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Can someone please explain to me why $80 for Sublime Text is a good price for a text editor? I'm not flaming, I genuinely want to know. I've tried Gedit, Atom,

Can someone please explain to me why $80 for Sublime Text is a good price for a text editor? I'm not flaming, I genuinely want to know. I've tried Gedit, Atom, VS Code, Notepad++ and I fail to see what Sublime offers over those to justify the price.

coldtea 9y ago
>I'm not flaming, I genuinely want to know. I've tried Gedit, Atom, VS Code, Notepad++ and I fail to see what Sublime offers over those to justify the price. It's better than Gedit in every way, it's way faster and more lightweight than Atom and VS Code, and it has a far better plugin ecosystem and functionality than Notepad++. I'd pay triple the price.
- amelius 9y ago
  > it's way faster and more lightweight Now you've got me wondering why editor speed is actually a thing.
  - colecut 9y ago
    It matters for huge files
    - Touche 9y ago
      So not source code, for the most part.
      - mehs 9y ago
        I don't use Sublime Text as an IDE (I have Intellij for that), mainly to edit scripts, large CSV files, as a scratchpad etc. but It's always open and increases my productivity a lot.
  - xapata 9y ago
    You mean why some editors are slow or why I care? Not sure about the first. I care about speed because I like to use "large" files. I prefer a few large files to many small files.
  - buttscicles 9y ago
    Slow software is frustrating. A text editor is a tool, it should help and not hinder.
  - Pxl_Buzzard 9y ago
    There are a lot of factors that play into the speed (perceived and real) of an editor. Sublime is written in C, which is generally recognized as a performant language when used correctly. In contrast, Atom and VS Code are Electron[1] apps, which mean they have to deal with browser optimization. They both use a lot of tricks[2] to operate as quickly as they do. And in all editors, one bad extension can kill performance, from my recent experience Resharper in Visual Studio increases startup time by 3x. An editor is not as simple as displaying lines of text a la Notepad, different editors optimize for different use cases. 1. https://electron.atom.io/ https://electron.atom.io/ 2. http://blog.atom.io/2017/06/22/a-new-approach-to-text-rendering.html http://blog.atom.io/2017/06/22/a-new-approach-to-text-render...
    - saagarjha 9y ago
      Sublime Text is written is C++ FYI.
  - hughes 9y ago
    Having tried Atom, it's the main reason I stuck with Sublime. Somehow, even typing was slow in some larger files...
  - melq 9y ago
    Try using something like xcode or a jetbrains IDE with a large codebase (for the record I like jetbrains software, but it can be slow comparatively). edit: not sure I correctly understood the parent
  - coldtea 9y ago
    The same reason its annoying when any other kind of program is slow, especially interactive ones. I don't want to see freezes for 2-3 seconds for some GC run, I don't want the letters to appear several 100ms after I've typed, I don't want to wait minutes for it to parse a large-ish file or update the autocomplete suggestions. https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
  - eggpy 9y ago
    Not only does the editor need to track project folders and open files, even something seemingly simple like syntax highlighting can be surprisingly complex[0]. The editor needs to be able to read your inputs (mouse and keyboard) and represent those changes onscreen just like every other piece of software. It needs to repaint the screen with your changes and, depending on the complexity of the editor, load and implement a host of features (auto-complete? bracket matching? code indentation? code standards a la pep8? updates to source control?), with every single keypress and ideally in a matter of milliseconds. All of that takes memory and different editors make different sacrifices. Of course the extent to which this happens is the whole reason there are different editors. If all you want to do is write text with zero features, then speed isn't an issue at all and you can just write directly in your terminal to a single file with pico or something. [0] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/02/08/syntax-highlighting-optimizations https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/02/08/syntax-highli...
    - vacri 9y ago
      > even something seemingly simple like syntax highlighting can be surprisingly complex I was troubleshooting something with a colleague who was using Atom, and every time he opened a new file, it'd take somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds before the syntax highlighting was applied. As someone who's in and out of files all day, that'd drive me bananas.
nichochar 9y ago
It's highly likely that OP simply stumbled upon it, or someone recommended it, and now he learned it and is used to it and knows how productive it can be. Thing is, same is true for any other good IDE, of which there are plenty. Personally, it always blows my mind that people don't use VIM :) if they actually spent 5-20hours learning VIM correctly they would not touch these inferior pretty looking UIs
- dheera 9y ago
  Agree! I do almost everything in VIM for file-efficient languages and environments (NodeJS projects, Python projects, HTML, C++ ROS packages, most things that promote DRY coding, etc.) For file-inefficient environments (e.g. Java/Android -- 79 files for a "hello world" Android app!) I have to grudgingly use an IDE because I have no idea how to update the 78 other manifest/gradle/workspace/resource/etc. files based on the 1 file I change and the IDE takes care of the magic, as much as I hate that way of working.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cletus 9y ago
  Whereas I view vim as simply a necessary evil and I mean "necessary" in the sense that I want to edit something over ssh. Bret Viktor's oft-quoted "Inventing on Principle" talk touches on this subject where a lot of research has shown that bimodal editors are worse. While I can't argue for how true that statement is, it's certainly been my experience. I always find it jarring to think I'm in command mode but I'm actually in edit mode or vice versa. Any vim user has had the experience of pasting text in command mode. I just absolutely hate bimodal editors. Additionally, staunch vim (and emacs) users I know seem to spend an inordinate amount of time screwing around with plugins to get some pale version of behaviour you get out the box on any halfway decent IDE or even text editor. I feel the same way about learning yet another series of keyboard shortcuts for, say, tmux/screen. You could argue the mouse is slower. I'm not sure if this actually holds up to empirical measurement (or at least not to the degree that's claimed) but the point is, the barrier for entry is so much lower. You can just click around and find things. If you find yourself doing something a lot, you can find out what the keyboard shortcut is. Thus you don't need to spend 50 hours upfront on a GUI editor.
marcuslager 9y ago
I bought a license simply beacuse Sublime Text was the only editor that could open a wikipedia json data dump. I installed many editors before I more than willingly paid for Sublime.
- geerlingguy 9y ago
  For me, same thing: no other editor gives me the decent UI of a GUI-based editor, but with the speed of vim when working with large text files (e.g. 10MB+). I will often use sed or other CLI tools to parse through giant files (1GB+), but sublime only takes a short bit to load in a pretty hefty file, or a do regex search across entire projects with multiple-GB of files, and it works natively on Mac and Windows, so even when I'm forced to work on something on my Windows 10 laptop, I can be productive. Well worth whatever I paid for it 4 years ago.
chj 9y ago
It's a dead simple editor, comparing to VIM or Emacs (both I used a lot). Everything behaves just as you would expect. And it's fast, it's small, and it's got a lot of packages. What more do you want?
- uji 9y ago
  Terminal support? To be fair, sublime text is great and I use it sometimes, but if your job requires you to work over ssh then vim definitely beats all modern editors.
  - chj 9y ago
    Yeah, I agree. That's when I use vim/emacs.
paradite 9y ago
I think it is in a similar situation as JavaScript. It is not strictly better than its competitors, but it still manages to attract an entire community of people[1] to contribute actively to the project and its popularity. [1] https://packagecontrol.io/stats https://packagecontrol.io/stats
rublev 9y ago
Nothing is faster for me when opening gargantuan text files. It's never broken for me and never lagged either. I think that's pretty impressive, not to mention the customizability options.
- dexterdog 9y ago
  Define gargantuan. I just opened a 900MB CSV and it choked part-way through and eventually opened after about a minute. Windows 10, 8GB RAM and running on an SSD. Not to mention if you hit ctrl-f and search for something in the file. Another lock-up for a few minutes while it tries to figure out highlighting. This is something I've reported to them. I have never considered Sublime to be a good handler of large files.
  - cdelsolar 9y ago
    > Windows
    - dexterdog 9y ago
      Same problem on my mac with 16GB RAM and also an SSD
  - rublev 9y ago
    Opened a 1GB text file on MacOS 15gb ram and SSD.
p0nce 9y ago
The small things are really well done.
dabockster 9y ago
It has almost all of the features of the Electron based editors (aka Atom) but with a C++ backend instead of HTML/JS toilet water. So you have all the customization you could ever want with the speed of low level code.
bitwize 9y ago
It's an organic, artisanal text editor lovingly hand-carved from gap-buffer wood by craftsmen from a remote Tibetan village. A steal at thrice the price!
kylebebak 9y ago
Speed and stability, search, command palette, file navigation, Goto. And the excellent Python plugin API, which has made the plugin ecosystem so vibrant. Here's one I wrote, https://github.com/kylebebak/Requester https://github.com/kylebebak/Requester, an HTTP client that goes toe to toe with Paw and Postman on features and outdoes them on usability. I couldn't have have written something like this for any other editor, or any other platform.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zerr 9y ago
Agree, yet even SlickEdit - which costs several times more, is still running strong. I wonder what kind of audience pays for it.

coldtea 9y ago

>I'm not flaming, I genuinely want to know. I've tried Gedit, Atom, VS Code, Notepad++ and I fail to see what Sublime offers over those to justify the price. It's better than Gedit in every way, it's way faster and more lightweight than Atom and VS Code, and it has a far better plugin ecosystem and functionality than Notepad++. I'd pay triple the price.

amelius 9y ago
> it's way faster and more lightweight Now you've got me wondering why editor speed is actually a thing.
- colecut 9y ago
  It matters for huge files
  - Touche 9y ago
    So not source code, for the most part.
    - mehs 9y ago
      I don't use Sublime Text as an IDE (I have Intellij for that), mainly to edit scripts, large CSV files, as a scratchpad etc. but It's always open and increases my productivity a lot.
- xapata 9y ago
  You mean why some editors are slow or why I care? Not sure about the first. I care about speed because I like to use "large" files. I prefer a few large files to many small files.
- buttscicles 9y ago
  Slow software is frustrating. A text editor is a tool, it should help and not hinder.
- Pxl_Buzzard 9y ago
  There are a lot of factors that play into the speed (perceived and real) of an editor. Sublime is written in C, which is generally recognized as a performant language when used correctly. In contrast, Atom and VS Code are Electron[1] apps, which mean they have to deal with browser optimization. They both use a lot of tricks[2] to operate as quickly as they do. And in all editors, one bad extension can kill performance, from my recent experience Resharper in Visual Studio increases startup time by 3x. An editor is not as simple as displaying lines of text a la Notepad, different editors optimize for different use cases. 1. https://electron.atom.io/ https://electron.atom.io/ 2. http://blog.atom.io/2017/06/22/a-new-approach-to-text-rendering.html http://blog.atom.io/2017/06/22/a-new-approach-to-text-render...
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    Sublime Text is written is C++ FYI.
- hughes 9y ago
  Having tried Atom, it's the main reason I stuck with Sublime. Somehow, even typing was slow in some larger files...
- melq 9y ago
  Try using something like xcode or a jetbrains IDE with a large codebase (for the record I like jetbrains software, but it can be slow comparatively). edit: not sure I correctly understood the parent
- coldtea 9y ago
  The same reason its annoying when any other kind of program is slow, especially interactive ones. I don't want to see freezes for 2-3 seconds for some GC run, I don't want the letters to appear several 100ms after I've typed, I don't want to wait minutes for it to parse a large-ish file or update the autocomplete suggestions. https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
- eggpy 9y ago
  Not only does the editor need to track project folders and open files, even something seemingly simple like syntax highlighting can be surprisingly complex[0]. The editor needs to be able to read your inputs (mouse and keyboard) and represent those changes onscreen just like every other piece of software. It needs to repaint the screen with your changes and, depending on the complexity of the editor, load and implement a host of features (auto-complete? bracket matching? code indentation? code standards a la pep8? updates to source control?), with every single keypress and ideally in a matter of milliseconds. All of that takes memory and different editors make different sacrifices. Of course the extent to which this happens is the whole reason there are different editors. If all you want to do is write text with zero features, then speed isn't an issue at all and you can just write directly in your terminal to a single file with pico or something. [0] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/02/08/syntax-highlighting-optimizations https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/02/08/syntax-highli...
  - vacri 9y ago
    > even something seemingly simple like syntax highlighting can be surprisingly complex I was troubleshooting something with a colleague who was using Atom, and every time he opened a new file, it'd take somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds before the syntax highlighting was applied. As someone who's in and out of files all day, that'd drive me bananas.

nichochar 9y ago

It's highly likely that OP simply stumbled upon it, or someone recommended it, and now he learned it and is used to it and knows how productive it can be. Thing is, same is true for any other good IDE, of which there are plenty. Personally, it always blows my mind that people don't use VIM :) if they actually spent 5-20hours learning VIM correctly they would not touch these inferior pretty looking UIs

dheera 9y ago
Agree! I do almost everything in VIM for file-efficient languages and environments (NodeJS projects, Python projects, HTML, C++ ROS packages, most things that promote DRY coding, etc.) For file-inefficient environments (e.g. Java/Android -- 79 files for a "hello world" Android app!) I have to grudgingly use an IDE because I have no idea how to update the 78 other manifest/gradle/workspace/resource/etc. files based on the 1 file I change and the IDE takes care of the magic, as much as I hate that way of working.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cletus 9y ago
Whereas I view vim as simply a necessary evil and I mean "necessary" in the sense that I want to edit something over ssh. Bret Viktor's oft-quoted "Inventing on Principle" talk touches on this subject where a lot of research has shown that bimodal editors are worse. While I can't argue for how true that statement is, it's certainly been my experience. I always find it jarring to think I'm in command mode but I'm actually in edit mode or vice versa. Any vim user has had the experience of pasting text in command mode. I just absolutely hate bimodal editors. Additionally, staunch vim (and emacs) users I know seem to spend an inordinate amount of time screwing around with plugins to get some pale version of behaviour you get out the box on any halfway decent IDE or even text editor. I feel the same way about learning yet another series of keyboard shortcuts for, say, tmux/screen. You could argue the mouse is slower. I'm not sure if this actually holds up to empirical measurement (or at least not to the degree that's claimed) but the point is, the barrier for entry is so much lower. You can just click around and find things. If you find yourself doing something a lot, you can find out what the keyboard shortcut is. Thus you don't need to spend 50 hours upfront on a GUI editor.

marcuslager 9y ago

I bought a license simply beacuse Sublime Text was the only editor that could open a wikipedia json data dump. I installed many editors before I more than willingly paid for Sublime.

geerlingguy 9y ago
For me, same thing: no other editor gives me the decent UI of a GUI-based editor, but with the speed of vim when working with large text files (e.g. 10MB+). I will often use sed or other CLI tools to parse through giant files (1GB+), but sublime only takes a short bit to load in a pretty hefty file, or a do regex search across entire projects with multiple-GB of files, and it works natively on Mac and Windows, so even when I'm forced to work on something on my Windows 10 laptop, I can be productive. Well worth whatever I paid for it 4 years ago.

chj 9y ago

It's a dead simple editor, comparing to VIM or Emacs (both I used a lot). Everything behaves just as you would expect. And it's fast, it's small, and it's got a lot of packages. What more do you want?

uji 9y ago
Terminal support? To be fair, sublime text is great and I use it sometimes, but if your job requires you to work over ssh then vim definitely beats all modern editors.
- chj 9y ago
  Yeah, I agree. That's when I use vim/emacs.

paradite 9y ago

I think it is in a similar situation as JavaScript. It is not strictly better than its competitors, but it still manages to attract an entire community of people[1] to contribute actively to the project and its popularity. [1] https://packagecontrol.io/stats https://packagecontrol.io/stats

rublev 9y ago

Nothing is faster for me when opening gargantuan text files. It's never broken for me and never lagged either. I think that's pretty impressive, not to mention the customizability options.

dexterdog 9y ago
Define gargantuan. I just opened a 900MB CSV and it choked part-way through and eventually opened after about a minute. Windows 10, 8GB RAM and running on an SSD. Not to mention if you hit ctrl-f and search for something in the file. Another lock-up for a few minutes while it tries to figure out highlighting. This is something I've reported to them. I have never considered Sublime to be a good handler of large files.
- cdelsolar 9y ago
  > Windows
  - dexterdog 9y ago
    Same problem on my mac with 16GB RAM and also an SSD
- rublev 9y ago
  Opened a 1GB text file on MacOS 15gb ram and SSD.

p0nce 9y ago

The small things are really well done.

dabockster 9y ago

It has almost all of the features of the Electron based editors (aka Atom) but with a C++ backend instead of HTML/JS toilet water. So you have all the customization you could ever want with the speed of low level code.

bitwize 9y ago

It's an organic, artisanal text editor lovingly hand-carved from gap-buffer wood by craftsmen from a remote Tibetan village. A steal at thrice the price!

kylebebak 9y ago

Speed and stability, search, command palette, file navigation, Goto. And the excellent Python plugin API, which has made the plugin ecosystem so vibrant. Here's one I wrote, https://github.com/kylebebak/Requester https://github.com/kylebebak/Requester, an HTTP client that goes toe to toe with Paw and Postman on features and outdoes them on usability. I couldn't have have written something like this for any other editor, or any other platform.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

zerr 9y ago

Agree, yet even SlickEdit - which costs several times more, is still running strong. I wonder what kind of audience pays for it.