17 ms·

Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ

304 points by dmart 11y ago

nodesocket 11y ago
Love Sublime, and honestly feel like if there was more financial support from developers it would have even more marketshare. Congratulations Will, check out his super useful sftp package as well: https://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp https://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp.
- hbhakhra 11y ago
  I don't think money was an issue. Wes Bos gave some numbers on his Sublime Text learning course and extrapolated that the Sublime team had made a few million easily for what was a one developer operation. He based his numbers on assuming that the people that paid for his course to learn sublime would only be a fraction of those that paid to actually use sublime, so I think that sounds reasonable.
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    Aside from an occasional dialog, there's pretty much zero cost to never paying for Sublime. (I'm a licensed user, but when I put it on other machines I use, I usually don't enter my license key, and I almost never notice)
fredleblanc 11y ago
Woo! I worked with Will for a couple years and this is going to be a great pick up for Sublime. Nice guy, great developer.
Nicksil 11y ago
This is fantastic news! Very glad to hear such a staunch supporter of Sublime Text joining their team. Congrats and good luck, Will!
brandonblack 11y ago
== slow clap == Great hire.
hbhakhra 11y ago
This is very nice to see. Just last week Sublime started releasing new dev builds after close to a year of silence. Sublime is my favorite text editor and it seemed like it was going to drift off into obscurity but this will definitely inject new life into it. Sublime didn't just make a hire, they hired the guy responsible for an arguably large part of sublime's success.
lobster_johnson 11y ago
They also replaced their awful old forums with Discourse (which Atom also uses): https://forum.sublimetext.com https://forum.sublimetext.com.
- danielsamuels 11y ago
  Implying Discource isn't terrible. I've never found it intuitive to use.
  - lobster_johnson 11y ago
    It isn't terrible. And compared to Sublime's old forums (some kind of phpBB monstrosity) it's superb.
    - batat 11y ago
      While phpBB-ish forums looks pretty outdated nowadays, they're at least usable. Search Help Options order:views order:latest order:likes status:open status:closed status:archived status:noreplies status:single_user category:foo user:foo group:foo badge:foo in:likes in:posted in:watching in:tracking in:private in:bookmarks in:first posts_count:num min_age:days max_age:days Oh thanks, why not to simply embed DB REPL there?
      - lobster_johnson 11y ago
        The fact that those search options are available is fantastic. I find phpBB-type forums almost completely unusable. Pagination made for 1998; large, intrusive signatures; confusing timestamps (person's last location and login time more prominent than the timestamp of the comment), etc.
zzleeper 11y ago
As others mention, these are amazing news. The last months were void of communication from Jon and the forums were in a constant state of spam+complains, so hopefully this (and the recent updates) signals something is changing :)
jamesfzhang 11y ago
Congrats to Will and Sublime, great everyone involved!
ggreer 11y ago
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.
- cheez 11y ago
  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.
  - hollerith 11y ago
    Are you sure no one can make a living by improving Atom? The license (BSDL) allows proprietary forks.
    - cheez 11y ago
      Maybe.
- hbhakhra 11y ago
  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.
  - bsimpson 11y ago
cpfohl 11y ago
Congrats Will! :) Or more like, Congrats Sublime HQ.
wkirby 11y ago
There's a single feature that made me an Atom user over Sublime — and that's support for excluding files and folders in gitignore from the quick open.
- JustinAiken 11y ago
  ..and you can also have a different set of files/folders ignored than those in .gitignore, AND it's customizable per project with Project Manager. Huge plus for me too!
danharaj 11y ago
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?
- profmonocle 11y ago
  > how's atom doing these days? Fairly well, IMO. The editor itself has caught up with Sublime for at least everything I care about, the community is very active, and they release updates pretty regularly. Unfortunately, although performance has gotten noticeably better, it's still way behind Sublime. Opening a new editor window takes about three seconds on my MacBook Air, vs. less than a second for Sublime. I find myself opening new windows pretty often as part of my workflow, so I really, really hope they can cut that down. Also, Atom still struggles with large (>2MB) files, but I don't work with those often enough for it to be a big deal.
  - softinio 11y ago
    Been using atom for 4 weeks now in place of Sublime. The slowness has not affected me at all. Especially as I rarely close my windows :-) The benefits it provides far out ways its flaws. Atom is great.
moonlighter 11y ago
Sublime Text user here, who switched to Atom a year ago and never looked back. Never had any of the issues others described having with Atom such as slowness, etc. What I love about Atom is that it's under active, fast-paced development, that it's super-easy to customize (first thing was to increase the font-size of the left-hand folder pane), and the available plugins are fantastic. It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript, rather than Python with ST. Furthermore, as others commented, the plugins have much more reach into the editor and can do a lot more. For example, the new block decorations coming in 1.6 are going to be an awesome API for plugin authors! http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations.html http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations...
- ossreality 11y ago
  >Never had any of the issues others described having with Atom such as slowness, etc. aka ""I've never opened a file larger than 1KB"". Okay cool, so we can disregard the rest of your testimony; cool, good to know.
- modulus1 11y ago
  > It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript... I've heard this said before, I've had the opposite experience. ST offers a small api and it was easy for me to make something work with a single .py file. I gave up trying the same thing in Atom; the api is larger and lower-level. Admission: I don't know coffeescript. ST of course isn't nearly as flexible, there are many things you just can't do.
  - ivanca 11y ago
    What are the things you can't do with ST? You can actually use the C bindings of python and do anything C can do... which is pretty much anything.
    - moonlighter 11y ago
      It's not about the limits of the language but the limits of the ST API itself. However, given Will Bond's background, this might just change for the better now that he's officially working for ST, so this is good news for all ST users obviously.
garyclarke27 11y ago
Good news I love Sublime it's so fast and slick - I haven't used Atom because consensus seems to be that it's not as fast with multiple large files open. Why is everyone obsessed about open source, yes nice to have but at the end of the day this is just a (very sharp) tool - what's your priority tinkering with your tools or getting the job done? 70$ is peanuts, speed and productivity gains way outweigh this. ST is multi-talented, brilliant for SQL, runs huge Postgres queries directly and lightning fast with full feed back ( error messages line numbers etc) even multi million row result sets don't phase it , any other editor would just gind to a spluttering halt.
- JohnDoe365 11y ago
  But you understand that Postgres also went a long way and is Open Source?
  - mundanevoice 11y ago
    That's right! But open source doesn't always necessarily means better software. Atom for sure ain't better than Sublime in terms of speed at this point of time.
  - garyclarke27 11y ago
    I agree - I'm building a huge application on Postgres because of it has amazing capability and yes because it's Open Source. Doing the same on ms sql server or oracle in my case would be madness - because of their insane per core licensing costs for enterprise features which I need. However for my tools, I'm not bothered so long as a reasonable price or free MIT - in fact I'd rather pay for a commercial license than use a risky GPL license. I do feel sorry for Architects (my wife) though, they have to pay outrageous prices for design tools, literally thousands yet developers who earn far more than architects, bleat about trivial amounts such as $70 for ST.
    - oblio 11y ago
      > However for my tools, I'm not bothered so long as a reasonable price or free MIT - in fact I'd rather pay for a commercial license than use a risky GPL license Why do you consider GPL tools risky? I'm guessing you're using GNU utils constantly? :) > I do feel sorry for Architects (my wife) though, they have to pay outrageous prices for design tools, literally thousands yet developers who earn far more than architects, bleat about trivial amounts such as $70 for ST. Architects probably don't have other options. Free development tools abound.
pinkfloyd 11y ago
Of course Will Bond will bond
demarq 11y ago
but no SSL... :( Anyway I love sublime, and really hope the API keeps growing! It's also nice to see Will Bond becoming "official" :) congratulations!
muhic 11y ago
FYI Build 3103 was just released [1] [1] https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-build-3103 https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-bui...
wbond 11y ago
Wow, thanks everyone! I'm thrilled to be working with Jon and Kari and to be helping with Sublime Text.
- s9w 11y ago
  Hey wbond, I'm glad that you're now part of the team. Can you say anything about what you'll work on? Only package-stuff or other things too? And does this mean there are now more planned features and a more stable future for sublime? You know the burning questions of the community.
  - wbond 11y ago
    I‘ll be working on everything related to Sublime Text. I was part of the dev releases building up to 3103, moving the forum and merging in pull requests from https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages. We are definitely working on improving all the different aspects of Sublime, so you can expect to continue seeing new builds!
- carterschonwald 11y ago
  I'm excited for you. And for me and other st3 users :)
- polshaw 11y ago
  Is there any chance of some ARM builds? (pretty please!) (also, congrats!)
jbrooksuk 11y ago
Congrats Will! I'm really excited to see what you'll be bringing to Sublime! I wish you all the best!
dvcrn 11y ago
Very amazing news! I loved sublime text and kept holding onto it while everyone else was switching. At some point I got really frustrated with the plugin API. Stuff like only 1 thing can write into the gutter at a time and that relative line numbers is close to impossible to implement (the package that exists is garbage) is just ridiculous. That was the moment when I switched to atom and ported my sublimious plugin to atom (proton). I've since been using atom and am quite happy with it but now and then look back at the ST3 days and the incredible performance that ST3 offers. I hope with Will on board, development will finally pick up again. ST3 needs excited developers that want to push it further and Will seems like that kind of person. I'd love to grab my old license out of the cellar and give it another spin.
provemewrong 11y ago
The title is somewhat like a garden path sentence [1], when I started reading this I thought it was a question about the future of a package manager called Bond. The title case doesn't make it any easier. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
agentgt 11y ago
I'm curious if any one remembers SlickEdit. Circa 2000 I had an internship and SlickEdit was the Sublime Text at that time. SlickEdit for some reason went into complete obscurity though and I can't recall why. I'm not saying this will happen to Sublime (as I'm not even sure what happend to Slick) but I do wonder if it will as TextMate seems to be going down the path of long term obscurity.
sbaum 11y ago
This and the fact that they just released a new version is very good news! I've tried several other editors over the last 2 years or so, but I keep coming back to Sublime. I love many things about Atom, but janky scrolling on a 2 year old MacBook Pro is just unacceptable. Another big advantage that isn't mentioned a lot is that Sublime is a lot lighter on CPU. Just for all the folks that are developing on battery power.

304 points by dmart 11y ago

Love Sublime, and honestly feel like if there was more financial support from developers it would have even more marketshare. Congratulations Will, check out his super useful sftp package as well: https://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp https://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp.

hbhakhra 11y ago
I don't think money was an issue. Wes Bos gave some numbers on his Sublime Text learning course and extrapolated that the Sublime team had made a few million easily for what was a one developer operation. He based his numbers on assuming that the people that paid for his course to learn sublime would only be a fraction of those that paid to actually use sublime, so I think that sounds reasonable.
- bdcravens 11y ago
  Aside from an occasional dialog, there's pretty much zero cost to never paying for Sublime. (I'm a licensed user, but when I put it on other machines I use, I usually don't enter my license key, and I almost never notice)

fredleblanc 11y ago

Woo! I worked with Will for a couple years and this is going to be a great pick up for Sublime. Nice guy, great developer.

Nicksil 11y ago

This is fantastic news! Very glad to hear such a staunch supporter of Sublime Text joining their team. Congrats and good luck, Will!

brandonblack 11y ago

== slow clap == Great hire.

hbhakhra 11y ago

This is very nice to see. Just last week Sublime started releasing new dev builds after close to a year of silence. Sublime is my favorite text editor and it seemed like it was going to drift off into obscurity but this will definitely inject new life into it. Sublime didn't just make a hire, they hired the guy responsible for an arguably large part of sublime's success.

lobster_johnson 11y ago

They also replaced their awful old forums with Discourse (which Atom also uses): https://forum.sublimetext.com https://forum.sublimetext.com.

danielsamuels 11y ago
Implying Discource isn't terrible. I've never found it intuitive to use.
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  It isn't terrible. And compared to Sublime's old forums (some kind of phpBB monstrosity) it's superb.
  - batat 11y ago
    While phpBB-ish forums looks pretty outdated nowadays, they're at least usable. Search Help Options order:views order:latest order:likes status:open status:closed status:archived status:noreplies status:single_user category:foo user:foo group:foo badge:foo in:likes in:posted in:watching in:tracking in:private in:bookmarks in:first posts_count:num min_age:days max_age:days Oh thanks, why not to simply embed DB REPL there?
    - lobster_johnson 11y ago
      The fact that those search options are available is fantastic. I find phpBB-type forums almost completely unusable. Pagination made for 1998; large, intrusive signatures; confusing timestamps (person's last location and login time more prominent than the timestamp of the comment), etc.

zzleeper 11y ago

As others mention, these are amazing news. The last months were void of communication from Jon and the forums were in a constant state of spam+complains, so hopefully this (and the recent updates) signals something is changing :)

jamesfzhang 11y ago

Congrats to Will and Sublime, great everyone involved!

ggreer 11y ago

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.

cheez 11y ago
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.
- hollerith 11y ago
  Are you sure no one can make a living by improving Atom? The license (BSDL) allows proprietary forks.
  - cheez 11y ago
    Maybe.
hbhakhra 11y ago
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.
- bsimpson 11y ago

cpfohl 11y ago

Congrats Will! :) Or more like, Congrats Sublime HQ.

wkirby 11y ago

There's a single feature that made me an Atom user over Sublime — and that's support for excluding files and folders in gitignore from the quick open.

JustinAiken 11y ago
..and you can also have a different set of files/folders ignored than those in .gitignore, AND it's customizable per project with Project Manager. Huge plus for me too!

danharaj 11y ago

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?

profmonocle 11y ago
> how's atom doing these days? Fairly well, IMO. The editor itself has caught up with Sublime for at least everything I care about, the community is very active, and they release updates pretty regularly. Unfortunately, although performance has gotten noticeably better, it's still way behind Sublime. Opening a new editor window takes about three seconds on my MacBook Air, vs. less than a second for Sublime. I find myself opening new windows pretty often as part of my workflow, so I really, really hope they can cut that down. Also, Atom still struggles with large (>2MB) files, but I don't work with those often enough for it to be a big deal.
- softinio 11y ago
  Been using atom for 4 weeks now in place of Sublime. The slowness has not affected me at all. Especially as I rarely close my windows :-) The benefits it provides far out ways its flaws. Atom is great.

moonlighter 11y ago

Sublime Text user here, who switched to Atom a year ago and never looked back. Never had any of the issues others described having with Atom such as slowness, etc. What I love about Atom is that it's under active, fast-paced development, that it's super-easy to customize (first thing was to increase the font-size of the left-hand folder pane), and the available plugins are fantastic. It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript, rather than Python with ST. Furthermore, as others commented, the plugins have much more reach into the editor and can do a lot more. For example, the new block decorations coming in 1.6 are going to be an awesome API for plugin authors! http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations.html http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations...

ossreality 11y ago
>Never had any of the issues others described having with Atom such as slowness, etc. aka ""I've never opened a file larger than 1KB"". Okay cool, so we can disregard the rest of your testimony; cool, good to know.
modulus1 11y ago
> It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript... I've heard this said before, I've had the opposite experience. ST offers a small api and it was easy for me to make something work with a single .py file. I gave up trying the same thing in Atom; the api is larger and lower-level. Admission: I don't know coffeescript. ST of course isn't nearly as flexible, there are many things you just can't do.
- ivanca 11y ago
  What are the things you can't do with ST? You can actually use the C bindings of python and do anything C can do... which is pretty much anything.
  - moonlighter 11y ago
    It's not about the limits of the language but the limits of the ST API itself. However, given Will Bond's background, this might just change for the better now that he's officially working for ST, so this is good news for all ST users obviously.

garyclarke27 11y ago

Good news I love Sublime it's so fast and slick - I haven't used Atom because consensus seems to be that it's not as fast with multiple large files open. Why is everyone obsessed about open source, yes nice to have but at the end of the day this is just a (very sharp) tool - what's your priority tinkering with your tools or getting the job done? 70$ is peanuts, speed and productivity gains way outweigh this. ST is multi-talented, brilliant for SQL, runs huge Postgres queries directly and lightning fast with full feed back ( error messages line numbers etc) even multi million row result sets don't phase it , any other editor would just gind to a spluttering halt.

JohnDoe365 11y ago
But you understand that Postgres also went a long way and is Open Source?
- mundanevoice 11y ago
  That's right! But open source doesn't always necessarily means better software. Atom for sure ain't better than Sublime in terms of speed at this point of time.
- garyclarke27 11y ago
  I agree - I'm building a huge application on Postgres because of it has amazing capability and yes because it's Open Source. Doing the same on ms sql server or oracle in my case would be madness - because of their insane per core licensing costs for enterprise features which I need. However for my tools, I'm not bothered so long as a reasonable price or free MIT - in fact I'd rather pay for a commercial license than use a risky GPL license. I do feel sorry for Architects (my wife) though, they have to pay outrageous prices for design tools, literally thousands yet developers who earn far more than architects, bleat about trivial amounts such as $70 for ST.
  - oblio 11y ago
    > However for my tools, I'm not bothered so long as a reasonable price or free MIT - in fact I'd rather pay for a commercial license than use a risky GPL license Why do you consider GPL tools risky? I'm guessing you're using GNU utils constantly? :) > I do feel sorry for Architects (my wife) though, they have to pay outrageous prices for design tools, literally thousands yet developers who earn far more than architects, bleat about trivial amounts such as $70 for ST. Architects probably don't have other options. Free development tools abound.

pinkfloyd 11y ago

Of course Will Bond will bond

demarq 11y ago

but no SSL... :( Anyway I love sublime, and really hope the API keeps growing! It's also nice to see Will Bond becoming "official" :) congratulations!

muhic 11y ago

FYI Build 3103 was just released [1] [1] https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-build-3103 https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-bui...

wbond 11y ago

Wow, thanks everyone! I'm thrilled to be working with Jon and Kari and to be helping with Sublime Text.

s9w 11y ago
Hey wbond, I'm glad that you're now part of the team. Can you say anything about what you'll work on? Only package-stuff or other things too? And does this mean there are now more planned features and a more stable future for sublime? You know the burning questions of the community.
- wbond 11y ago
  I‘ll be working on everything related to Sublime Text. I was part of the dev releases building up to 3103, moving the forum and merging in pull requests from https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages. We are definitely working on improving all the different aspects of Sublime, so you can expect to continue seeing new builds!
carterschonwald 11y ago
I'm excited for you. And for me and other st3 users :)
polshaw 11y ago
Is there any chance of some ARM builds? (pretty please!) (also, congrats!)

jbrooksuk 11y ago

Congrats Will! I'm really excited to see what you'll be bringing to Sublime! I wish you all the best!

dvcrn 11y ago

Very amazing news! I loved sublime text and kept holding onto it while everyone else was switching. At some point I got really frustrated with the plugin API. Stuff like only 1 thing can write into the gutter at a time and that relative line numbers is close to impossible to implement (the package that exists is garbage) is just ridiculous. That was the moment when I switched to atom and ported my sublimious plugin to atom (proton). I've since been using atom and am quite happy with it but now and then look back at the ST3 days and the incredible performance that ST3 offers. I hope with Will on board, development will finally pick up again. ST3 needs excited developers that want to push it further and Will seems like that kind of person. I'd love to grab my old license out of the cellar and give it another spin.

provemewrong 11y ago

The title is somewhat like a garden path sentence [1], when I started reading this I thought it was a question about the future of a package manager called Bond. The title case doesn't make it any easier. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

agentgt 11y ago

I'm curious if any one remembers SlickEdit. Circa 2000 I had an internship and SlickEdit was the Sublime Text at that time. SlickEdit for some reason went into complete obscurity though and I can't recall why. I'm not saying this will happen to Sublime (as I'm not even sure what happend to Slick) but I do wonder if it will as TextMate seems to be going down the path of long term obscurity.

sbaum 11y ago

This and the fact that they just released a new version is very good news! I've tried several other editors over the last 2 years or so, but I keep coming back to Sublime. I love many things about Atom, but janky scrolling on a 2 year old MacBook Pro is just unacceptable. Another big advantage that isn't mentioned a lot is that Sublime is a lot lighter on CPU. Just for all the folks that are developing on battery power.