlehandedly reignited my love of Microsoft. Despite the name "Visual Studio Code", it does not at all try to shove Microsoft languages like Visual Basic or C# down your throat. Support for common open source languages like python and javascript are amazing.
It's as surprising to me as it is to you that I'm defending Microsoft in an online thread right now.
That's ... a bold claim.
I've never used sublime, how is it "more featured" than either Vim, or (especially) Emacs?
I don't know if it's still the case as I generally don't need to do it anymore but VS Code (and other Electron-based editors) used to struggle with large files.
I know it's not very common use case but I did need to open large log files (from 100MB to even gigabytes range) and such in the past and that's where ST really shined.
Have not had a reason to do that in several years so I'm not sure if it's still the case or not.
If you do something else (like some workflows, including Poetry’s default, prefer) then its more work.
In one word, comfortable multi-row and column editing. Can't go back to manually indent SQL.
The licensing from sublime is very amenable, I believe, far from what companies like Adobe force on their end users, IMO.
The eye rolls I get. Bro. You're literally getting paid 150k at a minimum, you can she'll out 100 dollars a year.
not to say you shouldn't support great companies but the average programmer salary isn't 150k. it's probably not even half that.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programm...
There's more of the world than SV. Most people outside of those areas do not make that much or even close to it.
Some of the comments on HN have a vibe of "Let them eat cake" - they are out of touch with how most of us plebs in the rest of the world are living.
And then I realize that the rich influence all the decision making that affects the poor - and it scares me.
(BTW: I assume this number is yearly; $12.5K/mo. Which is multiple times the average dev pay out where I live. Even in the States, I assume no one pulls $150K/monthly, amiright?)
I would like a nice Git GUI, but GitKraken pricing is nonsense. I've settled with Fork, but I would prefer it if there was a native Linux version.
Where? This website can be so frustrating with all the silicon valley privileged richy riches.
You understand that 150k is a massive salary?
Sublime is personally worth $0 to me because I wouldn't use it at all regardless of what I paid for it. And I say that as someone who bought every new version starting from the first one up until ~2018. VS Code is just that much better.
The trouble here is that "better" comes at a cost that the community has yet to truly realize, and Microsoft is very good at playing the long, slow bleed game; if strategic fractures[1] come to fruition, that debt will be repaid and it's going to be very expensive.
When it comes to Sublime these days it's hard to see why I'd pay for proprietary software, likely more than once when there's everything from Vim to Emacs, to VsCode and a dozen others.
People are always more willing to spend on entertainment where they get personal joy … than on tools.
The things you use every day for quite a bit plus one time purchase - sure.
But let's take some hypothetical note-taking tool I access 2 times per day for one minute. Am I willing to pay a subscription for 60 minutes of use per month? nope.
And the same is true for development tools I purely use for my fun projects. I kinda like IDEA but 170€ per year? No way, I regularly don't need an IDE for months at a time. Their one-time purchase (was it like 300?) wasn't much better. I don't personally like Sublime, but if I did, 99€ one time sounds absolutely fair.
The problem arises when there are a dozen tools.
So yeah, my main gripe is with subscriptions, but no, I can't simply justify those purchases to feel more productive in my spare time. I don't really care if I theoretically would need twice as much time to code a feature for a few hours a week. Games are fun, and sometimes art - I enjoy them and so I am willing to pay.
In work settings I'm mostly a tool developer myself, so it might sound weird, but I wouldn't want to work for a company that sells a product to end users that does something I can get done 90% with FLOSS tools and fix the bugs I encounter.
It's 170e/year if you keep paying for it. You can stop and get to keep the latest version you payed.
Example: IDEA 1.0 is out now and you pay 170e. 12 months later IDEA 1.9 is out .. if you pay another 170e you get to use 1.9+ If you don't pay you stay on IDEA 1.0. If you cancel earlier than 12 months you don't get to keep anything.
I even used it for notetaking because it opened faster than vscode but then that was fixed. Good stuff but hard to avoid a solid ecosystem that is constantly evolving with the backing of big companies. kinda sad actually.
I was really a skeptic for years, but Microsoft really threw money at this until it won.
And although I appreciate that Sublime is supposed to be a simple editor, not an IDE, it wouldn't hurt to add more IDE-like features. It's just too basic for development in 2023. Sublime has a really clean, performant, cross platform UI, why not take that and build the foundations of something more viable?
The only significant thing that I think VSCode has over Sublime is the Live sharing stuff.
Sublime used far fewer resources yes, but as others have said the plugins just weren't the same. It also felt like a huge premium to pay just to take notes.
Tried Obsidian a few months ago, and it's roughly on par with VSC but much better geared towards my notes.
I think that argument is overblown. People don't LIKE seeing the resource bloat, but it has almost zero impact on today's systems. Maybe back when I was using a WD Fireball HDD for swap space, sure...
Sublime HQ the company maintains an excellent reputation, and does a wonderful job.
If you're a fully employed professional of some means, which a huge amount of folk reading this are.
Pay for your shareware software. Usually with independent SaaS software, after I've used software for 6+ months or more, I pay for the lifetime license.
It's just polite.
It got me to pay for Sublime even though I haven’t used it in years. When I used it, though, it was the best thing since sliced bread and more than paid for itself.
However, my personal issue with Sublime is the fact some basic requested editor functionality hasn't been implemented in years. You can see multiple such issues opened against it.
And I'm not talking about IDE-like stuff, just basic editor features, like having multiple rows of tabs when you have many files open.
[1] Worked on in the since of configurations, my own modes, packages, etc.. I have never contributed to Emacs the project.
It's the same with Vim, if you learn how to do basic editing, the rest comes along easily, as you need it. (remember "ESC :q!", though :) )
I won't lie to you, though. Emacs is the single greatest source of yak shaving there is. It becomes your passion project as you try to craft your ultimate editing experience. It's so cool to be able to use your own passion project for work every day.
Porting the same extension to sublime text was a nightmare. Python has poor language support in all ides, the docs were lacking, there was no good debugger and I couldn't just check the code.
I had in mind only the kind of extension a user might write for personal use, which may often involve adding some simple functionality (usually some event listener, e.g. intercepting auto-completion to do some filtering). I find it very convenient to be able to change the code and have the changes instantaneously reflected in the editor itself (rather than some sandboxed environment) and wish it were possible to do the same in VSCode
I paid for Sublime Text 3 while I was still using it. Even though I switched away (to Vim/Neovim, then Kakoune, then Helix), I don’t regret it at all. It was a fantastic tool I used for about two to three years, and it brought me far more value than the $70 it asked for in return.
In fact, I’ve since bought a ton of other software when it’s proven useful more than the free alternatives. I’m particularly happy when it’s sold by a small team, just like Sublime. Some favorites I currently have installed: Acorn, Fantastical, Ivory, Monodraw, Things, Transmit, and Tweetbot (RIP).
> Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that is designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is lean, fast and uncluttered. It starts up quickly, has a live word count, and is easy on the eyes. Also, Bean is available free of charge.
> Bean has some limitations: it doesn't do footnotes or use stylesheets and is only partially compatible with Word's file formats. Also, it allows in-line graphics, but not floating graphics.
Per the website: https://www.sublimehq.com/sales_faq
> As licenses are per-user, you're welcome to use your license key on all computers where you are the primary user, including at work.
It's not that I didnt want to buy it, Ive paid for Sublime twice now! I grumbled through the second payment. Something about the license only applying to major versions for 3 years? It is an indispensable pieces of software for me though, and I've paid more for other stuff (Backlink tracking subscription)
Nova is wonderful.
btw, if you need help with issues or just curious whether Sublime is dead or not, drop by their unofficial Discord server -> https://discord.com/invite/D43Pecu
On Sublime, it's a great editor, and being cross platform is really nice. They really do need to update the web site to reflect that it's not dead. The "see what's new" link is dated 2021.
There are a lot of people talking about the VSCode plugin ecosystem but I've never lacked any plugins from Sublime. I just prefer the experience.
Once you have LSP setup it sings. There are also some underutilized features like workspaces and build systems that are really handy when you set them up. The snippets and macros system is also really nice.
I should also add that it is easy to build plugins for. The docs on plugins are a bit rough but there are lots of examples out there.
It is overall a really good editor experience
I’d also enjoy some typing stubs for their API to import to help with autocompletion of their API, though.
I wish there was a viable alternative to VSCode. For a clue as to where that's headed, take a look at any free tool with heavy investment by a large corporation. Chrome is good case-study.
VSCodium is ... I can't put my finger on it, but it doesn't cut it. Maybe death by a thousand cuts, many small things that don't quite work as cleanly as they should.
Lots of people saying they use VSCode, and I can't blame them. It has a lot going for it. But when I recently tried each for a while, Sublime does everything VSCode does just as well. Even plugins - there's nothing I want (with one exception) I can't get in Sublime. So the calculus basically comes down to this:
VSCode: the remoting feature is great, and Sublime currently can't match it (rsub is a poor substitute at best).
Sublime: it's not an Electron app, and therefore uses a fraction of the resources. Working with the same set of files open, VSCode uses hundreds of MB of memory while Sublime uses 100 or so.
So either way I have to give something up, but ultimately the massive bloat of VSCode bothers me more than the lack of good remoting functionality in Sublime. So I'm using Sublime for the foreseeable future.
the community is very much active in there!
I happily paid for sublime text.
It was second choice - first was Fork, which is even more embarrassing as it means I don't use the git CLI. But Fork rejected my card so ST it was.
It does feel weird. There's no satisfaction. I don't use it that much these days; it's just a text editor that I paste logs into. It's pretty damn expensive for a text editor.
Plus I find the way it manages the search results screen far superior to VScode.
But one day, I realized enough was enough. Sublime Text 2 was worth its cost, and so was Sublime Text 3. But when we were introduced to Sublime Text 4 and its license with an annual fee, we were told that it was to avoid holding back significant features for the next major release to boost its sales. The annual fee would allow them to release new features just after done - that's what they said. But where is it? Sublime Text, previously stagnant, continued to stagnate in its fourth version.
Recognizing this, I moved on to other solutions.
As a "dev" user (the unstable version), I can say that they are active. They have 6 builds just this year. 4 of which are large ones. Unfortunately, they just released those in "stable" last Aug 2.
Previous years are also bad. They released to "stable" mostly before the year ends while "dev" has builds almost every month.
If I were them, I would leverage the "we are so quiet" and provide exclusive access to frequent builds to paying customers. Sure they might be "unstable" but as a paying customer, I would rather have an unstable product than not hear from you the whole year.
Anyway, going back to my point, they are active. I can vouch for that. They are just really bad in doing "company" things. In my purely honest opinion, it is not enough for a business to have a great product if you can't appeal to your target market. They are lucky enough that there are people who fell in love with ST and stuck around.
ST could probably make a decent chunk of change if they tweaked their terms to require a license for authoring commercial software or content.
Thanks for this. I got a new plugin idea!
Ever since, I’ve been mired in the dialog pop up because I don’t want to buy it again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even though I appreciate opensource for many of its benefits (not quality, but mostly the community), there are dark sides to opensource that few mention. And one of it is the absolutely insanely negative view of anything that is closed-source software and needs to be paid for. Totally disregarding the qualities of product. This is so wrong on so many levels.
Whats more - a company which builds its services on opensource very seldom open sources its own code. What a hypocrisy! I'm not even going to go into this discussion of Amazon vs Elastic. It is shameful that users of opensource so much under-appreciate the authors' work while doing thousands, if not millions, on top of it. But then it is even more shameful to deny the right of authors of great software such as Sublime Text to proudly collect money for their work. After all - these service companies which are 99% opensource based, do whatever they do, for a profit, right?
And if we put this in perspective - whats the combined that you pay for Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Google Drive... whatever? Why not pay for the editor you are using on a daily basis, when its created by a hard-working professional. I'm not saying you have to pay for VSCode - its a marketing thing, very different. But people actually pay for Visual Studio, right?
So nothing shameless in buying Sublime Text, in fact - it is commendable.
I now find that the editor I am happiest with is VS Code, not because it's free but because of the extensibility and community support it brings. I'd happily pay for it - but I think the nature of it being free is what has brought so much community support to it.
This was a decade before VSCode took over, and at the time I was a Vim user for most of my career. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the Stockholm syndrome I had built around VimScript, and I never looked back.
We (people like me) owe ST for opening the door for innovation in the general-purpose IDE space that created what is frankly a golden age compared to the century prior. Heck, the command palette has bled into tools well outside the scope of developer tools these days and it’s probably my favorite UX pattern in modern complex software.
To any Vim users preparing to inform me about how much better Vim is these days, I’d argue that we still owe ST for raising the expectations that developers have of their editors.
There's a deeper feeling of responsibility when someone's given you cash and I seem to prioritize things that otherwise I probably wouldn't have found the time for.
So you may think you "get" nothing, but what you might actually get is a developer to spend more time on it.
Now of course there's diminishing returns, but zero to non-zero obligates the honest person. Beyond that it's mostly headcount. I'd work more for 10 people that gave $1 than for 1 person that gave $10 because I've gone from having a sponsor to an audience.
I've paid for BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Sublime Text, and probably others over the years. VS Code is really the first editor I haven't felt compelled to pay for.
I'm not sure if it still does this, but I have experienced this on multiple systems at the time.
Happy I paid for it though, the sluggish VSCode bloatware is not doing it for me.
I have also tried to be in compliance with "free for personal use" licenses; I pay the fee for business use of Obsidian now, because I do use it a lot for work.
I tend to open directories/folders of projects and Sublime text is the only one that I can zip around while still being visually informative and beautiful.
Thank you Sublimetext.
I'm gonna buy a license, just as soon as I have the time.
After years of using ST for free, I finally bought a license about two years ago when ST 4 came out, I am also a paid user of Sublime Merge, which is the best git client I have tried.
It felt great even though I was being laughed at by many. I contributed to the great work these guys pre-Facebook were doing.
To me it felt like buying me some good karma for when I sell my software.
Now I pay for Telegram and I only have WhatsApp out of network effects.
I guess I don't get the license message as the op because I don't save the tabs, all catched.
I tryed obsidian for some time and was cool, but was miles behind in snappiness and wasn't worth it.
I use it, it is nice and I enjoy, so I pay person some money. I figure I'm not buying some millionaire another boat.
I have definitely spent more on worse / dumber things.
Re: VSCode, I liked it more when MS stayed on their side of the fence, producing megacorper dev tools. This allowed smaller companies to flourish and create useful things and wild features. Now those same smallcos are relegated to the marketplace which is ruled by MS whim. I'm sure you can sideload etc, but I danno. Something about the freedom of Sublime plugs felt nice. Also what a great license scheme compared to all the other subscribeware we see anymore.
Maybe I'm just a sucker, I pay for my own JetBrains sub lol.
Why?
It does not take a body part to host a server or buy a VPS, or you can even use wordpress parts. If the only thing they are looking for is opinions (or, mainly similar opinions), they could go subreddits or forums like HN. Why Github?
This must be Sublime PR department psyop. A brilliant one, I must admit.
I still prefer vi/vim for speed, and use Textmate only for restructuring code.
VSCode is great for reading other people’s code, IMHO, but gets in the way while writing new code.
Different tools for different tasks.
This is such a weird insecurity to have. Are people so insecure that they have to be ashamed for buying a product?
This is how Sublime Text started: https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/2007/11
I now mostly use vim..
I'm pretty sure they'll never do it, but I think Sublime should embrace open source, or perhaps open more components of the editor..
When people like to be paid for their work, they should consider how the authors of their work tools pay for their living as well.
I'm a professional developer so the price is easily justifiable.
