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Something that I didn't like about Sublime was the random radio silence. They'd do a few regular beta releases, then just randomly _complete_ radio silence for

by dflock 9y ago

Something that I didn't like about Sublime was the random radio silence. They'd do a few regular beta releases, then just randomly _complete_ radio silence for months, a year or so - then, bam, another release, some "I'm not dead" activity on the forum from jon, then randomly silent again - maybe for a month, maybe a year - maybe forever. The editor was good - although not free of bugs - but that complete lack of communication - did I just buy dead software? will there _ever_ be another release? That makes it hard to have confidence that the software will continue to be supported - and hard to build a community around. The plugin ecosystem has definitely suffered a lot because of this stop-start cycle. Bear in mind that the bugs that Sublime _does_ have often hit plugin authors hardest and they're the ones that need docs & help from the original developer, who's often been completely AWOL for months or years at a time.

horsawlarway 9y ago
This pretty closely matches my experience. I was trying to develop plugins for ST3 and it was a complete bitch. Documentation is rare, often wrong, and the best you can do is try to find another plugin and dig through the source for that to determine how to implement something. Or you can ask a question and... radio silence for months. So I left. I went to VSCode and Atom, both of which are more active and (total blessing for plugin developers) have source code available for viewing. I really like Sublime. I think it's a great editor. I don't use it because I have better things to spend my time on than hoping a single dev gets the bandwidth to answer my question, or that I can hunt down some obscure plugin that happens to have the correct 'magic' that's not documented anywhere.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
Same here. Other than games, Sublime was the last proprietary software I purchased, that was 2012. I used it for a few months and I had no issues that I can remember but the radio silence started to get a little worrisome. I started thinking I might be investing too much into the ecosystem and developing muscle memory I will have a hard time breaking. I don't like my primary tools having an uncertain future and a text editor is the primariest tool of all to a developer. I switched to Vim. The experience is what set me on the path to preferring free, open source tools where ever possible, the lesson was well worth $60.

by dflock 9y ago

horsawlarway 9y ago

This pretty closely matches my experience. I was trying to develop plugins for ST3 and it was a complete bitch. Documentation is rare, often wrong, and the best you can do is try to find another plugin and dig through the source for that to determine how to implement something. Or you can ask a question and... radio silence for months. So I left. I went to VSCode and Atom, both of which are more active and (total blessing for plugin developers) have source code available for viewing. I really like Sublime. I think it's a great editor. I don't use it because I have better things to spend my time on than hoping a single dev gets the bandwidth to answer my question, or that I can hunt down some obscure plugin that happens to have the correct 'magic' that's not documented anywhere.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

Same here. Other than games, Sublime was the last proprietary software I purchased, that was 2012. I used it for a few months and I had no issues that I can remember but the radio silence started to get a little worrisome. I started thinking I might be investing too much into the ecosystem and developing muscle memory I will have a hard time breaking. I don't like my primary tools having an uncertain future and a text editor is the primariest tool of all to a developer. I switched to Vim. The experience is what set me on the path to preferring free, open source tools where ever possible, the lesson was well worth $60.