6 ms·

It's good to see more ST updates, but it's sad that it feels like they're only even bothering because of the popularity of Atom.

by zyxley 10y ago

usaphp 10y ago
What exactly are you looking for in ST improved? I just can't find anything that I think can be any better, it's just perfect already for me, I've tried using Atom but always went back to ST after a week of poor performance and battery drainage of Atom.
- elliotec 10y ago
  Yeah Atom still has issues. I've had crashing problems on 4 year old Macs. But ST makes you pay $70. And also isn't open source. And more people know JS than Python to hack on it. And Github has a powerful marketing team and lots of resources to put behind Atom and it's development. And ST doesn't get updated too often.
  - desireco42 10y ago
    I am a vim user, so I don't really use SublimeText often if at all. I was happy to pay $70 for it, just to support what I saw as a fresh take on editors. I wish developer could find more sustainable way to make a living from this and work on it more. I don't think I ever regretted paying for it and I made number of companies with people using it, pay for it.
    - lighttower 10y ago
      We bought it in our company also. Great product. Makes me happy to pay for good things. I use VIM also but regEx in VIM kill me
      - waivek 10y ago
        You could try this out - https://github.com/othree/eregex.vim https://github.com/othree/eregex.vim
  - cageface 10y ago
    $70 is absolutely peanuts for a tool that you use for hours every day. The main reason so much modern software is bad is that people aren't willing to pay for even a fraction of the actual value it delivers. I would happily pay $700 for my main code editor if that would guarantee regular updates and new features.
    - jethro_tell 10y ago
      To your point I think a lot of people would pay that kind of money if it guaranteed the company would both, continue to update and continue in its current direction. But that really hasn't been the case with most projects, and the open source products tend to have better shelf life. I am happy to pay for these kind of things but rarely in a big upfront block like that. I doubt I'm the only one.
      - drewcrawford 10y ago
        Very few people are willing to pay the kind of money that would actually sustain a company. Let's run the math, and see if we can build a business around a text editor. Let's say we can get away with 2 good developers (across 3 platforms, that seems difficult to me). Let's further stipulate they are willing to take a pay cut from their previous life at Facebook and are willing to do this as a labor of love. 90k/yr salary, 180k/yr for both. Now we need a technical writer, to handle API documentation etc. Let's say we can get a CS major to do it part-time at 20 hrs/week at $20/hr. 20k/yr. We also need a sysadmin to wrangle the CI setup, website hosting, install updates, setup email, etc. Suppose they automated everything in Ansible/Docker/Kubernetes/whatever_the_cool_kids_do_these_days and so we only need 10 hrs/week at $50/hr. 26k/yr. We need a QA engineer to bang on things and file proper bugs. $50k/yr. Let's further stipulate that this same person will handle customer support, because we're a lean startup and combine multiple roles in the same individual. We need somebody to handle marketing (or maybe direct sales, since it's a $700 pricepoint). Let's call it another $50k/yr. We're now up to $325k/yr. Traditionally we would now have to lease office space, buy macs, call our AWS sales rep, etc., but let's assume for this conversation everybody works from home, they have their own equipment, and we got free startup AWS credit, which is not very realistic at all, but whatever. So let's stipulate this is a stable burn rate. Nobody will get poached by Facebook, nobody needs to raise a round, if we can pull in only 325k/yr, we can do this forever. When we sell our $700/license, let's say we net 75%. That is actually very high: most software companies net around 50-60%, because the App Store, WalMart, the state, etc., take their pound of flesh. But our $700 text editor is so amazing that people will buy it direct from us, we will have a strong brand, handwave. So we take home an incredible $525. We now need to sell 700 licenses year-over-year in order to keep this thing going. Not even 700 licenses one-time, but we actually need to close 60 licenses a month, 2 licenses a day, 365 days a year. To do that, we needa sales process. I would love to live in a world where a salesman knocks on your door, does a 2-hour demo, and at the end you have 50% conversion to writing him a $700 check. I just don't live in that world. And that's the kind of sales process you'd need to sustainably develop a text editor. Anything short of the exercise I just went through will result in a failed product. A developer might take a pay cut for a year but will lose interest if they're well below market. If we don't hire good QA then our quality will be shit and not worth $700, just think of all the shitty software you use already. If we don't have support then nobody will want to spend $700 to get their emails ignored. If we fund via VC then we will have to blog about Our Incredible Journey the next time Google Docs needs an engineer. The result of this analysis is the current market. The only way to develop a text editor is either all volunteers (like Atom), a small part of a large corporation's marketing budget (VSCode), or a labor of love from one and a half underfunded and overworked people who we somehow expect to stop being underfunded and overworked even though we only paid them like half a billable hour several years ago (ST).
  - bpicolo 10y ago
    Python is not exactly an uncommon language, that's marginal. The main limitation to hacking on it is the docs aren't great
    - elliotec 10y ago
      True, it's not uncommon, but JS is very significantly more popular. I"m sure you've seen this: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >And more people know JS than Python to hack on it I wouldn't call the proliferation of npm modules a good thing. I'd rather have Python programmers coding my editor plugins. >And Github has a powerful marketing team and lots of resources to put behind Atom and its development. Marketing sounds like reason to avoid a software. And all the resources didn't manage to make it tolerably fast/low on cpu those 2-3 years its out. Whereas at least VSC got that right. >And ST doesn't get updated too often. Doesn't need to, either.
- threatofrain 10y ago
  One thing that has me switching between editors is Visual Studio Code's multi-file code information feature, or "intellisense". It's especially awesome for types. Another thing is that I find that Atom's syntax highlighting is sometimes better.
- druska 10y ago
  I'd like more customization with the gutter API [1]. You can only have a single icon per line in the gutter, and plugins often fight for that spot. [1]: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/api_reference.html https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/api_reference.html
- 746F7475 10y ago
  Well, for one it's not Vim ;)
- tuananh 10y ago
  plugin system for one.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  ST's plugin API is extremely limited. There's hardly anything a plugin can do to influence the rendering of the text editor. ST plugins can: * Show autocompletion boxes (e.g. cmd-T) * Update the status bar * Edit text * Tag text regions (which can be used for custom highlighting, e.g. underline errors) Atom plugins can do almost anything by modifying the editor DOM, but more formally they can: * Display compilation error messages inline * Show popups * Display custom panels (e.g. the neat Git conflict resolver) within the editor window * Draw custom settings UI * Extend the file tree sidebar's rendering * Create and arrange editor windows * Create custom windows (e.g. Markdown Preview splits the current editor window and shows a live preview on the right-hand side) etc. Atom has also been better designed with regard to pluggability. For example, it comes with a single autocomplete system that packages can extend with custom autocompleters. Plugins don't have to invent their own autocompletion system. The fact that ST's plugins are executed in a sandbox environment also causes (afaik) issues for plugins that want to use toolchains such as Go.
nirix 10y ago
The dev channel gets a lot more updates. https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev
HCIdivision17 10y ago
I really haven't seen any correlation there at all. Sublime's had sporadic and at-their-own-pace updates since before Atom came out. And... Why would it be sad?! Two excellent solutions competing to make a better product is pretty much the opposite of any sense of the word sad I can think of. It's great to have choices that are under active development.
- albasha 10y ago
  It's sad because it means Sublime dev isn't doing it out of love. Much like Microsoft.
  - Drive54 10y ago
    Better not doing things out of love then writing comments out of hate.
    - Aldo_MX 10y ago
      love and hate are the same sentiment, but with opposing directions
  - HCIdivision17 10y ago
    There's a sweetness to that sentiment, but I think it's misplaced. I mean, Jon Skinner has technically been working on this thing for over a decade. It's this guy and a couple other people polishing it for years; saying it's like Microsoft is like calling git-annex just another Dropbox. And don't forget: this is a product and a business. If someone comes up to eat your lunch, you can roll over and die or adapt and improve. We've come a bit full circle in the Complaints Department here: when Atom was first coming out, a vocal lot decried it was just a Sublime Text rip-off picking on the little guy. Turns out it's a pretty good editor! Sublime's got a few updates and it's just perfunctorily playing catch-up? Well, I liked it before, and now it's better, so... I think that's pretty good.
    - dreamsofdragons 10y ago
meritt 10y ago
I dunno, I'm just not a fan of Electron-based apps especially for a text editor or IDE. Native desktop applications always have such superior performance and memory-management.
- locusm 10y ago
  Thought same till I had a look at VS Code.
  - meritt 10y ago
    VSCode does seem pretty nice -- One thing I can't figure out is the Ctrl+P quick find. It doesn't seem to auto-complete/open files I have added in explorer? The same behavior works flawlessly in Sublime.
    - wbercx 10y ago
      I find it to be a bit hit and miss. Sometimes it just takes 5-10 seconds for the results to appear, for no apparent reason.
  - veli_joza 10y ago
    VS Code startup lasts at least 100 times longer than ST3. It also takes twice as much RAM. Maybe on your PC it's not noticeable, but the difference is there.
Raphmedia 10y ago
I don't use Atom but will gladly choose ST over PhpStorm or VS.

It's good to see more ST updates, but it's sad that it feels like they're only even bothering because of the popularity of Atom.

by zyxley 10y ago

It's good to see more ST updates, but it's sad that it feels like they're only even bothering because of the popularity of Atom.

usaphp 10y ago

What exactly are you looking for in ST improved? I just can't find anything that I think can be any better, it's just perfect already for me, I've tried using Atom but always went back to ST after a week of poor performance and battery drainage of Atom.

elliotec 10y ago
Yeah Atom still has issues. I've had crashing problems on 4 year old Macs. But ST makes you pay $70. And also isn't open source. And more people know JS than Python to hack on it. And Github has a powerful marketing team and lots of resources to put behind Atom and it's development. And ST doesn't get updated too often.
- desireco42 10y ago
  I am a vim user, so I don't really use SublimeText often if at all. I was happy to pay $70 for it, just to support what I saw as a fresh take on editors. I wish developer could find more sustainable way to make a living from this and work on it more. I don't think I ever regretted paying for it and I made number of companies with people using it, pay for it.
  - lighttower 10y ago
    We bought it in our company also. Great product. Makes me happy to pay for good things. I use VIM also but regEx in VIM kill me
    - waivek 10y ago
      You could try this out - https://github.com/othree/eregex.vim https://github.com/othree/eregex.vim
- cageface 10y ago
  $70 is absolutely peanuts for a tool that you use for hours every day. The main reason so much modern software is bad is that people aren't willing to pay for even a fraction of the actual value it delivers. I would happily pay $700 for my main code editor if that would guarantee regular updates and new features.
  - jethro_tell 10y ago
    To your point I think a lot of people would pay that kind of money if it guaranteed the company would both, continue to update and continue in its current direction. But that really hasn't been the case with most projects, and the open source products tend to have better shelf life. I am happy to pay for these kind of things but rarely in a big upfront block like that. I doubt I'm the only one.
    - drewcrawford 10y ago
      Very few people are willing to pay the kind of money that would actually sustain a company. Let's run the math, and see if we can build a business around a text editor. Let's say we can get away with 2 good developers (across 3 platforms, that seems difficult to me). Let's further stipulate they are willing to take a pay cut from their previous life at Facebook and are willing to do this as a labor of love. 90k/yr salary, 180k/yr for both. Now we need a technical writer, to handle API documentation etc. Let's say we can get a CS major to do it part-time at 20 hrs/week at $20/hr. 20k/yr. We also need a sysadmin to wrangle the CI setup, website hosting, install updates, setup email, etc. Suppose they automated everything in Ansible/Docker/Kubernetes/whatever_the_cool_kids_do_these_days and so we only need 10 hrs/week at $50/hr. 26k/yr. We need a QA engineer to bang on things and file proper bugs. $50k/yr. Let's further stipulate that this same person will handle customer support, because we're a lean startup and combine multiple roles in the same individual. We need somebody to handle marketing (or maybe direct sales, since it's a $700 pricepoint). Let's call it another $50k/yr. We're now up to $325k/yr. Traditionally we would now have to lease office space, buy macs, call our AWS sales rep, etc., but let's assume for this conversation everybody works from home, they have their own equipment, and we got free startup AWS credit, which is not very realistic at all, but whatever. So let's stipulate this is a stable burn rate. Nobody will get poached by Facebook, nobody needs to raise a round, if we can pull in only 325k/yr, we can do this forever. When we sell our $700/license, let's say we net 75%. That is actually very high: most software companies net around 50-60%, because the App Store, WalMart, the state, etc., take their pound of flesh. But our $700 text editor is so amazing that people will buy it direct from us, we will have a strong brand, handwave. So we take home an incredible $525. We now need to sell 700 licenses year-over-year in order to keep this thing going. Not even 700 licenses one-time, but we actually need to close 60 licenses a month, 2 licenses a day, 365 days a year. To do that, we needa sales process. I would love to live in a world where a salesman knocks on your door, does a 2-hour demo, and at the end you have 50% conversion to writing him a $700 check. I just don't live in that world. And that's the kind of sales process you'd need to sustainably develop a text editor. Anything short of the exercise I just went through will result in a failed product. A developer might take a pay cut for a year but will lose interest if they're well below market. If we don't hire good QA then our quality will be shit and not worth $700, just think of all the shitty software you use already. If we don't have support then nobody will want to spend $700 to get their emails ignored. If we fund via VC then we will have to blog about Our Incredible Journey the next time Google Docs needs an engineer. The result of this analysis is the current market. The only way to develop a text editor is either all volunteers (like Atom), a small part of a large corporation's marketing budget (VSCode), or a labor of love from one and a half underfunded and overworked people who we somehow expect to stop being underfunded and overworked even though we only paid them like half a billable hour several years ago (ST).
- bpicolo 10y ago
  Python is not exactly an uncommon language, that's marginal. The main limitation to hacking on it is the docs aren't great
  - elliotec 10y ago
    True, it's not uncommon, but JS is very significantly more popular. I"m sure you've seen this: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016
- coldtea 10y ago
  >And more people know JS than Python to hack on it I wouldn't call the proliferation of npm modules a good thing. I'd rather have Python programmers coding my editor plugins. >And Github has a powerful marketing team and lots of resources to put behind Atom and its development. Marketing sounds like reason to avoid a software. And all the resources didn't manage to make it tolerably fast/low on cpu those 2-3 years its out. Whereas at least VSC got that right. >And ST doesn't get updated too often. Doesn't need to, either.
threatofrain 10y ago
One thing that has me switching between editors is Visual Studio Code's multi-file code information feature, or "intellisense". It's especially awesome for types. Another thing is that I find that Atom's syntax highlighting is sometimes better.
druska 10y ago
I'd like more customization with the gutter API [1]. You can only have a single icon per line in the gutter, and plugins often fight for that spot. [1]: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/api_reference.html https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/api_reference.html
746F7475 10y ago
Well, for one it's not Vim ;)
tuananh 10y ago
plugin system for one.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
ST's plugin API is extremely limited. There's hardly anything a plugin can do to influence the rendering of the text editor. ST plugins can: * Show autocompletion boxes (e.g. cmd-T) * Update the status bar * Edit text * Tag text regions (which can be used for custom highlighting, e.g. underline errors) Atom plugins can do almost anything by modifying the editor DOM, but more formally they can: * Display compilation error messages inline * Show popups * Display custom panels (e.g. the neat Git conflict resolver) within the editor window * Draw custom settings UI * Extend the file tree sidebar's rendering * Create and arrange editor windows * Create custom windows (e.g. Markdown Preview splits the current editor window and shows a live preview on the right-hand side) etc. Atom has also been better designed with regard to pluggability. For example, it comes with a single autocomplete system that packages can extend with custom autocompleters. Plugins don't have to invent their own autocompletion system. The fact that ST's plugins are executed in a sandbox environment also causes (afaik) issues for plugins that want to use toolchains such as Go.

nirix 10y ago

The dev channel gets a lot more updates. https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev https://www.sublimetext.com/3dev

HCIdivision17 10y ago

I really haven't seen any correlation there at all. Sublime's had sporadic and at-their-own-pace updates since before Atom came out. And... Why would it be sad?! Two excellent solutions competing to make a better product is pretty much the opposite of any sense of the word sad I can think of. It's great to have choices that are under active development.

albasha 10y ago
It's sad because it means Sublime dev isn't doing it out of love. Much like Microsoft.
- Drive54 10y ago
  Better not doing things out of love then writing comments out of hate.
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    love and hate are the same sentiment, but with opposing directions
- HCIdivision17 10y ago
  There's a sweetness to that sentiment, but I think it's misplaced. I mean, Jon Skinner has technically been working on this thing for over a decade. It's this guy and a couple other people polishing it for years; saying it's like Microsoft is like calling git-annex just another Dropbox. And don't forget: this is a product and a business. If someone comes up to eat your lunch, you can roll over and die or adapt and improve. We've come a bit full circle in the Complaints Department here: when Atom was first coming out, a vocal lot decried it was just a Sublime Text rip-off picking on the little guy. Turns out it's a pretty good editor! Sublime's got a few updates and it's just perfunctorily playing catch-up? Well, I liked it before, and now it's better, so... I think that's pretty good.
  - dreamsofdragons 10y ago

meritt 10y ago

I dunno, I'm just not a fan of Electron-based apps especially for a text editor or IDE. Native desktop applications always have such superior performance and memory-management.

locusm 10y ago
Thought same till I had a look at VS Code.
- meritt 10y ago
  VSCode does seem pretty nice -- One thing I can't figure out is the Ctrl+P quick find. It doesn't seem to auto-complete/open files I have added in explorer? The same behavior works flawlessly in Sublime.
  - wbercx 10y ago
    I find it to be a bit hit and miss. Sometimes it just takes 5-10 seconds for the results to appear, for no apparent reason.
- veli_joza 10y ago
  VS Code startup lasts at least 100 times longer than ST3. It also takes twice as much RAM. Maybe on your PC it's not noticeable, but the difference is there.

Raphmedia 10y ago

I don't use Atom but will gladly choose ST over PhpStorm or VS.