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I still like Sublime Text

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Re: I still like Sublime Text

#241

Post by ben-schaaf »

redmandarin wrote: post #135
ben-schaaf wrote: post #81

Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.

Sublime Text team, thank you so much for creating the best tool out there! I truly appreciate the stability and simplicity of your product. My main request is to add a tool similar to Cursor Composer and Chat. Thank you again!

Similar to LSPs our approach to this sort of thing is to enable plugins authors to integrate 3rd party tools.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#242

Post by rollcat »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #225

I've used Sublime Text since it's initial release, and later on Sublime Merge, and i own licenses for every major version released. However, my ST4 license recently expired, and that caused me to look back at the previous 3 years to see what my money was actually buying me, and it turns out it was mostly bugfixes. There have been, rather consistently, 2 releases per year (november and august), and the last major feat…

I think that as software asymptotically approaches mostly-bugfix releases, it's a good sign that it's "done", and therefore just stable, reliable, and "boring".

Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit. It can free up your energy to spend it on more interesting things, like actual coding.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#243

Post by braggerxyz »

pell wrote: post #206
braggerxyz wrote: post #205

Maybe Sublime Text is good, but I refuse to pay for something as profane as a text editor. A decent editor (syntax highlighting, LSP, regex search, keybindings for the 21st century etc) needs to be part of every operarting system. For me nowadays, Lapce is quickly growing on me.

You can essentially use Sublime for free indefinitely. It shows you a prompt to buy a license for every few saves you make but that’s about it. Not invasive in my book. I also think people underestimate the amount of work that goes into building a good text editor and keeping it up to date over the years.

I cannot use Sublime without license in my work setting without violating License terms. That's a huge deal breaker

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#244

Post by whywhywhywhy »

js2 wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time I migrated off TextMate.

I still use it, just love the Mac style text manipulation shortcuts, the way spell check actually works properly and natively in code (Spell check within strings only) which VSCode can't seem to handle with any of the plugins that claim to.

I use VSCode on Windows but no matter what I do to it I can't get it feeling right.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#245

Post by whywhywhywhy »

al_borland wrote: post #45
js2 wrote: post #16

Maybe it's time I migrated off TextMate.

Is TextMate still being maintained? Last time I looked, there were very few signs of life. If that is accurate, the clock is ticking until Apple inevitably drops Rosetta support on Apple Silicon Macs sometime in the (probably not too distant) future.

It's open source, think the developer is on a break from it. He's left it for a few years then done a set of updates in the past or fixed it if it broke because of an Apple update previously.

Ultimately it kinda does everything it needs to.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#246

Post by scop »

So glad to see this. I have been down a long road of text editors:

- Sublime - Vim - Emacs - Atom - VSCode - Jetbrains IDE - Neovim - Zed - Cursor

And these aren’t just little flings. I’ve spent months if not years in most of these editors. However, at the end of the day I always come back to one: Sublime.

It is a beautiful piece of software. It feels like writing with one’s “good pen and good paper”, that high quality stationary sort of thing. It is just me and the code. There is something that just feels different or even tactile about Sublime. That actually leads me to ask as this is outside of my expertise: why does Sublime feel more tactile/real than other editors? When I look at the code in other editors it feels like I’m looking at a projector on a wall. When I look at the code in Sublime it feels like I’m looking at something painted on the wall. Anybody else have the same experience? What’s the psychological/software reason for that?

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#247

Post by bloomingkales »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #81

Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.

You really should write a book on programming a text editor. It seems like we’ve all been on this journey with you.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#248

Post by bruce343434 »

scop wrote: post #246

So glad to see this. I have been down a long road of text editors: - Sublime - Vim - Emacs - Atom - VSCode - Jetbrains IDE - Neovim - Zed - Cursor And these aren’t just little flings. I’ve spent months if not years in most of these editors. However, at the end of the day I always come back to one: Sublime. It is a beautiful piece of software. It feels like writing with one’s “good pen and good paper”, that high quali…

Sublime is really snappy and responsive. But it also doesn't have as many fancy automation like jetbrains. Maybe that keeps the code "real", rather than some artifact that you have the computer manipulate for you.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#249

Post by 8fingerlouie »

rollcat wrote: post #242
8fingerlouie wrote: post #225

I've used Sublime Text since it's initial release, and later on Sublime Merge, and i own licenses for every major version released. However, my ST4 license recently expired, and that caused me to look back at the previous 3 years to see what my money was actually buying me, and it turns out it was mostly bugfixes. There have been, rather consistently, 2 releases per year (november and august), and the last major feat…

I think that as software asymptotically approaches mostly-bugfix releases, it's a good sign that it's "done", and therefore just stable, reliable, and "boring". Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit. It can free up your energy to spend it on more interesting things, like actual coding.

> Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit.

I agree, but considering the "editor space" has progressed a lot in the past decade or so, i would hardly call Sublime Text "done".

It has it's strengths and weaknesses, and while it was a great editor 15 years ago, and had it's share of innovative features, things have stagnated quite a bit in recent years. ST4 felt more like a minor update to ST3, and ST3 was probably also just a minor update to ST2 (i forgot which one was the big rewrite, but i think it was ST2).

Compare that to what has been going on with VSCode and Zed in recent years, which far surpass Sublime Text in many ways, and doing it for free.

So, in the end, for me, it turned out to be a subscription based "slightly better than average" editor. Yes, i still love it, and i would love for it to get a revival and spring to life again, and i would switch back in a heartbeat, but sadly the "maintenance mode" has been going on for almost a decade now.

Re: I still like Sublime Text

#250

Post by ckunte »

Long time Sublime Text and Sublime Merge fan, and a paying user since 2011. It's very good; I use all three OSes (Windows at work, MacOS on occasion, Linux is primary driver, and I've now switched to Pi 5. Zed does not even load on this, whereas ST just flies. (The only real competition is Neovim.)

That reminds me, I wonder if Sublime Text still has room to improve in some areas. Here's an example, in Vim generating a date stamp is a one liner incl. text expansion[0], whereas in Sublime Text, one has to write a multi line plugin and a separate keyboard shortcut[1] to get the same functionality as that of Vim.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/2d7a750e6cf8b96f98f028e90c8ab...

[1]: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/31500c17452b0fd8c55bc9460bd9c...

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