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True.. I have never bothered to find out how the ST community grew so much. It's a paid product and somehow people have built plugins for a package manager that

True.. I have never bothered to find out how the ST community grew so much. It's a paid product and somehow people have built plugins for a package manager that is not even part of the core IDE. Does anyone know the history here?

oblio 9y ago
I think it got really popular, especially in the Rails community, because of the flashy multi-cursor demos on the site. I believe it was the first CUA/mainstream editor with multiple cursors.
- bronson 9y ago
  Pretty sure you're thinking of TextMate. RailsCasts probably sold thousands of TextMate licenses, and DHH's screencasts thousands more. No doubt some Rails devs use Sublime but it's nowhere near as popular as Vim.
  - oblio 9y ago
    I could be mixing them up, it's been a while. But I do remember some spiffy videos demoing the multi-cursor thing and I don't think TextMate supports (supported?) those. I also vaguely remember that most of these demos were on Macs and they were showing off editing of Ruby code. But as I was saying, it's been a while :)
wingerlang 9y ago
For starters you can use it for free indefinitely. The package manager might not be in the core product, but I recall it was bought by Sublime so it's official. Also a really really solid editor.
pvg 9y ago
I really have no issue with paying for it and have easily got my money's worth out of it. I just had some naive hope it might develop into something emacs-like (in terms of extensibility) but less crufty and it's mostly become less-than-emacs-like but just as crufty.
gnaritas 9y ago
When Textmate stalled between versions for years on end, Sublime came in with Textmate compatibility and simply scooped up a huge userbase who wanted something like Textmate on other platforms or were tired of waiting on Textmate to release a new version. Sublime is a Textmate clone that outdid the thing it was cloning but worked with all the existing Textmate bundles. That's how.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  Yep, I think this hits the nail on the head. I'd add that on Windows there wasn't a good, native, option past Notepad++ (which is fairly limited in comparison).

oblio 9y ago

I think it got really popular, especially in the Rails community, because of the flashy multi-cursor demos on the site. I believe it was the first CUA/mainstream editor with multiple cursors.

bronson 9y ago
Pretty sure you're thinking of TextMate. RailsCasts probably sold thousands of TextMate licenses, and DHH's screencasts thousands more. No doubt some Rails devs use Sublime but it's nowhere near as popular as Vim.
- oblio 9y ago
  I could be mixing them up, it's been a while. But I do remember some spiffy videos demoing the multi-cursor thing and I don't think TextMate supports (supported?) those. I also vaguely remember that most of these demos were on Macs and they were showing off editing of Ruby code. But as I was saying, it's been a while :)

wingerlang 9y ago

For starters you can use it for free indefinitely. The package manager might not be in the core product, but I recall it was bought by Sublime so it's official. Also a really really solid editor.

pvg 9y ago

I really have no issue with paying for it and have easily got my money's worth out of it. I just had some naive hope it might develop into something emacs-like (in terms of extensibility) but less crufty and it's mostly become less-than-emacs-like but just as crufty.

gnaritas 9y ago

When Textmate stalled between versions for years on end, Sublime came in with Textmate compatibility and simply scooped up a huge userbase who wanted something like Textmate on other platforms or were tired of waiting on Textmate to release a new version. Sublime is a Textmate clone that outdid the thing it was cloning but worked with all the existing Textmate bundles. That's how.

danpalmer 9y ago
Yep, I think this hits the nail on the head. I'd add that on Windows there wasn't a good, native, option past Notepad++ (which is fairly limited in comparison).