Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

sublimetext.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 92 posts

Re: Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

#11

Post by ggreer »

This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it.

The difference in staffing is the main reason I worry. I use Sublime Text far more than Atom, but the trend is unmistakable: Atom is improving faster than Sublime. The most recent stable release of Sublime Text is from 30 months ago. Atom was announced 22 months ago, and v1.0 was released 9 months ago. In those same 22 months, there have been zero updates to Sublime Text 2 and only four updates to Sublime Text 3 beta. That's some abysmally slow development. If these trends continue, there's simply no way that Sublime Text can stay in the lead.

Re: Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

#12

Post by cheez »

ggreer wrote: post #11

This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it. The differen…

If your goal is to making a living writing a text editor, you can't do that with Atom. As long as Sublime remains a good choice for professionals, I'm sure they'll do fine.

Re: Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

#15

Post by hbhakhra »

ggreer wrote: post #11

This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it. The differen…

Agree, up until Atom came out, Sublime had a virtual monopoly in the text editor space but now Atom has much more momentum and more importantly support from many thought leaders in the industry.

Re: Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

#16

Post by lobster_johnson »

ggreer wrote: post #11

This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it. The differen…

The plugin ecology for Atom is also great. Sublime has an extremely limited API; I remember trying to implement a simple autocomplete-based window switcher, back in the day, and had to give up because was no way to programmatically switch to a new window.

With Atom, packages can manipulate the editor. For example, the Atom linter shows errors on the line where it occurs. It can do this because packages are allowed to hijack the editor's rendering, something Sublime packages can't do. (The only thing you can do in Sublime is to mark areas for colorization, and there are some things you can do with the gutter.)

There's also a neat package that turns Git's textual conflict markers into live markers [1] allowing you pick which side to use. It also displays a list of pending project-wide conflicts while you're working — also not something Sublime plugins can do.

The Markdown Preview package is also very nice [2]. It displays a preview window inside Atom. Not possible with Sublime's API.

With Atom, I can have the sidebar colorized based on Git status, for example (it's a built-in package), and the icons can be themed [2]. Sublime plugins can't modify the file sidebar other than add context menus.

In short, Sublime really needs to up its API game in order to compete with Atom.

[1] https://github.com/smashwilson/merge-conflicts

[2] https://github.com/wyze/seti-icons

Re: Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

#17

Post by danharaj »

i really like Sublime. i've used it personally and professionally for years. but it's also the only piece of software that i use, the source code of which i don't have access to. i definitely would prefer something i can hack on for my own pleasure and profit, and my appreciation for FLOSS software has only grown and grown throughout my career.

how's atom doing these days? can Sublime HQ really compete in the long run?

Re: Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

#18

Post by bsimpson »

hbhakhra wrote: post #15
ggreer wrote: post #11

This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it. The differen…

Agree, up until Atom came out, Sublime had a virtual monopoly in the text editor space but now Atom has much more momentum and more importantly support from many thought leaders in the industry.

Sounds a lot like TextMate pre-Sublime.

Atom is the third in a succession of hipster text editors. It'll be interesting to see if it ever gets performant enough to use primarily and if its open nature enables it to perch on the roost a bit longer.

Re: Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

#19

Post by forrestthewoods »

ggreer wrote: post #11

This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it. The differen…

Until Atom is written natively I don't think Sublime Text is going to have a serious competitor.

Re: Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

#20

Post by ggreer »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #16
ggreer wrote: post #11

This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it. The differen…

The plugin ecology for Atom is also great. Sublime has an extremely limited API; I remember trying to implement a simple autocomplete-based window switcher, back in the day, and had to give up because was no way to programmatically switch to a new window. With Atom, packages can manipulate the editor. For example, the Atom linter shows errors on the line where it occurs. It can do this because packages are allowed to…

Full disclosure: I'm the CEO & co-founder of Floobits, which makes pair programming plugins for lots of editors.

I completely agree with you about the plugin APIs. Writing a collaborative editing plugin for Sublime Text was a slog. Not only were we limited by the plugin API, but we ran into show-stopper bugs.[1] SSL didn't work on some platforms.[2] ST2 shipped with a broken select() module broke on Windows. In contrast, Atom provided almost everything we wanted. And while we ran into more bugs, they were annoyances, not show-stoppers.[3]

1. https://news.floobits.com/2015/08/17/sublime-text-plugin-api...

2. https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/177

3. https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins...

Post reply on HN