7 ms·

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

• 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
    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.
    • mmanfrin 11y ago
      Atom is the third in a succession of hipster text editors What an unbelievably pretentious thing to say.
      • alexwebb2 11y ago
        The day we can have a discussion on text editors without someone trying to slip in a little dig like that... well, it's a day that's not coming anytime soon.
    • tangue 11y ago
      The hype is real but I won't put Atom in this category : it's probably the most hackable editor since Emacs.
    • anonyfox 11y ago
      Hispters are going to spacemacs already, before it gets a "1.0" tag. (Went textmate -> sublime -> atom -> spacemacs by myself)
  • TheLogothete 11y ago
    Monopoly? I highly doubt Sublime ever had even 20% of Notepad++'s installs.
• lobster_johnson 11y ago
  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 https://github.com/smashwilson/merge-conflicts [2] https://github.com/wyze/seti-icons https://github.com/wyze/seti-icons
  • ggreer 11y ago
    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-its-python-sort-of/ https://news.floobits.com/2015/08/17/sublime-text-plugin-api... 2. https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/177 https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/177 3. https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins-so-much-potential-so-many-bugs/ https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins...
  • SunShiranui 11y ago
• forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Until Atom is written natively I don't think Sublime Text is going to have a serious competitor.
  • skrebbel 11y ago
    Why? Speed? Visual Studio Code is based on JavaScript too and it's very fast. They even both use Electron, the JS-desktop-app core that the Atom guys open sourced separately.
    • sagichmal 11y ago
      VS Code is leagues better than Atom, but it's still perceivably and annoyingly slower than Sublime.
      • neoeldex 11y ago
        Especially when dealing with large files, atom just breaks. In ST3 it shows loading the file, but never becomes unresponsive
        • oblio 11y ago
          Doesn't this look more like an un-optimized edge case than anything else? Loading a 100MB text file is not really common, even among developers. Only logs and DB dumps are really that big.
          • neoeldex 11y ago
            I can't seem to open files of 1MB properly in Atom. Also I find it very useful to open logs to find-replace some info from logs.
        • sagichmal 11y ago
          I'm not even talking about large files -- I'm only talking about normal interactions on small (1-10KB) files. Moving the cursor around in the text field, especially when my language plugin is in some mode that has some dialog up on the screen. Find and replace. Switching between open files. All of these operations often (but not always) demonstrate noticeable lag between keyboard input and screen output in VS Code (and Atom, of course).
• chrisblackwell 11y ago
  Don't discount the benefit of a few men, trying to build a business. Doing dedicated work for Open Source is amazing, and very honourable. However, as the ATOM team grows, so does the overhead, the documentation requirements, and group thought. Sublime going lean and closed source might make things more competitive then you think.
  • tstrimple 11y ago
    Except for the whole fact that they are incredibly slow. Sublime has had major issues with consistent releases and complete silence from the owner with regards to updates.
    • chrisblackwell 11y ago
      Yes, but that's the point of Will Bond joining. He will be a developer actively dedicated to new releases.
      • FireBeyond 11y ago
        "I'd also like to welcome prominent community member and Package Control mastermind Will Bond to the Sublime HQ team." Or he's getting paid to manage packages. Your point makes assumptions not backed up by evidence.
• welly 11y ago
  This same thing happened with Textmate and it looks like history is repeating itself.
• laumars 11y ago
  > For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong Let's also not forget: o Brackets (which I do prefer over ST for Javascript and CSS), o Visual Studio Code o EditPlus (not so great with plug ins, but it's such a solid editor that this was my favourite for years before ST) o Notepad++ (very popular text editor) o Kate (KDE) o Emacs (which has long since also had a GUI) o Plus lots of environment specific editors and micro-IDE's such as: . Aracnophilia (I used to swear by this in the 90s), . Bluefish, . LiteIDE, ...and so on. I'm no doubt missing off dozens of popular editors, but bar VSC, all of the above have been around for longer than Atom has and many have been around even longer than ST. So it's been a crowded market for quite some time. Which often leaves me wondering why people make such noise about Atom when it always feels somewhat immature compared to any of the above (or at least has done for me whenever I've pulled an ArchLinux AUR package for Atom) As a side note, it's a pity HN doesn't support an easier method for posting bullet points.
  • ikurei 11y ago
    I also think that the "no competition" point is overblown, but Sublime was still quite unique. It is very general purpose, not focused on any particular domain like Brackets, multiplatform, and with a great plugin ecosystem. It was a swiss-knife editor, that you could throw at anything and was always great. I don't use it any more, but a few years ago I did everything, from writing a paper in latex to webdev to C, in Sublime. It was by far the king to my toolbelt. * Brackets was only good for web (wasn't it?) * Visual Studio Code is newer than Atom * Notepad++ is, I think, quite outdated, and windows only * I like Kate, but not so much out of KDE, that is very niche compared to Windows, OSX, and the wider Linux world * Emacs (and Vim!) are hard to learn and slowly dying off[1] * Other specific editors are... specific, and thus not direct competition to ST [1] Might be my perception. I hope they'll never really die; I use both (Emacs+Evil and GVim), and learned in the last 2 years, but I'm the only one I know.
    • laumars 11y ago
      I don't disagree with you per se, but I do think you're exaggerating things a little with regards to just how unique Sublime Text is. I've spent a lot of time switching between text editors (more time than I really should - but sometimes procrastination trumps productivity) and here are some of my thoughts on the points you've raised: > Brackets was only good for web (wasn't it?) That's certainly where it excels at, but there are plugins for other languages (eg I did write Go code in Brackets, albeit only for a brief period). > Notepad++ is, I think, quite outdated It's not the prettiest editor in the world, but it's a little unfair calling it "outdated" when it releases updates more frequent than Sublime Text does. > Emacs (and Vim!) are hard to learn and slowly dying off They're no harder to learn than any other IDE. But it's definitely fair to say that there's a steeper initial curve than something that's largely point-and-click; and that they're not as trendy nor pretty so most users (understandably) aren't interested in familiarising themselves with the basics. > Other specific editors are... specific, and thus not direct competition to ST That's not entirely fair as a lot of peoples ST use will be for specific things. In fact I often find myself using about half a dozen different general purpose text editors for specific things: vi for when I need to edit root owned files; Kate for general config files / text files; ST for Go; Brackets for JS and CSS; Notepad++ for editing Windows scripts; and POSIX tools (echo, tee, sed, awk, grep, etc) for automation in editing text documents. For me, ST could easily be replaced by any of the other editors I use or some of the specific ones (eg LiteIDE). I pretty much only use ST for Go because of habit and I'm sure in 6 months time I'd have gotten bored and switched again. My point is that not everyones usage for ST to be as diverse as you suggest. So Sublime Text is still having to compete with other tailored editors as well as the general purpose ones. > windows only ... KDE, that is very niche compared to Windows, OSX I don't think that many people switch between Windows, OS X and Linux enough that they need a single cross-platform editor. For most people, an editor that "just works" on their preferred platform is all they need. So in that regard, Kate and Notepad++ are just as viable competitors to Sublime Text as Atom is; albeit the former two are only competitors on specific platforms.
• kristofferR 11y ago
  You shouldn't judge the progress on Sublime Text based on when the last "stable version" was released. They seem to be way too perfectionistic in deeming version 3 stable - the developer versions have all been more stable for me than any version of Atom ever has been. The Sublime Text 3 betas are production ready. It's true that the development progress has been really slow/halted this last year, but it seems to have gotten back on track in the last month.
  • gbersac 11y ago
    That's the reason why I consider sublime text to be superior to atom. I heard some people complain about few bugs, ie sublime not working on some linux distribution. Nothing happened to me. And sublime is FAST.
    • fit2rule 11y ago
      For me, speed is the reason I'm still using ST3 instead of switching to Atom 'like everyone else' .. Sublime simply is nice and fast. (One more thing: large file support is just better..)
    • doktrin 11y ago
      Yeah. I've experienced way more problems with Atom than I ever have with Sublime (as a user). Crazy performance issues and crashes on literally every platform I've installed it on (including Windows and OSX). I agree with the parent in the sense that with Atom's resources and more extensible, modern design they will eventually have a superior product - but right now I keep finding reasons not to use it.
• arc0re 11y ago
  To me, Sublime Text was never made to last long. First of all, its not open source. Are Emacs and Vim closed source? No. Why are they still around? Because in addition to being great (Sublime Text is great too don't get me wrong), they are open source. That means people can adapt them to new computers, to new architectures.
• vlunkr 11y ago
  Maybe development speed and release frequency aren't the best ways to measure the quality of software? Sublime Text is a solid product that has done well despite a slow release schedule.
  • Betelgeuse90 11y ago
    Exactly. And the fact that it's thriving in spite of its infrequent updates just goes to show you how much of a solid core it has.