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

Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

limetext.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 251 posts

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#211

Post by Aldo_MX »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #200
MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I'm still using v2.0 because I don't want to get burned again. He released v3 a few months after I bought it. I understand software development isn't cheap but it's kind of annoying that $60 doesn't include free upgrades.

I think it does include free updates. At least, I just copied my code from v2 into v3 and that worked.

  Expiration Date
  Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however
  an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.
From: http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#212

Post by Aldo_MX »

oridecon wrote: post #116
overgard wrote: post #110

I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs, and it's pretty shady to ride another project's coattails when their intent is essentially to cannibalize it by being sublime-but-free. You can discuss the merits of open source and paying for tools all you want, but basically their goal is to put a man out of business who's made something that a lot of people love, because he has the gall…

I agree, but the main reason for most people (I can't comment on the author's intention) is that Sublime is lacking updates and transparency about the development. They did announced something recently, like getting ready for ST 4. And 3 is not even a major upgrade from ST2, IMHO.

As long as Sublime doesn't go the Jetbrains way where they never reach a stable status, but they keep increasing the version number every year, I'm fine.

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#213

Post by duckmysick »

rthomas6 wrote: post #131
kabdib wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll pay for value. For instance, I've probably sunk $800 into my current editor over the years. It's been completely worth it, and I don't regret a single penny. Another tool (for visual diffing) was about $300, 15 years or so ago. Totally worth it; it's paid for itself many times over. In both cases the open source alternatives were awkward and borderline broken. Sure, I could have saved a few bucks by using them,…

What editor?

Probably a JetBrains editor. One commercial license for IntelliJ IDEA is one buck shy of $500. If you include the cost of upgrades over the years, it's not that surprising.

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#214

Post by slang800 »

overgard wrote: post #110

I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs, and it's pretty shady to ride another project's coattails when their intent is essentially to cannibalize it by being sublime-but-free. You can discuss the merits of open source and paying for tools all you want, but basically their goal is to put a man out of business who's made something that a lot of people love, because he has the gall…

> I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand

They aren't claiming to be associated with Sublime - they're saying that they're trying to make something _like_ Sublime. And that is actually a pretty good way to explain it. When I first found LimeText (about a year ago) I was searching for an "open source ST2 clone". I already knew that I wanted something like Sublime, I just wanted it to be open source so I could contribute to it. Having to compare the features of LimeText to the ubiquitous features of Sublime would have just made it harder for me to "get" what LimeText is.

> because he has the gall to charge $60

I don't think that the 60USD was a big deal. I was fine with that, I just wanted something that's open-source.

> weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch

I think that the reason why is because LimeText is marketed towards people who want to contribute to their editor. Sublime is probably a more stable solution for people looking for something like Sublime, so right now the big feature is that it's open-source.

* Also, I should note that I've never used LimeText... I ended up switching to Atom instead. My primary experience with it is just finding it and evaluating it as an alternative to Sublime.

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#215

Post by drewcrawford »

Karunamon wrote: post #210
trevor-e wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can contribute plugins, sure, but the direction of the entire project is in the hands of one person. As others have said, updates have become more scarce in recent times. For example, it was almost 6 months between build Build 3061 and Build 3062. Open Source doesn't imply that there's a productivity gain. For obvious reasons I'm a lot more comfortable using OS tools at work.

Can I ask a really silly question? Why do updates matter unless there are either serious bugs or glaring missing features? If a tool is relatively bug-free and has a plugin ecosystem which handles added functionality, why does the state of the core program matter all that much?

The real issue is that of nomenclature. If you are a professional software developer (ST target audience) then you are careful about how you use a #1 development tool that calls itself "unstable". It implies certain things about whether it is a good idea to install on a mission-critical server for example, or whether it is a good idea to invest time in writing plugins against its API.

The product itself may be relatively bug-free, but that is not really the issue. RHEL7Beta was relatively bug-free, but I would not advise you to use it for most purposes.

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#216

Post by klibertp »

dyeje wrote: post #182
oridecon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but the main reason for most people (I can't comment on the author's intention) is that Sublime is lacking updates and transparency about the development. They did announced something recently, like getting ready for ST 4. And 3 is not even a major upgrade from ST2, IMHO.

I've been using Sublime Text 2 for a few years now. I'm not sure what a major upgrade would entail when it works so well already. Do Emacs and Vim get 'major upgrades'? [actual question]

> Do Emacs and Vim get 'major upgrades'?

Yeah, they do. It's very hard to do in both cases, for different reasons - licensing for Emacs, code quality/style for Vim - but it happens. For Emacs just read this: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ant... and this: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ant... (or look at normal changelog, but I kind of like this "backwards in time" format, it's fun :)) to get a feeling for what you'd miss by not doing a "major upgrade".

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#217

Post by e12e »

shangxiao wrote: post #199
Diamons wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's the problem. Every single open source software looks like it was cobbled together with no vision or coherency in design. It's no surprise that most open source software is clunky and hard to use whereas closed products always have that visual polish.

Every single? You sure you want to make that claim on HN?

Yeah, take the go language, for instance. No vision, cobbled together by amateurs without any clear goals, and no real-world experience. Awful. /s

A lot of open/free projects are indeed "hobby" projects (and not in a good way) -- but to claim that all of them are bad? Compared to what? The shareware scene from the 90s?

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#218

Post by kabdib »

rthomas6 wrote: post #131
kabdib wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll pay for value. For instance, I've probably sunk $800 into my current editor over the years. It's been completely worth it, and I don't regret a single penny. Another tool (for visual diffing) was about $300, 15 years or so ago. Totally worth it; it's paid for itself many times over. In both cases the open source alternatives were awkward and borderline broken. Sure, I could have saved a few bucks by using them,…

What editor?

Epsilon (it's an Emacs clone). Was about $300 new, and upgrades over the years were about $100 each.

It hasn't been updated in quite some time, but it's a very capable editor, and many of the heavies I've worked with in the past decade or so have also been power-users of it.

Epsilon is arguably more abandonware-like than Sublime Text, but it's also a much more mature product (with way better documentation). I'd love to have some new features (multi-window editing would be great, and multi-selections, and support for collapsing regions of text), but on the whole I'm happy with it.

Re: Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone

#220

Post by lobster_johnson »

craigc wrote: post #100
sqren wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with what you say. Sublime is awesome and I don't mind paying money for closed-source software. What I do mind is, that the development seems to have stopped, and being closed-source nobody can move it forward but the original maintainer. It once again brings attention to the most important "bus factor" [0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

I'm pretty curious about what new features you are looking for in Sublime. I spend more time in Sublime Text than pretty much any other application. I understand the idea that "development may have stopped", but there are not any glaring bugs, sublime text 3 is super fast, and there is a huge community building sublime plugins. The editor was built in such a way where it allows the entire community to keep moving it…

Sublime is sorely lacking when it comes to working on multiple projects.

I regularly have 15+ projects open, all of which I work on regularly, and I probably have 30+ projects that I work on regularly that I don't bother to keep open, simply because the window menu grows too long. I use the next/previous window commands to cycle, but sometimes I have so many projects open I have to use the window menu, which coincidentally seems to be randomly ordered, so it takes a long time, relatively speaking, to scan.

There is no way to quickly switch between per-window projects. I tried to write a plugin for this (giving you a cmd-P-style project switcher), but it turns out the API doesn't support switching windows; you can find a window, but focusing it doesn't do anything if it's not the current window (something I consider a bug, but the developer never responded to my bug report). You can't create new windows, either.

Some other things:

* Sublime is fast, but it could easily be faster. Large files are quite slow to open, even in ST3.

* The sidebar needs work. SidebarEnhancements is great, but not enough. There's no Git integration, for one. No mode flags. Renaming and moving files is cumbersome. No multiple selection.

* The global file search functionality is pretty bad. It opens up a new buffer, but it appends to the current one if there is one. You can only double-click on the match, not on the context lines. My wish list item is for the search results to be a live view into the matching files, so that I can actually edit within the results buffer.

* Package Control needs to be moved into the editor and become a first-class citizen. It's weird that it has to be added manually.

* Syntax highlighting per file-pattern, not extension. For example, .js.erb is an ERB template containing JavaScript, but there is no way to tell Sublime this; syntaxes can only be associated with the last extension.

* Lots of tiny things. For example, Sublime doesn't have a built-in way to filter a selection through a Unix command (eg., "sort"). Turns out process management in a plugin is awkward.

I could probably think of a bunch more.

Post reply on HN