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> With these latest changes, Sublime Text 3 is almost > ready to graduate out of beta, and into a 3.0 version. Wow, Finally! I have been using ST3 for several

> With these latest changes, Sublime Text 3 is almost > ready to graduate out of beta, and into a 3.0 version. Wow, Finally! I have been using ST3 for several years (wow, years) and always wondered what is keeping the developer from labeling that version as stable. From all the issues reported here [1] I have never encountered one while using the editor for pretty much all my work. Those $70 are definitely worth every penny. Sometimes I cringe from videos featuring ST while using a non-registered license, this week it happened with a course from Google engineers via Udacity, Google engineers!!! As if they don't have miserable $70 to buy a license, I assumed they were in a rush and didn't have time to set the license which I hope they bought. Anyway, thanks for all the hard work Jon, and recently Will. [1] https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues

mastazi 10y ago
> Those $70 are definitely worth every penny. Same here, buying an ST license is probably the single best SW-related purchase that I've ever done. ST3 works so flawlessly, it's just ironic that it's still technically a beta version. It is actually much less buggy than many "final version" competitors ;-) On a side note, it is notable how, despite being a closed-source program, ST was able to generate a large ecosystem of open-source plugins; that is not something that happens every day (Jeskola Buzz comes to mind as a similar case: also closed source and with a large open-source plugins ecosystem, but I'm not sure how many people on HN are familiar with tracker-style music software, LOL).
- jacobolus 10y ago
  ST bootstrapped its ecosystem by directly and shamelessly cloning every one of its original features from the TextMate editor, and just copy/pasting its entire ecosystem, without contributing anything back. For years there was no special support for actually working on custom features from within Sublime Text, so if you wanted to create new language grammars or syntax highlighting modes etc. you needed to do it from within TextMate. Sublime users would come to the TextMate IRC channel to complain about particular language bundle features that were buggy in the not-quite-compatible environment of ST, and ask TM users to fix it for them. Kind of comical really. Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool. My impression is that the Sublime programmer didn’t really understand the underlying philosophy behind many of the features he cloned, and kind of screwed up a bunch of the subtler details. (This isn’t really surprising; I’d say it pretty much always happens when anyone just copies something that exists; they seldom perfectly understand the context or ideas of the original creator, so the copy is always at least a bit degraded/distorted, with less clarity of vision.) Sublime does have the advantage of working on more platforms though.
  - intruder 10y ago
    Can you give some examples of what those features are?
  - halflings 10y ago
    I tried both TextMate and Sublime Text and find ST to be much better for what I do (web, Python and text editing). Copying or not, "badly designed" or not, in the end Sublime Text is blazing fast even on a big files, extensible with the help of Package Control and has some native features (like multiple cursors) that make the difference.
  - TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
    I switched to ST2 after about 20 years of VI(m). I happily paid the money to NOT have to deal with 50 different plugins designed to get VIm to, essentially, work like ST, with the side bar and tabs. I switched to Mac as my primary desktop not long after, and looked at TextMate. I WANT to support the Apple "ecosystem" in ways like using a "Mac" text editor, but I still work on Linux (and Windows). Not having cross-platform capability is a deal breaker for me, and ST is just as good as VIm in this regard.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    > Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool. Do people still actually use TextMate? Judging by their website [1], for example the screenshots taken under an ancient version of OS X, I thought it'd been abandoned years ago. The last post on the blog is in October 2014. [1]: https://macromates.com https://macromates.com [2]: http://blog.macromates.com http://blog.macromates.com
    - b3b0p 10y ago
      Tons of people still use it and it's being very actively developed. Check out the GitHub: https://github.com/textmate/textmate https://github.com/textmate/textmate It's constantly being updated.
travisty 10y ago
The $70 price tag has been an amazing gift to the developer community as well. Without it we wouldn't have so many options for great editors that are totally free and open source. Had they simply priced sublime around $30, they would have sold 10x or more licenses and not have to deal with the piracy problem nearly as much. Sublime is a great product, but that's one of the worst business decisions I've ever seen.
draw_down 10y ago
100% agreed, worth every penny.
lawnchair_larry 10y ago
It's probably not that they don't have $70, but that they don't have time and it's easier not to bother. Buying software at big companies can be a pain.
- danieldk 10y ago
  Ok, let's rephrase: anybody with a Google salary can afford Sublime Text. Also, when Sublime Text has a reasonable amount of popularity within Google, they could just purchase a site license for N users.
gotofritz 10y ago
Sorry, I must disagree. For 70 bucks you get developers who hardly fix bugs, who don't listen to users (I posted a few feature requests in their site and was banned) and with a crazy architecture (try and change the highlight colour of brackets in BracketHighlighter and see what I mean). They are worse than Microsoft. Screw them. It was great when it came out, but now Atom is better.
- bobsoap 10y ago
  I share your sentiment about the buggy software and the unresponsive devs; I moved to Atom for the same reason. However great Atom is though, it's unbelievably slow and nearly unusable because of that. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a better alternative since.
  - yAnonymous 10y ago
    Are you using the latest version? I can hardly see a speed difference compared to VS Code anymore, even for big projects and files. It's certainly very far from being unusably slow. >buggy software and the unresponsive devs I mainly use VS Code for that reason. It does feel a bit more polished and Atom is missing some much requested features, most notably a list of open files in the sidebar (the plugins that offer this are all terrible).
    - PeterisP 10y ago
      Tried Atom for Mac right now. Opening a tiny (10k rows) csv file took multiple seconds, opening a larger (100k rows) csv put out a warning about potentially taking a lot of time and in a second simply crashed before loading it.
      - yAnonymous 10y ago
        Opening a CSV with 100k rows takes about 10s for me and is pretty workable with an i7 and 16GB RAM. Selecting and editing text is almost instant.
petters 10y ago
Must be a simple mistake. You can definitely get a ST license at Google if you want to.
- toxican 10y ago
  I know that I often put off inputting my license on a fresh install because it's kind of a pain to hunt down. Or at least it's easier to dismiss the occasional notification than it is to log into my email and try to find the license key.
jasim 10y ago
The fact that it is a pseudo-free piece of software is one of the biggest reasons for its success (apart from its blazing speed and the rugged, minimalist engineering aesthetic). People just get used to the occasional nag screen as a sort of background noise. I'm hopelessly tied to IntelliJ's amazing IDEs for any sort of programming, but Sublime is my EDIT.COM for all other writing, especially note-keeping. I used it in that capacity for around a year, guiltily enduring the nag-screen, before I got around to buying it. This free-but-nag approach (not Nagware - too negative) was unusual for the times, but it reminded me of the Shareware days when successful software like PKZip spread virally, but extracted commercial value only when the users felt like it.
- danieldk 10y ago
  The fact that it is a pseudo-free piece of software is one of the biggest reasons for its success I think the demise (in terms of active development) of TextMate should not be understated as a factor in ST's success. At the time Sublime Text 2 came out, a lot of TextMate users were frustrated with the lack of progress on TextMate and hopped on the ST bandwagon. Ironically, ST had the same fate for a while. But it's good to see that there is some movement again.
mstade 10y ago
> Those $70 are definitely worth every penny. I've said it before, and I'll say it again – the fact that ST saves buffers no matter what has saved my butt so many times I can't even count. The effort it would've taken to restore the lost data had those buffers not been stored would've costed way more than $70 every time. Even if ST was worse in every possible way than other editors (and it's not,) I'd still pay money for this (and I did.) I don't know if my license will stop working when ST3 comes out of beta (I think I bought it for ST2, but it was so long ago at this point I don't even know) but if it does I'll happily shell out another $70. ST is one of the few tools I use that never, ever caused me any grief. Not once. It just works, works really well, and does all I need it to do.
- TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
  Agreed. The ability to paste some data I may or may not need after a couple more hours of debugging, and have that buffer save through a reboot -- without needing to save it to a file -- is something I've come to rely on. I only realized this when I tried Visual Studio Code, and noticed that it wasn't doing the same thing.
  - glogla 10y ago
    This is the reason I stopped using Atom and returned to ST. It's just so practical.
    - matt_kantor 10y ago
      For anyone else who is missing this feature from Atom, try the save-session package.
      - jdi 10y ago
        I see on the package page that all its functionality has been merged into Atom itself.
        10y ago
onetom 10y ago
I have a license too but as I'm moving between workstations and sometimes between accounts even on the same machine, I don't always paste the license in, because it would be extra effort to dig it up and copy-paste it... I bought it on day one when I discovered that Sublime supports Windows, Linux & Mac. I wanted a "modern editor" after vim, which works the same way across platforms, easy to install and configure, supports proportional fonts and does save on focus lost, yet still neither a memory hog nor a snail. I never would have paid just for getting rid of the nag screen, but I was so impressed with its quality, I just had to express my gratitude by paying. :)

mastazi 10y ago

> Those $70 are definitely worth every penny. Same here, buying an ST license is probably the single best SW-related purchase that I've ever done. ST3 works so flawlessly, it's just ironic that it's still technically a beta version. It is actually much less buggy than many "final version" competitors ;-) On a side note, it is notable how, despite being a closed-source program, ST was able to generate a large ecosystem of open-source plugins; that is not something that happens every day (Jeskola Buzz comes to mind as a similar case: also closed source and with a large open-source plugins ecosystem, but I'm not sure how many people on HN are familiar with tracker-style music software, LOL).

jacobolus 10y ago
ST bootstrapped its ecosystem by directly and shamelessly cloning every one of its original features from the TextMate editor, and just copy/pasting its entire ecosystem, without contributing anything back. For years there was no special support for actually working on custom features from within Sublime Text, so if you wanted to create new language grammars or syntax highlighting modes etc. you needed to do it from within TextMate. Sublime users would come to the TextMate IRC channel to complain about particular language bundle features that were buggy in the not-quite-compatible environment of ST, and ask TM users to fix it for them. Kind of comical really. Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool. My impression is that the Sublime programmer didn’t really understand the underlying philosophy behind many of the features he cloned, and kind of screwed up a bunch of the subtler details. (This isn’t really surprising; I’d say it pretty much always happens when anyone just copies something that exists; they seldom perfectly understand the context or ideas of the original creator, so the copy is always at least a bit degraded/distorted, with less clarity of vision.) Sublime does have the advantage of working on more platforms though.
- intruder 10y ago
  Can you give some examples of what those features are?
- halflings 10y ago
  I tried both TextMate and Sublime Text and find ST to be much better for what I do (web, Python and text editing). Copying or not, "badly designed" or not, in the end Sublime Text is blazing fast even on a big files, extensible with the help of Package Control and has some native features (like multiple cursors) that make the difference.
- TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
  I switched to ST2 after about 20 years of VI(m). I happily paid the money to NOT have to deal with 50 different plugins designed to get VIm to, essentially, work like ST, with the side bar and tabs. I switched to Mac as my primary desktop not long after, and looked at TextMate. I WANT to support the Apple "ecosystem" in ways like using a "Mac" text editor, but I still work on Linux (and Windows). Not having cross-platform capability is a deal breaker for me, and ST is just as good as VIm in this regard.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  > Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool. Do people still actually use TextMate? Judging by their website [1], for example the screenshots taken under an ancient version of OS X, I thought it'd been abandoned years ago. The last post on the blog is in October 2014. [1]: https://macromates.com https://macromates.com [2]: http://blog.macromates.com http://blog.macromates.com
  - b3b0p 10y ago
    Tons of people still use it and it's being very actively developed. Check out the GitHub: https://github.com/textmate/textmate https://github.com/textmate/textmate It's constantly being updated.

travisty 10y ago

The $70 price tag has been an amazing gift to the developer community as well. Without it we wouldn't have so many options for great editors that are totally free and open source. Had they simply priced sublime around $30, they would have sold 10x or more licenses and not have to deal with the piracy problem nearly as much. Sublime is a great product, but that's one of the worst business decisions I've ever seen.

draw_down 10y ago

100% agreed, worth every penny.

lawnchair_larry 10y ago

It's probably not that they don't have $70, but that they don't have time and it's easier not to bother. Buying software at big companies can be a pain.

danieldk 10y ago
Ok, let's rephrase: anybody with a Google salary can afford Sublime Text. Also, when Sublime Text has a reasonable amount of popularity within Google, they could just purchase a site license for N users.

gotofritz 10y ago

Sorry, I must disagree. For 70 bucks you get developers who hardly fix bugs, who don't listen to users (I posted a few feature requests in their site and was banned) and with a crazy architecture (try and change the highlight colour of brackets in BracketHighlighter and see what I mean). They are worse than Microsoft. Screw them. It was great when it came out, but now Atom is better.

bobsoap 10y ago
I share your sentiment about the buggy software and the unresponsive devs; I moved to Atom for the same reason. However great Atom is though, it's unbelievably slow and nearly unusable because of that. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a better alternative since.
- yAnonymous 10y ago
  Are you using the latest version? I can hardly see a speed difference compared to VS Code anymore, even for big projects and files. It's certainly very far from being unusably slow. >buggy software and the unresponsive devs I mainly use VS Code for that reason. It does feel a bit more polished and Atom is missing some much requested features, most notably a list of open files in the sidebar (the plugins that offer this are all terrible).
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    Tried Atom for Mac right now. Opening a tiny (10k rows) csv file took multiple seconds, opening a larger (100k rows) csv put out a warning about potentially taking a lot of time and in a second simply crashed before loading it.
    - yAnonymous 10y ago
      Opening a CSV with 100k rows takes about 10s for me and is pretty workable with an i7 and 16GB RAM. Selecting and editing text is almost instant.

petters 10y ago

Must be a simple mistake. You can definitely get a ST license at Google if you want to.

toxican 10y ago
I know that I often put off inputting my license on a fresh install because it's kind of a pain to hunt down. Or at least it's easier to dismiss the occasional notification than it is to log into my email and try to find the license key.

jasim 10y ago

The fact that it is a pseudo-free piece of software is one of the biggest reasons for its success (apart from its blazing speed and the rugged, minimalist engineering aesthetic). People just get used to the occasional nag screen as a sort of background noise. I'm hopelessly tied to IntelliJ's amazing IDEs for any sort of programming, but Sublime is my EDIT.COM for all other writing, especially note-keeping. I used it in that capacity for around a year, guiltily enduring the nag-screen, before I got around to buying it. This free-but-nag approach (not Nagware - too negative) was unusual for the times, but it reminded me of the Shareware days when successful software like PKZip spread virally, but extracted commercial value only when the users felt like it.

danieldk 10y ago
The fact that it is a pseudo-free piece of software is one of the biggest reasons for its success I think the demise (in terms of active development) of TextMate should not be understated as a factor in ST's success. At the time Sublime Text 2 came out, a lot of TextMate users were frustrated with the lack of progress on TextMate and hopped on the ST bandwagon. Ironically, ST had the same fate for a while. But it's good to see that there is some movement again.

mstade 10y ago

> Those $70 are definitely worth every penny. I've said it before, and I'll say it again – the fact that ST saves buffers no matter what has saved my butt so many times I can't even count. The effort it would've taken to restore the lost data had those buffers not been stored would've costed way more than $70 every time. Even if ST was worse in every possible way than other editors (and it's not,) I'd still pay money for this (and I did.) I don't know if my license will stop working when ST3 comes out of beta (I think I bought it for ST2, but it was so long ago at this point I don't even know) but if it does I'll happily shell out another $70. ST is one of the few tools I use that never, ever caused me any grief. Not once. It just works, works really well, and does all I need it to do.

TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
Agreed. The ability to paste some data I may or may not need after a couple more hours of debugging, and have that buffer save through a reboot -- without needing to save it to a file -- is something I've come to rely on. I only realized this when I tried Visual Studio Code, and noticed that it wasn't doing the same thing.
- glogla 10y ago
  This is the reason I stopped using Atom and returned to ST. It's just so practical.
  - matt_kantor 10y ago
    For anyone else who is missing this feature from Atom, try the save-session package.
    - jdi 10y ago
      I see on the package page that all its functionality has been merged into Atom itself.
      - 10y ago

onetom 10y ago

I have a license too but as I'm moving between workstations and sometimes between accounts even on the same machine, I don't always paste the license in, because it would be extra effort to dig it up and copy-paste it... I bought it on day one when I discovered that Sublime supports Windows, Linux & Mac. I wanted a "modern editor" after vim, which works the same way across platforms, easy to install and configure, supports proportional fonts and does save on focus lost, yet still neither a memory hog nor a snail. I never would have paid just for getting rid of the nag screen, but I was so impressed with its quality, I just had to express my gratitude by paying. :)