23 ms·

Sublime Text 4 [video]

338 points by dsego 6y ago

pytlicek 6y ago
I was a big fan of Sublime Text, but during those years of inactivity I got used to VScode. This I think surpassed the Sublime Text in all respects. In my opinion, ST4 is no longer up-to-date and uninteresting.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  I bounced back and forth for the longest time... ST3 was way more performant on my 2 core, 8MB desktop. Then I upgraded to 16 core 3700 amd with 64MB Ram... Electron apps don't leave a dent in my performance anymore, so it's a non-issue and vscode has a lot bigger community, support, plugins, etc... Really, I don't think any other thing out there can compare except maybe vim/emacs but the learning curve to make it useful takes awhile and I keep giving up on that.
  - Thev00d00 6y ago
    The world would be a better place if you could run Electron apps on 64MB of RAM!
threatofrain 6y ago
Like for many Sublime used to be the go-to editor for a slick editing experience. Easiness for people who didn't want Vim but found JetBrains too heavy. But today I'm afraid Sublime is far behind VSC as a tool to empower developer productivity, and it reminds me of Nova at this point (too late). Also no mention of the feature that changed the face of the ecosystem — Intellisense or the language server protocol.
- warmwaffles 6y ago
  I still use sublime text everyday. By far the boot speed, zero lag between file changes and other slight annoyances are not there. Plus the integration of Sublime Merge has been fantastic.
  - laddershoe 6y ago
    Me too -- I live in Sublime Text most days. Hard to argue that VSCode wins on dev features, and most of my fellow developers use it for that reason. But I can't get past the speed; Sublime Text does everything instantly, while in VS Code, everything is just slightly laggy. To each their own, I guess, but given how much of my day editing text, it's hard to want to use a text editor that has noticeable lag. (Cue the usual rants about latency in 2021 on multi-GHz machines)
    - warmwaffles 6y ago
      I've also got most of the shortcuts committed to muscle memory and configured just the way I like it. Sunken cost fallacy is where I am headed. But I've always loved this editor and will continue to support it as long as they continue to support it.
  - kamranjon 6y ago
    I also love sublime merge, any time im screensharing with someone pairing on some code and we finish up i pop it open straight from sublime to review our changes and they always want to know what tool it is. They just produce really great software.
- ericcholis 6y ago
  I basically use Sublime in place of notepad on Windows at this point. If I need anything beyond advanced text editing; I'm using an IDE.
  - tored 6y ago
    I use Sublime Text as excellent grep/search tool. Superfast, easy to write filters for include or exclude, can quickly open the matching file and you can see it with proper syntax highlighting.
  - systems 6y ago
    then why not use notepad++ its free and open source, unlike sublime text
- patjenk 6y ago
  I use sublime.txt everyday. The main purpose is reading, editing, searching a “scratch.txt” file I have been prepending to for the last 11 years. Sublime loads, saves, and searches it better than any other text editor. I have found it’s a helpful way to save random lists, notes, links, and common chunks of code. It’s also my go to for wrangling weird txt.
  - thefz 6y ago
    I have a similar use case, although I am not a power user. I use it to open often giant .csv and .txt very very fast. I use it to quickly edit SQL because the select-lines command (ctrl+alt+up/down) makes batch edits of indented code a breeze. I use it to sometimes format and arrange weirdly formatted C#. I use it often for its lightning fast search and replace function. It has grown on me over NP++ which is still a very very nice text editor.
- tored 6y ago
  Wasn't one problem that Sublime Text's plugin API was somewhat lacking, you couldn't do any advanced GUI in it?
  - bogwog 6y ago
    This is a big one. Being able to create a tab/window to view custom data would be awesome, like a live HTML preview, OpenGL surface, graph rendered from an open data file, custom image format, etc. I wouldn't mind the core ST app being so bare bones if the plugin API was more powerful, but unfortunately it is pretty limited in what you can do.
    - wbond 6y ago
      We've got quite a number of API enhancements in the next version, including HTML sheets for non-text content. That said, we are definitely focused on being first and foremost a really fast text editor that makes it easy to read, navigate and write code. Trying to implement a browser or be an IDE are outside of our area of focus.
- klibertp 6y ago
  > Intellisense Could we please call it "autocompletion" instead? The feature did not originate from Microsoft IDEs, and while they are free to call it whatever when talking about their editors, the rest of the world (well, that 2m^2 part centered on me, at least) would appreciate if we used more general terminology.
  - tehbeard 6y ago
    I think at this point it's safe to assume Intellisense is fairly genericized and refers more to an "autocompletion" that takes additional information/context into account than a specific $company's implementation.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    I always understood "intellisense" as a way to say "contextual autocompletion based on structured information". So it is a form of autocompletion, but one that adapts gracefully to the context (like an IDE autocompletion experience). Autocompletion could just mean that you have some string matching (more like basic shell completion). It's good to have a way to specify when you're talking about the former meaning and I do not know another term for this than "intellisense".
    - bogwog 6y ago
      In my experience, "Intellisense" is shorthand for "broken autocompletion" I don't use Microsoft IDEs often, but have had experience with them many times over the past 15 years. And every single time, intellisense would freeze, get confused, or just stop working completely. Not once in 15 years have I had a passable experience with it, so nowadays when I'm in Microsoft land I always immediately disable intellisense before I start working.
      - deleted 6y ago
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      - dgellow 6y ago
        I completely understand your feelings. I also always faced quite a lot of issues with Visual Studio (not vscode) autocompletion when trying to write C++. But when it decides to work the experience is great. Visual Studio Code on the other hand is just fantastic. I was a hardcore emacs user until I switched to VSCode as my main editor a few years ago due to the crazy good auto-completion experience.
- tehbeard 6y ago
  Sublime still holds king for ad-hoc grepping around large files. For dev work though, my daily driver is VSC at this point. I still use Sublime for notes as well, but that's more so I don't have to think about how closing/opening half a dozen workspaces in VSC affects which notes are open.
- wbond 6y ago
  This is a little teaser of some of the more easily demonstrated visual changes in ST4, but we've got a huge collection of new features, tweaks and bug fixes coming. The community is actively maintaining an LSP package, and we've added a number of features in ST4 that the protocol requires, such as UTF-16 diffs.
  - kamranjon 6y ago
    I'm really excited about the new release, thanks for building one of the fastest text editors in the game. I use it every day and couldn't develop without it.
  - hn8788 6y ago
    I love sublime text, but I really wish you'd reconsider relying on a community LSP package. There was an issue a year or two ago where the LSP package couldn't be installed due to a dependency issue in the package, and since it's a community package, they could only fix it when they had enough spare time. I think it was a 1-2 month timeframe where there was no way for new installs to have LSP functionality since it required a third-party plugin.
    - wbond 6y ago
      We looked into the protocol, but unfortunately it made a number of poor architectural choices that leads to many language servers not implementing the protocol properly. This effectively requires custom integrations for most language servers. That wouldn't make sense to do in the core of the editor, since we'll never be primary users on the vast majority of servers. The open source model makes sense since it will need to have tweaks and fixes to support various language servers. That combined with a very small development team (six engineers across our two products), would probably lead to slower development, and it would be tied to the release cadence of the main product.
      - hn8788 6y ago
        That makes sense, I didn't know how small the team was. Thanks for the response, looking forward to ST4.
- psychometry 6y ago
  Jetbrains is extremely fast for me these days because the indexing is good. The fact that the IDE and Java are using 1-2 GBs RAM isn't really a problem when any dev machine is going to have at least 8 GBs.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    That's surprising. I used IntelliJ today after a pause and found it unbearably slow. For instance, scrolling a ~6 page source file lags so much it's extremely irritating. It's also fantastically bloated. There's so much stuff I have to disable to make it barely usable. And most of the supposedly helpful lightbulbs suggest changes that make absolutely no sense. I can absolutely believe that IntelliJ has its fans because it has a ton of features, but for me it's just unusable.
  - benbristow 6y ago
    8GB is low for a dev machine nowadays. Your browser uses 1/2GB, IDE using 1/2GB+ (JetBrains Rider often uses like 4GB for me), then the OS itself, database servers, virtualization overhead (e.g. Docker) and other tools. Easily used up. 16GB is the bare minimum for a dev machine in 2021 IMO. Anything higher than that is 'nice to have' unless you're doing heavy stuff like data analysis, machine learning/AI, games development etc.
systems 6y ago
quick editing : Notepad++ coding : vscode , jetbrains pim : emacs org-mode I think sublime text is somewhere between quick editing and coding, but there are better options for both
- kuroguro 6y ago
  All coding: Notepad2 (one of the more updated forks) Need to find some reference or search whole folder: Sublime IDEs are too fat, the only time I pull one out is when I need to design a WPF desktop app or sth.
  - spiralx 6y ago
    Replacing the built-in Notepad app with Notepad2 with code folding is one of the first things I do when setting up a new Windows box. It's a tiny app that starts instantly and for viewing text/code files and small- to medium-sized edits it has almost everything - multi-cursor editing is the one thing I'm so used to now that I notice its lack, truly a first-world developer problem ;) F12 opens a file in Notepad2 in Directory Opus and `e FILE` does the same from Bash or PS, can't think of a time where I'd need someone more than Notepad2 but less than Sublime Text, or VS Code today. I've installed Notepad++ several times over the years and just never wanted to have to use it.
- generalEvie 6y ago
  I personally love Sublimetext for quick editing. Things like multiline selection on single documents. For anything else, vscode or jetbrains
- spupy 6y ago
  There's one killer feature of Sublime that I can't find anywhere else (on Linux at least) and it's the reason I still use it: Upon closing it persist even unsaved tabs, and those tabs are named after the first line of text. I find this incredibly helpful when juggling multiple snippets of code/logs, without having to think about saving or worrying about accidentally closing the window. Intellij Idea and Zim offer something similar, but they are clunky in comparison. Anyone know another text editor that offers this functionality and run on Linux?
eu 6y ago
Please release BSD binaries..
niahmiah 6y ago
Yawn. VSCode.
ultim8k 6y ago
Sublime may lack the feature richness of VSC and while I switched to the second a while ago for my day to day coding needs, it's still my editor of choice when I need to edit huge files or paste content coming from a website and I always have a sublime window open just in case I need to quickly type something.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  I only use sublime for sudo editing, cause it's easier to just install some nginx syntax highlighter, and ini/config into the sudo profile, and run sudo subl /etc than it is to use vscode, I mean vscode does ask "would you like to use sudo" but I'm not sure how good it is to use vscode for sudo editing or viewing of files... and I don't want to have to okay it on EVER file when I'm doing a lot of system edits for a new linux package I'm trying out and testing - like when I tried to get a system-wide proxy tool installed.
xattt 6y ago
Sublime has a sweet spot for LaTeX editing with Latextools.
nickelcitymario 6y ago
There are text editors and there are IDEs, and each has its place. Sublime Text is, to me, the best GUI text editor around. (For those with the patience to master them, Vim or Emacs may be both objectively and subjectively better. But I've never had that patience. Emacs has a hell of a steep learning curve.) You can't knock Sublime for not having the features of an IDE, because that's not what it is. If we keep pushing for Sublime to be as "full featured" as an IDE, we're gonna kill what makes it great. VSC seems to be trying to be both, and by all appearances, those who like it, like it a lot. I'm not in that group, but I admit that there may be something(s) outstanding about it that I just haven't yet appreciated.
- w4rh4wk5 6y ago
  I've been a Vim user for a long time and still use it today occasionally. VSCode has replaced most applications of Vim for me because of the good out-of-the-box experience for different programming languages. In VSCode all it typically takes to get started with a new language is to install one or two extensions, click one to three buttons, followed by a restart. Now you got syntax highlighting, auto-completion, go to definition, find all references, build system integration, test runners, debugging support, etc. You can also get these features in Vim or Emacs, but from my experience it takes a lot longer to setup and integrate properly.
  - mstipetic 6y ago
    I would pay a lot of money for a curated vim distribution that works out of the box. I've used vim heavily for years, and still nothing compares to it when things are working well, but every time I want to change something I get so frustrated. Every extension uses it's own set of principles, the learning curve is steep, error messages super vague. If anyone is looking for a side-hustle, I'd be your first customer
    - ctas 6y ago
      I'm building something like that. Feel free to reach out, would love to chat.
jcolella 6y ago
I used to be a big supporter and user of Sublime, using it for my day to day. Unfortunately, even though it still has faster boot time than VSC, the community around VSC is so much richer that it becomes a case of too little too late.
jokoon 6y ago
Yeah well, it's still impossible to fold blocks of code based on syntax and not on indentation. They decided they would not fix this, which is quite a shame. https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101 https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101
- Narretz 6y ago
  The last comment by a dev is from 2019 and indicates that this isn't ruled out. But if it's not in version 4 it's fair to assume that it's not gonna happen in the near future. https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101#issuecomment-474430869 https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101#issueco...
bogwog 6y ago
So after all this time the only thing they have to show is a handful of features that could've probably been implemented as plugins for ST3? I'm hoping there's a lot more, and that this video was just a rush job. I've been using ST3 as my exclusive development tool for the past ~5 years, and I've been very happy with it. It's extremely fast, stable, and customizable. I even have a bunch of custom plugins I've written to integrate with custom tools and workflows on different projects. But my biggest complaint is that the pace of development is glacial. The chances of them adding a feature you want/need is basically zero, so you shouldn't even bother asking. IMO, they should consider releasing it as open source software (at least partially), and accepting donations via a Patreon page or something similar.
- nickelcitymario 6y ago
  Your position is totally reasonable, but I would argue that ST is better off with a smaller feature set and a robust plugin ecosystem. The last thing I would want to see is for ST to become the Microsoft Word of text editors, i.e. a million built-in features, of which you might only use 5%. Addendum: It dawns on me that building the Microsoft Word of anything is probably not a bad goal, considering it's the dominant word processor. It's not what I would want in a text editor, but it may very well be what most people want most of the time.
  - hn8788 6y ago
    I think some features that are currently plugins could stand to be integrated into the main editor. For example, language server functionality is only available through a third-party plugin, and a year or two ago there was a couple month period where the plugin install was broken due to a dependency issue. Anyone who installed ST during that time would have been out of luck if they wanted to use progamming language plugins that required a language server.
    - nickelcitymario 6y ago
      I'm not entirely familiar with "language server functionality", but it sounds like something that isn't needed for most text editing situations. So it's a perfect candidate for a plugin. I'm not knocking this functionality. It's probably super helpful, useful, or downright required in the work you do. It sucks that the plugin was broken. However, the fact that the plugin was broken tells me there's a problem with the plugin ecosystem, not with the editor.
PascLeRasc 6y ago
Sublime is so, so good, no qualifications or buts about it. Startup is instant and the typing latency feels incredibly fast. Very thankful that it’s still being developed.
- jonemi 6y ago
  This is the most valuable feature for me. I love how lightweight and responsive it feels.
cyberlab 6y ago
Does anyone know if this is a valid point: If you can't code without a feature-rich text-editor, you might then ask: how good are you really at coding, and how much skill are you off-loading to the editor? Because if you can't code with Windows' notepad.exe you need to re-evaluate your perceived skill and your /reliance/ on an editor.
- b3kart 6y ago
  Doubt there's anyone who literally can't code without a full-fledged IDE. There's just people who are used to certain conveniences, and it would take them longer to write code without them. I don't see anything particularly wrong with that. Most professionals use tools that make their job easier, and might get worse at doing the job without these tools -- but so what?
- _benj 6y ago
  I don't think that that's a fair statement. I remember when I was learning Linux and in KDE there was this huge "Developer Tools" section... IDEs, UI designers, documentations tools, etc. I opened each one of those tools and had absolutely no clue how to use that! Looking at them now, they seems quite easy and similar, but that is only because I know how to program now. Think about MS Access. It could be said that you don't know how to use relational DBs is you can't write perfect SQL on a napkin, but MS Access is certainly a skill and just because it can make it easier to view/manipulate data doesn't invalidate the need of skill to use the tool.
- the_bigfatpanda 6y ago
  In my opinion, I don't think its a valid point. The main skill of a developer is problem solving, whether its business logic or code related problems like structure, integrations of different layers etc. If you can code in a notepad, good for you, but if an IDE or something like VSC or Sublime increase your productivity then that's more valuable then remembering the exact names of methods or imports
- bdcravens 6y ago
  The features that make a difference are the ones that aren't text editing. Bare minimum is file management, but things like integrated git, terminal, linters, are good productivity improvements.
danpalmer 6y ago
Sublime Text has the strangest development cycle I can think of. It does big-bang releases with lots of features, followed by frequent bug fix releases that quickly resolve issues, followed then by years of silence even though there are still issues... until there's a major version bump and the cycle starts again. This then means that the plugin ecosystem is fairly under developed and inactive because there's little incentive to actively develop plugins for software that appears to be dead. I used Sublime for many years and it was hard to let it go, the speed was great and the SublimeGit plugin was the best Git client I've used, but multi-project development was a pain because the Python/JS/etc plugins didn't have good support for virtualenvs/per-project config/etc, and it was clear that they were out of active development. I switched to another editor and it's slower, but fast enough. It's not quite as nice in many ways but it's nice enough. Critically though it's got a great plugin for most things.
- slifin 6y ago
  Maybe it looks that way if you don't go out of your way to use or follow the Dev build but development has been consistent over the last couple of years
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    Opened Sublime text – no updates since Oct 2019. Went to the website – everything about ST3 from Oct 20190. Went to Download – Build 3211 from Oct 2019. "For _bleeding edge_ releases, see the dev builds" – last build September 2019, older than the stable one. I'm all for using "bleeding edge" (although I don't with VSCode because I don't need to in order to have a working dev environment), but I've had a really good look in all the places I'd expect to see this and am thoroughly convinced that I'm using the very latest version of ST and that it is therefore out of development. I understand that this thread saying something different, but if I've had a good look _knowing there is a later version_ and can't find it, then how would a customer know? A sufficiently hidden development process is indistinguishable from a project being dead. Edit: really keen to use a later version if one is available, can anyone point me towards a download link? I own a licence for ST3.
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fprog 6y ago
I used Sublime Text 3 through college and drifted between tools the past few years of my professional life, variously trying JetBrains' IDEs, VSCode, and some others. For Go, GoLand was nice, if heavyweight; for Python, VSCode had a fantastic plug-and-play experience, though it was hard to shake the feeling of using a web app, albeit a snappy one. The Sublime Text 4 dev builds pulled me enthusiastically back to Sublime full-time, and I'm excited that it's close to release. It's been carefully modernized and is a joy to use. In particular, writing Go in Sublime with LSP (gopls) and Sublime's Go Build System plugin essentially makes it an IDE for me, but still as snappy as, well, Sublime. That's a hard combination to beat. I suspect Sublime's approach of "do one thing well" (text editing) is especially well-suited for a language like Go, which has such an excellent selection of first-party tools. Sublime's approach lets those tools shine rather than hiding them away. It's hard to name all of the features that feel fast. Some are little, like scrolling; many are bigger, like starting up the editor, switching projects, and searching for symbols, all of which are instantaneous. Even the dev builds have been remarkably stable; the result of the care taken is that the whole application feels crafted. It's a quality that HN (rightly!) laments is lacking in much modern software. There are caveats; in particular, to get gopls to work, I recall having to search around a plugin's GitHub issues to find a solution for some problem with my $PATH. Not everyone will want this upfront learning investment. For me, the tradeoff was worth it. Having gotten familiar with the Sublime console and just a bit of how its plugin system works, there are no longer any parts of my editor I'm scared of and consider a black box. Finally, I am happy that I paid for Sublime; I own my copy. The VSCode community seems vibrant and sustainable, but when trying it, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was living in Microsoft's world. They've shepherded it well so far, and it would seem they have incentive to continue. But despite being OSS, I never felt it was mine. One modicum of validation to that feeling: Microsoft recently (last year?) switched to a closed-source model for the Python language server that made the VSCode python experience so great for me. So overall, the transaction with Sublime HQ felt clearer to me. I paid them money for a great editor, rather than using an editor for free in exchange for goodwill or developer mindshare. That is a transaction I'd make again.
- memco 6y ago
  I love Sublime, but like many others have not used it nearly as much in recent years due to how much more powerful VSC is for Python development: do you still do work in Python and if so, does ST4 have a somewhat comparable experience to VSC? Last I tried (which was two or three years ago) I couldn't get code navigation, completion and debugging to work on nearly the same level and remote editing in VSC was also much easier to set up.
smasher164 6y ago
I used Sublime as my only editor for many years on end. But I could never quite get a handle on the plugins and editor configuration, experimenting with options that didn't exist or affect the editor in any way. With the introduction of LSP, like many non-VSCode editors, integration lagged behind, and older language-specific plugins were no longer seeing much maintenance. I do still prefer Sublime for the specific use-case of opening a random text file. Its startup time is far faster than any other editor.
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JediPig 6y ago
I have a ST license since day 5 when I saw it in the #macromates irc chat room. ANY man willing to make a cross platform editor, that was fast and decent, is my hero. C++... with a python enabled extensions.. is why it will prove itself better than vscode.
happyrock 6y ago
I very much like Sublime and have used it on and off for years. But it has one annoying issue... if you do a text search across a project and the search returns too many results, it will beach-ball and you'll have to Force Quit! Drives me crazy.
- nepthar 6y ago
  Probably worth a bug report!
- happy_pancake 6y ago
  im going to start using word beach-ball now. never thought of it that way. thanks!
zzzeek 6y ago
sublime text ignores huge issues like https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/2994 https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/2994 in favor of "just go buy our secret, not available for free evaluation sublime text 4 thing", which led me to try out vscode, which revealed I've been living in the stone ages all this time with sublime.
vardaro 6y ago
Love the native TS and JSX support. Will my Subl license carry over to Subl 4 or will I need to repurchase a new license to use this?
keb_ 6y ago
I switched from Sublime to VSCode around 2017, and then switched back to Sublime in 2019. My return to Sublime was triggered by a funfunfunction video[1] wherein Mattias recounts an anecdote where he spent an enormous amount of time learning and configuring his IDE, editors, and tools. I realized this is what I was doing with VSCode -- adding more and more extensions, and spending an increasing amount of time configuring them or troubleshooting them when they broke. I realized I was happier and more productive using a "dumber" tool like Sublime Text. I still use plugins with ST, but try to keep them to an absolute minimum. If there is a CLI for what I want to do, I prefer to just use that instead of an extension that obfuscates it. Also, ST is significantly snappier than VSCode, an Electron app. I've been using ST4 for over a week now, and it's been a breath of fresh air. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjKJjzRX_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjKJjzRX_E
- musingsole 6y ago
  I've seen far too many developers spend far too much time configuring literally everything but especially their IDEs. I've gotten so very tired of hearing that nonsense as an excuse in a scrum for no progress yesterday. I don't care. I don't need their tools to do my job; maybe they quite literally do and couldn't make any progress with out them...but I'm more convinced these types have little appreciation for work ethic. All the configuration knobs on an IDE don't make a lick of sense if your goal is being useful to those paying for your services. Each and every one (with the exceptions of autocomplete, goto and syntax highlighting) are better implemented as separate tools. But that mentality got lost long, long ago.
  - damagednoob 6y ago
    I keep relearning this lesson: First it was with competitive gaming. In tournaments, competition machines have their configs reset after each match. You have a limited amount of time to setup before game time because admins also have to check your config. I learned to have a fairly simple config (i.e. close to defaults) so I wouldn't run out of time. Second time round it was with vim and Ruby. I spent nearly 2 months trying to get the right combination of plugins to get something close to a decent IDE experience. I ended up packing it in for RubyMine which gave me what I wanted right out the box.
agambrahma 6y ago
fwiw, I used to use ST2/3 a long time back and stopped completely. I recently discovered their Discord (should _really_ be communicated better!) and downloaded ST4 to try it out, and ... there is nothing as SNAPPY as ST4. The LSP integration rocks, basically "just works". Now, a decade is a long time and there will be inevitably be comparisons to VSCode and Jetbrains, and ST4 is _not_ an IDE, so it's not clear how it will fare, but it's definitely still the fastest :-)
ziml77 6y ago
Sublime Text isn't my main editor anymore but I still reach for it in certain cases. If I need to check a file out quickly it's nice to have a program that opens fast and yet still provides syntax highlighting. The other thing I use it for is multi-file search (and replace). As far as I know the only way to get VS Code to do this is to open the directory as a project. With Sublime I can enter any path I want. It's more ergonomic than grep and sed for this. When I search I can just pick a result from the list to jump to that location in a file. And when I replace I have the option to check over the modifications before saving (though usually I just make sure the number of replacements and files seems about right).
11235813213455 6y ago
Nice, it seems text drag-n-drop will finally work on linux https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/1361#issuecomment-637246753 https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/1361#issuec...
throwawaysea 6y ago
Interesting that this is uploaded on Vimeo. I haven't heard much about them in many years, and I'm curious what their business model is like. It seems they're no longer in the running to provide an alternative to YouTube. One thing I found annoying about this page is the pop-up at the bottom of the screen that says "Upload, livestream, and create your own videos, all in HD" actually hides the video player controls. I initially thought Vimeo got rid of them until I dismissed the pop-up. Seems like a poorly thought out design.
adenozine 6y ago
Shipping an editor in 2021 without a terminal, I just don't get it. Do y'all really tab back and forth between the code and a shell? Maybe I'm just lazy.
- bogwog 6y ago
  I actually used to do this, but got so tired of it that I made a custom plugin that sends my most common commands to an open terminal window on a second monitor via a keyboard shortcut. So now I can press F5 to 1) compile arm64 target and create an APK, 2) install the APK on an Android device, 3) run the newly installed application, and 4) execute logcat to view logs That's a hacky solution since it requires a server app running in the terminal listening for commands from ST3. There's also some logic in there to make sure nothing happens unless all files have been saved, to avoid some impossible to debug situations. As far as I know there's no better way to accomplish something like this in ST. I've seen some plugins that use a text buffer/tab as a command line output, but that's terrible. On the bright side, this does allow me to use whichever terminal app I want instead of being forced to use whichever built-in terminal the ST devs might include.
- robenkleene 6y ago
  How is moving between an editor and terminal splits any less effort than moving between separate editor and terminal apps? They both require either one keyboard shortcut or one click to go between? What’s the difference?
  - adenozine 6y ago
    I lose my focus moving between two windows, and I'm always moving around, so I only ever have a laptop screen and not double monitors. I use VSCode very happily after using Gedit for many years, and it's just the layout I'm attached to, I suppose.
    - markogresak 6y ago
      I solve that with multiple desktops feature on macOS. You also get that on Linux and newer versions of Windows. I use either trackpad swipe or ctrl+[left/right] to navigate. The important thing is to set the desktops to be static (disable the “smart” rearranging) and set the windows to always open in the same desktop. This makes my experience on a 16” screen so great that I have a hard time adjusting to using two monitors.
johnmc408 6y ago
Any "virtual cursor" fans, know if it is supported in this release? (long requested feature, but not that common anymore...)
lukaszkups 6y ago
cool video, what VSCode theme is that? ;>
alert0 6y ago
I've been using Sublime since 2013 or 2014. I absolutely love it and feel a little guilty getting so many years of usage out of it on a single license. My only request is ARM builds so I can run it on a Pi.
- doubleunplussed 6y ago
  They've got a 64 bit ARM build for Sublime Text 4. Are raspberry pis 64 bit? https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_build_4409_arm64.tar.xz https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_build_4409_arm...
  - alert0 6y ago
    Rad, I was looking at ST3 last time I was doing it.
dingdingdang 6y ago
Honestly like the philosophy of a lightweight editor for programming with a focus on basic functionality and speed. However, feel so well serviced by Geany that I can't justify the expense in terms of time and energy that would need to go into buying a commercial piece of software.
balls187 6y ago
Big fan of sublime text. It's my default scratch pad/note pad. Several years ago I switched development to Cloud9 and haven't looked back, but for text manipulation, I still rely on sublime text.
fireeyed 6y ago
How many of you have paid for Sublime ?
macrael 6y ago
Any plans to improve Find In Project? I constantly have to add -node_modules/ to my search paths and it's irritating. I switched back to ST3 once I could get Language Server to work. Go and Typescript work great there, and are so fast fast fast.
- wbond 6y ago
  Find in Files has had a number of improvements in ST4, including defaulting to ignoring files in .gitignore, defaulting to ignoring files excluded from the project when right-clicking a folder, along with some other tweaks and fixes.
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    Ignoring files in .gitignore has my attention!
  - macrael 6y ago
    yay!
dopu 6y ago
I struggle to think of a piece of software I've been as happy with paying for as ST. It's just a reliable and snappy text editor that _feels good to use_. Sure, it doesn't have all the fancy new things Atom and VSCode often do, but that doesn't really matter to me. I work on fairly small codebases (scientific data analysis, mostly) and ST is more than good enough for it. Whenever I feel the need for something more advanced, I'll switch to neovim. But ST + neovintageous usually get the job done. I'll happily continue to support ST!
edm0nd 6y ago
Still cant print from Sublime QQ :C
- ben-schaaf 6y ago
  ST4 comes with some support for printing.
faitswulff 6y ago
Adding to all the other comments about communication: it would be nice to have a progress report a la the Dolphin emulator or This Week in Rust. I honestly think it would be worth hiring someone to do. The added press would make up for itself in costs.
nikolay 6y ago
Ewww, ugly tabs with no space/delimiter between them.
tomcooks 6y ago
One of the best software I've used, a multiplier of speed and editing powers. Pity it's not free software (as in freedom), and that it would lose all its superpowers in a CLI environment. If only I could replicate its functions in vanilla vim
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
The 2->3 switch had similar issues as the Python 2 -> 3 switch: Half of your plugins were incompatible with the old version, the other half incompatible with the new version, so you were stuck between a rock and a hard place for a long time. That seriously put me off Sublime (and anything that follows a similar strategy). I really don't like tools that intentionally become barely usable for years at a time, repeatedly. I really hope they'll keep plugins compatible across this version jump.
- ben-schaaf 6y ago
  We've learnt a lot from that. A lot of effort has been put into keeping ST4 fully backwards compatible with ST3.
young_unixer 6y ago
I still prefer Sublime Text over VS Code for the simple reason that it has much less visual clutter. VS Code is cognitively stressful for me to use, there is too much stuff going on in the interface.
- baby 6y ago
  That is definitely one downside of VSC.
- ggregoire 6y ago
  There is a Zen Mode that displays nothing else than your current file. (View > Appearance > Zen Mode, or shortcut Cmd+K Z)
- damsta 6y ago
  The interface is customizable, if you want you can hide everything except the code editor with those preferences: { "workbench.editor.showTabs": false, "workbench.statusBar.visible": false, "workbench.activityBar.visible": false, "editor.minimap.enabled": false, "breadcrumbs.enabled": false }
- PufPufPuf 6y ago
  Too much stuff going on in VSCode? I like VSCode for the very reason that the interface offers comparable functionality to IDEs while not flooding you with tiny buttons and tabs on each side of the screen...
modeless 6y ago
I just upgraded to 4 last week and discovered that the Goto Anything (Control/Command-P) feature is significantly faster when a project has millions of files (all of Chromium in my case). That was actually my main complaint with Sublime before so I'm pretty happy. I still prefer Sublime over any other editor. My biggest feature request now is color support in the build output window. And maybe some quality of life stuff around adding/editing build systems and iterating on build output regexes which is clunky right now and could be much easier. I'm not a huge fan of the code indexing stuff. It bogs down on large projects, and fuzzy search is never good enough for me. I want precise completions that can only come from LSP. Built in LSP support would be better. Actually, with good LSP support the build output window becomes less important because you can fix all your errors before building, so maybe do that instead of working on build systems.
tkuraku 6y ago
I really like Sublime Text, but I have mostly moved on to VScode. I will probably buy a license just to support their software, especially Sublime Merge. For me the Sublime Merge git client is an essential.
- ggregoire 6y ago
  Curious why you would need Sublime Merge if you already use VSCode? The git integration is pretty good. What features are you missing?
  - tkuraku 6y ago
    Sublime Merge is just much easier to use than VSCode git integration. Yes VSCode can do everything, but Sublime Merge is just a much better experience.
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      I tried using it but the one built into JetBrains IDE's to me is just better. /personal preference.
deliveryboyman 6y ago
Is the editor still written in C++ and assembly, or is the front end now based on something like Electron? The front end shown in the video looks similar to something like VS Code or Atom.
gekkonier 6y ago
I love Sublime. I use it for ruby coding, and I think I will buy an upgrade to version 4, just to support this great editor. I don't know how long I have my license.... Must been 5 or 6 years now I guess. I hope there will sometimes a feature to load the actual selection into irb (and irb should be inside Sublime). That would be great! Dr. Racket is very cool for this, well for Racket. Repls for the win!
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voceboy521 6y ago
everyone talking about irrelevant boot times. how many times a day do you boot your editor? for me like 0.2
voceboy521 6y ago
i use vscode AND sublime. even on the same files sometimes. sublime is just way better at editing text. don't know why vscode won't just copy their ideas. like, ctrl+f in vscode is busted
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
The only thing that bothers me about literally every text editor out there today besides Atom is that because plugins are almost necessary these days and none of them cloud sync, it's really hard for me to move off Atom. I want that speed of Sublime Text back. I really do. VSCode's slight differences compared to Atom make it hard for me to move over. New system? `apm stars --install` done. I can't do that out of the box with VSCode. I can't do it out of the box with Sublime Text and Package Control. But I have to get off Atom, it's just a disgrace. I can't multiline find and replace all project-wide on it. Can you believe that? Incredible. And no, I don't want to put my config in a gist or put it on Dropbox. It's 2021. Please, for the love of editors, put these configurations in places where iCloud and OneDrive can pick them up automatically or give us a cli to pull down packages from our accounts. Am I missing something? Is there an editor out there that takes care of automatically syncing packages for me besides Atom? No, I don't want a package to sync my packages. I can't go to vim or neovim. I don't have all day to get my plugins and configurations just right. I want to be productive, now.
- horsawlarway 6y ago
  It's built into vscode... https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/settings-sync https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/settings-sync
- dsego 6y ago
  https://packagecontrol.io/packages/PackageSync https://packagecontrol.io/packages/PackageSync
- markogresak 6y ago
  Given your goal, I’m surprised you haven’t found a solution to this already. I had a similar goal, and with Atom, I’ve solved it with a hacked-together script that automatically backed up the installed packages and replayed the apm install when I called the script. When switching to VSCode more than 2 years ago, there was a popular plugin to sync (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.code-settings-sync https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.cod...). And as a sibling comment mentions, there’s now a built-in sync. I’ve used it since the beginning and it works flawlessly. I’ve even used it between macOS (primary device), Windows and Linux (popOS) machines and it works great. VSCode does a great job in keeping platform-specific settings so you don’t break it for the other device. It’s much better than the approach I’ve used with Atom because I do not have to think about it, it just happens in the background. The only thing you need to do is to enable the sync and then let it do its job.
didip 6y ago
The Go related plugins for Sublime is a pain point of mine. How do you guys use ST for Go development?
strzibny 6y ago
I love Sublime and how fast it is. I currently write all my code and my book[0] in it. I wish their focus is in plugins for some main languages to be more on par with Code. I don't really need anything else. [0] https://deploymentfromscratch.com/ https://deploymentfromscratch.com/

338 points by dsego 6y ago

I was a big fan of Sublime Text, but during those years of inactivity I got used to VScode. This I think surpassed the Sublime Text in all respects. In my opinion, ST4 is no longer up-to-date and uninteresting.

gremlinsinc 6y ago
I bounced back and forth for the longest time... ST3 was way more performant on my 2 core, 8MB desktop. Then I upgraded to 16 core 3700 amd with 64MB Ram... Electron apps don't leave a dent in my performance anymore, so it's a non-issue and vscode has a lot bigger community, support, plugins, etc... Really, I don't think any other thing out there can compare except maybe vim/emacs but the learning curve to make it useful takes awhile and I keep giving up on that.
- Thev00d00 6y ago
  The world would be a better place if you could run Electron apps on 64MB of RAM!

threatofrain 6y ago

Like for many Sublime used to be the go-to editor for a slick editing experience. Easiness for people who didn't want Vim but found JetBrains too heavy. But today I'm afraid Sublime is far behind VSC as a tool to empower developer productivity, and it reminds me of Nova at this point (too late). Also no mention of the feature that changed the face of the ecosystem — Intellisense or the language server protocol.

warmwaffles 6y ago
I still use sublime text everyday. By far the boot speed, zero lag between file changes and other slight annoyances are not there. Plus the integration of Sublime Merge has been fantastic.
- laddershoe 6y ago
  Me too -- I live in Sublime Text most days. Hard to argue that VSCode wins on dev features, and most of my fellow developers use it for that reason. But I can't get past the speed; Sublime Text does everything instantly, while in VS Code, everything is just slightly laggy. To each their own, I guess, but given how much of my day editing text, it's hard to want to use a text editor that has noticeable lag. (Cue the usual rants about latency in 2021 on multi-GHz machines)
  - warmwaffles 6y ago
    I've also got most of the shortcuts committed to muscle memory and configured just the way I like it. Sunken cost fallacy is where I am headed. But I've always loved this editor and will continue to support it as long as they continue to support it.
- kamranjon 6y ago
  I also love sublime merge, any time im screensharing with someone pairing on some code and we finish up i pop it open straight from sublime to review our changes and they always want to know what tool it is. They just produce really great software.
ericcholis 6y ago
I basically use Sublime in place of notepad on Windows at this point. If I need anything beyond advanced text editing; I'm using an IDE.
- tored 6y ago
  I use Sublime Text as excellent grep/search tool. Superfast, easy to write filters for include or exclude, can quickly open the matching file and you can see it with proper syntax highlighting.
- systems 6y ago
  then why not use notepad++ its free and open source, unlike sublime text
patjenk 6y ago
I use sublime.txt everyday. The main purpose is reading, editing, searching a “scratch.txt” file I have been prepending to for the last 11 years. Sublime loads, saves, and searches it better than any other text editor. I have found it’s a helpful way to save random lists, notes, links, and common chunks of code. It’s also my go to for wrangling weird txt.
- thefz 6y ago
  I have a similar use case, although I am not a power user. I use it to open often giant .csv and .txt very very fast. I use it to quickly edit SQL because the select-lines command (ctrl+alt+up/down) makes batch edits of indented code a breeze. I use it to sometimes format and arrange weirdly formatted C#. I use it often for its lightning fast search and replace function. It has grown on me over NP++ which is still a very very nice text editor.
tored 6y ago
Wasn't one problem that Sublime Text's plugin API was somewhat lacking, you couldn't do any advanced GUI in it?
- bogwog 6y ago
  This is a big one. Being able to create a tab/window to view custom data would be awesome, like a live HTML preview, OpenGL surface, graph rendered from an open data file, custom image format, etc. I wouldn't mind the core ST app being so bare bones if the plugin API was more powerful, but unfortunately it is pretty limited in what you can do.
  - wbond 6y ago
    We've got quite a number of API enhancements in the next version, including HTML sheets for non-text content. That said, we are definitely focused on being first and foremost a really fast text editor that makes it easy to read, navigate and write code. Trying to implement a browser or be an IDE are outside of our area of focus.
klibertp 6y ago
> Intellisense Could we please call it "autocompletion" instead? The feature did not originate from Microsoft IDEs, and while they are free to call it whatever when talking about their editors, the rest of the world (well, that 2m^2 part centered on me, at least) would appreciate if we used more general terminology.
- tehbeard 6y ago
  I think at this point it's safe to assume Intellisense is fairly genericized and refers more to an "autocompletion" that takes additional information/context into account than a specific $company's implementation.
- dgellow 6y ago
  I always understood "intellisense" as a way to say "contextual autocompletion based on structured information". So it is a form of autocompletion, but one that adapts gracefully to the context (like an IDE autocompletion experience). Autocompletion could just mean that you have some string matching (more like basic shell completion). It's good to have a way to specify when you're talking about the former meaning and I do not know another term for this than "intellisense".
  - bogwog 6y ago
    In my experience, "Intellisense" is shorthand for "broken autocompletion" I don't use Microsoft IDEs often, but have had experience with them many times over the past 15 years. And every single time, intellisense would freeze, get confused, or just stop working completely. Not once in 15 years have I had a passable experience with it, so nowadays when I'm in Microsoft land I always immediately disable intellisense before I start working.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dgellow 6y ago
      I completely understand your feelings. I also always faced quite a lot of issues with Visual Studio (not vscode) autocompletion when trying to write C++. But when it decides to work the experience is great. Visual Studio Code on the other hand is just fantastic. I was a hardcore emacs user until I switched to VSCode as my main editor a few years ago due to the crazy good auto-completion experience.
tehbeard 6y ago
Sublime still holds king for ad-hoc grepping around large files. For dev work though, my daily driver is VSC at this point. I still use Sublime for notes as well, but that's more so I don't have to think about how closing/opening half a dozen workspaces in VSC affects which notes are open.
wbond 6y ago
This is a little teaser of some of the more easily demonstrated visual changes in ST4, but we've got a huge collection of new features, tweaks and bug fixes coming. The community is actively maintaining an LSP package, and we've added a number of features in ST4 that the protocol requires, such as UTF-16 diffs.
- kamranjon 6y ago
  I'm really excited about the new release, thanks for building one of the fastest text editors in the game. I use it every day and couldn't develop without it.
- hn8788 6y ago
  I love sublime text, but I really wish you'd reconsider relying on a community LSP package. There was an issue a year or two ago where the LSP package couldn't be installed due to a dependency issue in the package, and since it's a community package, they could only fix it when they had enough spare time. I think it was a 1-2 month timeframe where there was no way for new installs to have LSP functionality since it required a third-party plugin.
  - wbond 6y ago
    We looked into the protocol, but unfortunately it made a number of poor architectural choices that leads to many language servers not implementing the protocol properly. This effectively requires custom integrations for most language servers. That wouldn't make sense to do in the core of the editor, since we'll never be primary users on the vast majority of servers. The open source model makes sense since it will need to have tweaks and fixes to support various language servers. That combined with a very small development team (six engineers across our two products), would probably lead to slower development, and it would be tied to the release cadence of the main product.
    - hn8788 6y ago
      That makes sense, I didn't know how small the team was. Thanks for the response, looking forward to ST4.
psychometry 6y ago
Jetbrains is extremely fast for me these days because the indexing is good. The fact that the IDE and Java are using 1-2 GBs RAM isn't really a problem when any dev machine is going to have at least 8 GBs.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  That's surprising. I used IntelliJ today after a pause and found it unbearably slow. For instance, scrolling a ~6 page source file lags so much it's extremely irritating. It's also fantastically bloated. There's so much stuff I have to disable to make it barely usable. And most of the supposedly helpful lightbulbs suggest changes that make absolutely no sense. I can absolutely believe that IntelliJ has its fans because it has a ton of features, but for me it's just unusable.
- benbristow 6y ago
  8GB is low for a dev machine nowadays. Your browser uses 1/2GB, IDE using 1/2GB+ (JetBrains Rider often uses like 4GB for me), then the OS itself, database servers, virtualization overhead (e.g. Docker) and other tools. Easily used up. 16GB is the bare minimum for a dev machine in 2021 IMO. Anything higher than that is 'nice to have' unless you're doing heavy stuff like data analysis, machine learning/AI, games development etc.

systems 6y ago

quick editing : Notepad++ coding : vscode , jetbrains pim : emacs org-mode I think sublime text is somewhere between quick editing and coding, but there are better options for both

kuroguro 6y ago
All coding: Notepad2 (one of the more updated forks) Need to find some reference or search whole folder: Sublime IDEs are too fat, the only time I pull one out is when I need to design a WPF desktop app or sth.
- spiralx 6y ago
  Replacing the built-in Notepad app with Notepad2 with code folding is one of the first things I do when setting up a new Windows box. It's a tiny app that starts instantly and for viewing text/code files and small- to medium-sized edits it has almost everything - multi-cursor editing is the one thing I'm so used to now that I notice its lack, truly a first-world developer problem ;) F12 opens a file in Notepad2 in Directory Opus and `e FILE` does the same from Bash or PS, can't think of a time where I'd need someone more than Notepad2 but less than Sublime Text, or VS Code today. I've installed Notepad++ several times over the years and just never wanted to have to use it.
generalEvie 6y ago
I personally love Sublimetext for quick editing. Things like multiline selection on single documents. For anything else, vscode or jetbrains
spupy 6y ago
There's one killer feature of Sublime that I can't find anywhere else (on Linux at least) and it's the reason I still use it: Upon closing it persist even unsaved tabs, and those tabs are named after the first line of text. I find this incredibly helpful when juggling multiple snippets of code/logs, without having to think about saving or worrying about accidentally closing the window. Intellij Idea and Zim offer something similar, but they are clunky in comparison. Anyone know another text editor that offers this functionality and run on Linux?

eu 6y ago

Please release BSD binaries..

niahmiah 6y ago

Yawn. VSCode.

ultim8k 6y ago

Sublime may lack the feature richness of VSC and while I switched to the second a while ago for my day to day coding needs, it's still my editor of choice when I need to edit huge files or paste content coming from a website and I always have a sublime window open just in case I need to quickly type something.

gremlinsinc 6y ago
I only use sublime for sudo editing, cause it's easier to just install some nginx syntax highlighter, and ini/config into the sudo profile, and run sudo subl /etc than it is to use vscode, I mean vscode does ask "would you like to use sudo" but I'm not sure how good it is to use vscode for sudo editing or viewing of files... and I don't want to have to okay it on EVER file when I'm doing a lot of system edits for a new linux package I'm trying out and testing - like when I tried to get a system-wide proxy tool installed.

xattt 6y ago

Sublime has a sweet spot for LaTeX editing with Latextools.

nickelcitymario 6y ago

There are text editors and there are IDEs, and each has its place. Sublime Text is, to me, the best GUI text editor around. (For those with the patience to master them, Vim or Emacs may be both objectively and subjectively better. But I've never had that patience. Emacs has a hell of a steep learning curve.) You can't knock Sublime for not having the features of an IDE, because that's not what it is. If we keep pushing for Sublime to be as "full featured" as an IDE, we're gonna kill what makes it great. VSC seems to be trying to be both, and by all appearances, those who like it, like it a lot. I'm not in that group, but I admit that there may be something(s) outstanding about it that I just haven't yet appreciated.

w4rh4wk5 6y ago
I've been a Vim user for a long time and still use it today occasionally. VSCode has replaced most applications of Vim for me because of the good out-of-the-box experience for different programming languages. In VSCode all it typically takes to get started with a new language is to install one or two extensions, click one to three buttons, followed by a restart. Now you got syntax highlighting, auto-completion, go to definition, find all references, build system integration, test runners, debugging support, etc. You can also get these features in Vim or Emacs, but from my experience it takes a lot longer to setup and integrate properly.
- mstipetic 6y ago
  I would pay a lot of money for a curated vim distribution that works out of the box. I've used vim heavily for years, and still nothing compares to it when things are working well, but every time I want to change something I get so frustrated. Every extension uses it's own set of principles, the learning curve is steep, error messages super vague. If anyone is looking for a side-hustle, I'd be your first customer
  - ctas 6y ago
    I'm building something like that. Feel free to reach out, would love to chat.

jcolella 6y ago

I used to be a big supporter and user of Sublime, using it for my day to day. Unfortunately, even though it still has faster boot time than VSC, the community around VSC is so much richer that it becomes a case of too little too late.

jokoon 6y ago

Yeah well, it's still impossible to fold blocks of code based on syntax and not on indentation. They decided they would not fix this, which is quite a shame. https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101 https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101

Narretz 6y ago
The last comment by a dev is from 2019 and indicates that this isn't ruled out. But if it's not in version 4 it's fair to assume that it's not gonna happen in the near future. https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101#issuecomment-474430869 https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101#issueco...

bogwog 6y ago

So after all this time the only thing they have to show is a handful of features that could've probably been implemented as plugins for ST3? I'm hoping there's a lot more, and that this video was just a rush job. I've been using ST3 as my exclusive development tool for the past ~5 years, and I've been very happy with it. It's extremely fast, stable, and customizable. I even have a bunch of custom plugins I've written to integrate with custom tools and workflows on different projects. But my biggest complaint is that the pace of development is glacial. The chances of them adding a feature you want/need is basically zero, so you shouldn't even bother asking. IMO, they should consider releasing it as open source software (at least partially), and accepting donations via a Patreon page or something similar.

nickelcitymario 6y ago
Your position is totally reasonable, but I would argue that ST is better off with a smaller feature set and a robust plugin ecosystem. The last thing I would want to see is for ST to become the Microsoft Word of text editors, i.e. a million built-in features, of which you might only use 5%. Addendum: It dawns on me that building the Microsoft Word of anything is probably not a bad goal, considering it's the dominant word processor. It's not what I would want in a text editor, but it may very well be what most people want most of the time.
- hn8788 6y ago
  I think some features that are currently plugins could stand to be integrated into the main editor. For example, language server functionality is only available through a third-party plugin, and a year or two ago there was a couple month period where the plugin install was broken due to a dependency issue. Anyone who installed ST during that time would have been out of luck if they wanted to use progamming language plugins that required a language server.
  - nickelcitymario 6y ago
    I'm not entirely familiar with "language server functionality", but it sounds like something that isn't needed for most text editing situations. So it's a perfect candidate for a plugin. I'm not knocking this functionality. It's probably super helpful, useful, or downright required in the work you do. It sucks that the plugin was broken. However, the fact that the plugin was broken tells me there's a problem with the plugin ecosystem, not with the editor.

PascLeRasc 6y ago

Sublime is so, so good, no qualifications or buts about it. Startup is instant and the typing latency feels incredibly fast. Very thankful that it’s still being developed.

jonemi 6y ago
This is the most valuable feature for me. I love how lightweight and responsive it feels.

cyberlab 6y ago

Does anyone know if this is a valid point: If you can't code without a feature-rich text-editor, you might then ask: how good are you really at coding, and how much skill are you off-loading to the editor? Because if you can't code with Windows' notepad.exe you need to re-evaluate your perceived skill and your /reliance/ on an editor.

b3kart 6y ago
Doubt there's anyone who literally can't code without a full-fledged IDE. There's just people who are used to certain conveniences, and it would take them longer to write code without them. I don't see anything particularly wrong with that. Most professionals use tools that make their job easier, and might get worse at doing the job without these tools -- but so what?
_benj 6y ago
I don't think that that's a fair statement. I remember when I was learning Linux and in KDE there was this huge "Developer Tools" section... IDEs, UI designers, documentations tools, etc. I opened each one of those tools and had absolutely no clue how to use that! Looking at them now, they seems quite easy and similar, but that is only because I know how to program now. Think about MS Access. It could be said that you don't know how to use relational DBs is you can't write perfect SQL on a napkin, but MS Access is certainly a skill and just because it can make it easier to view/manipulate data doesn't invalidate the need of skill to use the tool.
the_bigfatpanda 6y ago
In my opinion, I don't think its a valid point. The main skill of a developer is problem solving, whether its business logic or code related problems like structure, integrations of different layers etc. If you can code in a notepad, good for you, but if an IDE or something like VSC or Sublime increase your productivity then that's more valuable then remembering the exact names of methods or imports
bdcravens 6y ago
The features that make a difference are the ones that aren't text editing. Bare minimum is file management, but things like integrated git, terminal, linters, are good productivity improvements.

danpalmer 6y ago

Sublime Text has the strangest development cycle I can think of. It does big-bang releases with lots of features, followed by frequent bug fix releases that quickly resolve issues, followed then by years of silence even though there are still issues... until there's a major version bump and the cycle starts again. This then means that the plugin ecosystem is fairly under developed and inactive because there's little incentive to actively develop plugins for software that appears to be dead. I used Sublime for many years and it was hard to let it go, the speed was great and the SublimeGit plugin was the best Git client I've used, but multi-project development was a pain because the Python/JS/etc plugins didn't have good support for virtualenvs/per-project config/etc, and it was clear that they were out of active development. I switched to another editor and it's slower, but fast enough. It's not quite as nice in many ways but it's nice enough. Critically though it's got a great plugin for most things.

slifin 6y ago
Maybe it looks that way if you don't go out of your way to use or follow the Dev build but development has been consistent over the last couple of years
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Opened Sublime text – no updates since Oct 2019. Went to the website – everything about ST3 from Oct 20190. Went to Download – Build 3211 from Oct 2019. "For _bleeding edge_ releases, see the dev builds" – last build September 2019, older than the stable one. I'm all for using "bleeding edge" (although I don't with VSCode because I don't need to in order to have a working dev environment), but I've had a really good look in all the places I'd expect to see this and am thoroughly convinced that I'm using the very latest version of ST and that it is therefore out of development. I understand that this thread saying something different, but if I've had a good look _knowing there is a later version_ and can't find it, then how would a customer know? A sufficiently hidden development process is indistinguishable from a project being dead. Edit: really keen to use a later version if one is available, can anyone point me towards a download link? I own a licence for ST3.

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fprog 6y ago

I used Sublime Text 3 through college and drifted between tools the past few years of my professional life, variously trying JetBrains' IDEs, VSCode, and some others. For Go, GoLand was nice, if heavyweight; for Python, VSCode had a fantastic plug-and-play experience, though it was hard to shake the feeling of using a web app, albeit a snappy one. The Sublime Text 4 dev builds pulled me enthusiastically back to Sublime full-time, and I'm excited that it's close to release. It's been carefully modernized and is a joy to use. In particular, writing Go in Sublime with LSP (gopls) and Sublime's Go Build System plugin essentially makes it an IDE for me, but still as snappy as, well, Sublime. That's a hard combination to beat. I suspect Sublime's approach of "do one thing well" (text editing) is especially well-suited for a language like Go, which has such an excellent selection of first-party tools. Sublime's approach lets those tools shine rather than hiding them away. It's hard to name all of the features that feel fast. Some are little, like scrolling; many are bigger, like starting up the editor, switching projects, and searching for symbols, all of which are instantaneous. Even the dev builds have been remarkably stable; the result of the care taken is that the whole application feels crafted. It's a quality that HN (rightly!) laments is lacking in much modern software. There are caveats; in particular, to get gopls to work, I recall having to search around a plugin's GitHub issues to find a solution for some problem with my $PATH. Not everyone will want this upfront learning investment. For me, the tradeoff was worth it. Having gotten familiar with the Sublime console and just a bit of how its plugin system works, there are no longer any parts of my editor I'm scared of and consider a black box. Finally, I am happy that I paid for Sublime; I own my copy. The VSCode community seems vibrant and sustainable, but when trying it, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was living in Microsoft's world. They've shepherded it well so far, and it would seem they have incentive to continue. But despite being OSS, I never felt it was mine. One modicum of validation to that feeling: Microsoft recently (last year?) switched to a closed-source model for the Python language server that made the VSCode python experience so great for me. So overall, the transaction with Sublime HQ felt clearer to me. I paid them money for a great editor, rather than using an editor for free in exchange for goodwill or developer mindshare. That is a transaction I'd make again.

memco 6y ago
I love Sublime, but like many others have not used it nearly as much in recent years due to how much more powerful VSC is for Python development: do you still do work in Python and if so, does ST4 have a somewhat comparable experience to VSC? Last I tried (which was two or three years ago) I couldn't get code navigation, completion and debugging to work on nearly the same level and remote editing in VSC was also much easier to set up.

smasher164 6y ago

I used Sublime as my only editor for many years on end. But I could never quite get a handle on the plugins and editor configuration, experimenting with options that didn't exist or affect the editor in any way. With the introduction of LSP, like many non-VSCode editors, integration lagged behind, and older language-specific plugins were no longer seeing much maintenance. I do still prefer Sublime for the specific use-case of opening a random text file. Its startup time is far faster than any other editor.

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JediPig 6y ago

I have a ST license since day 5 when I saw it in the #macromates irc chat room. ANY man willing to make a cross platform editor, that was fast and decent, is my hero. C++... with a python enabled extensions.. is why it will prove itself better than vscode.

happyrock 6y ago

I very much like Sublime and have used it on and off for years. But it has one annoying issue... if you do a text search across a project and the search returns too many results, it will beach-ball and you'll have to Force Quit! Drives me crazy.

nepthar 6y ago
Probably worth a bug report!
happy_pancake 6y ago
im going to start using word beach-ball now. never thought of it that way. thanks!

zzzeek 6y ago

sublime text ignores huge issues like https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/2994 https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/2994 in favor of "just go buy our secret, not available for free evaluation sublime text 4 thing", which led me to try out vscode, which revealed I've been living in the stone ages all this time with sublime.

vardaro 6y ago

Love the native TS and JSX support. Will my Subl license carry over to Subl 4 or will I need to repurchase a new license to use this?

keb_ 6y ago

I switched from Sublime to VSCode around 2017, and then switched back to Sublime in 2019. My return to Sublime was triggered by a funfunfunction video[1] wherein Mattias recounts an anecdote where he spent an enormous amount of time learning and configuring his IDE, editors, and tools. I realized this is what I was doing with VSCode -- adding more and more extensions, and spending an increasing amount of time configuring them or troubleshooting them when they broke. I realized I was happier and more productive using a "dumber" tool like Sublime Text. I still use plugins with ST, but try to keep them to an absolute minimum. If there is a CLI for what I want to do, I prefer to just use that instead of an extension that obfuscates it. Also, ST is significantly snappier than VSCode, an Electron app. I've been using ST4 for over a week now, and it's been a breath of fresh air. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjKJjzRX_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjKJjzRX_E

musingsole 6y ago
I've seen far too many developers spend far too much time configuring literally everything but especially their IDEs. I've gotten so very tired of hearing that nonsense as an excuse in a scrum for no progress yesterday. I don't care. I don't need their tools to do my job; maybe they quite literally do and couldn't make any progress with out them...but I'm more convinced these types have little appreciation for work ethic. All the configuration knobs on an IDE don't make a lick of sense if your goal is being useful to those paying for your services. Each and every one (with the exceptions of autocomplete, goto and syntax highlighting) are better implemented as separate tools. But that mentality got lost long, long ago.
- damagednoob 6y ago
  I keep relearning this lesson: First it was with competitive gaming. In tournaments, competition machines have their configs reset after each match. You have a limited amount of time to setup before game time because admins also have to check your config. I learned to have a fairly simple config (i.e. close to defaults) so I wouldn't run out of time. Second time round it was with vim and Ruby. I spent nearly 2 months trying to get the right combination of plugins to get something close to a decent IDE experience. I ended up packing it in for RubyMine which gave me what I wanted right out the box.

agambrahma 6y ago

fwiw, I used to use ST2/3 a long time back and stopped completely. I recently discovered their Discord (should _really_ be communicated better!) and downloaded ST4 to try it out, and ... there is nothing as SNAPPY as ST4. The LSP integration rocks, basically "just works". Now, a decade is a long time and there will be inevitably be comparisons to VSCode and Jetbrains, and ST4 is _not_ an IDE, so it's not clear how it will fare, but it's definitely still the fastest :-)

ziml77 6y ago

Sublime Text isn't my main editor anymore but I still reach for it in certain cases. If I need to check a file out quickly it's nice to have a program that opens fast and yet still provides syntax highlighting. The other thing I use it for is multi-file search (and replace). As far as I know the only way to get VS Code to do this is to open the directory as a project. With Sublime I can enter any path I want. It's more ergonomic than grep and sed for this. When I search I can just pick a result from the list to jump to that location in a file. And when I replace I have the option to check over the modifications before saving (though usually I just make sure the number of replacements and files seems about right).

11235813213455 6y ago

Nice, it seems text drag-n-drop will finally work on linux https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/1361#issuecomment-637246753 https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/1361#issuec...

throwawaysea 6y ago

Interesting that this is uploaded on Vimeo. I haven't heard much about them in many years, and I'm curious what their business model is like. It seems they're no longer in the running to provide an alternative to YouTube. One thing I found annoying about this page is the pop-up at the bottom of the screen that says "Upload, livestream, and create your own videos, all in HD" actually hides the video player controls. I initially thought Vimeo got rid of them until I dismissed the pop-up. Seems like a poorly thought out design.

adenozine 6y ago

Shipping an editor in 2021 without a terminal, I just don't get it. Do y'all really tab back and forth between the code and a shell? Maybe I'm just lazy.

bogwog 6y ago
I actually used to do this, but got so tired of it that I made a custom plugin that sends my most common commands to an open terminal window on a second monitor via a keyboard shortcut. So now I can press F5 to 1) compile arm64 target and create an APK, 2) install the APK on an Android device, 3) run the newly installed application, and 4) execute logcat to view logs That's a hacky solution since it requires a server app running in the terminal listening for commands from ST3. There's also some logic in there to make sure nothing happens unless all files have been saved, to avoid some impossible to debug situations. As far as I know there's no better way to accomplish something like this in ST. I've seen some plugins that use a text buffer/tab as a command line output, but that's terrible. On the bright side, this does allow me to use whichever terminal app I want instead of being forced to use whichever built-in terminal the ST devs might include.
robenkleene 6y ago
How is moving between an editor and terminal splits any less effort than moving between separate editor and terminal apps? They both require either one keyboard shortcut or one click to go between? What’s the difference?
- adenozine 6y ago
  I lose my focus moving between two windows, and I'm always moving around, so I only ever have a laptop screen and not double monitors. I use VSCode very happily after using Gedit for many years, and it's just the layout I'm attached to, I suppose.
  - markogresak 6y ago
    I solve that with multiple desktops feature on macOS. You also get that on Linux and newer versions of Windows. I use either trackpad swipe or ctrl+[left/right] to navigate. The important thing is to set the desktops to be static (disable the “smart” rearranging) and set the windows to always open in the same desktop. This makes my experience on a 16” screen so great that I have a hard time adjusting to using two monitors.

johnmc408 6y ago

Any "virtual cursor" fans, know if it is supported in this release? (long requested feature, but not that common anymore...)

lukaszkups 6y ago

cool video, what VSCode theme is that? ;>

alert0 6y ago

I've been using Sublime since 2013 or 2014. I absolutely love it and feel a little guilty getting so many years of usage out of it on a single license. My only request is ARM builds so I can run it on a Pi.

doubleunplussed 6y ago
They've got a 64 bit ARM build for Sublime Text 4. Are raspberry pis 64 bit? https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_build_4409_arm64.tar.xz https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_build_4409_arm...
- alert0 6y ago
  Rad, I was looking at ST3 last time I was doing it.

dingdingdang 6y ago

Honestly like the philosophy of a lightweight editor for programming with a focus on basic functionality and speed. However, feel so well serviced by Geany that I can't justify the expense in terms of time and energy that would need to go into buying a commercial piece of software.

balls187 6y ago

Big fan of sublime text. It's my default scratch pad/note pad. Several years ago I switched development to Cloud9 and haven't looked back, but for text manipulation, I still rely on sublime text.

fireeyed 6y ago

How many of you have paid for Sublime ?

macrael 6y ago

Any plans to improve Find In Project? I constantly have to add -node_modules/ to my search paths and it's irritating. I switched back to ST3 once I could get Language Server to work. Go and Typescript work great there, and are so fast fast fast.

wbond 6y ago
Find in Files has had a number of improvements in ST4, including defaulting to ignoring files in .gitignore, defaulting to ignoring files excluded from the project when right-clicking a folder, along with some other tweaks and fixes.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  Ignoring files in .gitignore has my attention!
- macrael 6y ago
  yay!

dopu 6y ago

I struggle to think of a piece of software I've been as happy with paying for as ST. It's just a reliable and snappy text editor that _feels good to use_. Sure, it doesn't have all the fancy new things Atom and VSCode often do, but that doesn't really matter to me. I work on fairly small codebases (scientific data analysis, mostly) and ST is more than good enough for it. Whenever I feel the need for something more advanced, I'll switch to neovim. But ST + neovintageous usually get the job done. I'll happily continue to support ST!

edm0nd 6y ago

Still cant print from Sublime QQ :C

ben-schaaf 6y ago
ST4 comes with some support for printing.

faitswulff 6y ago

Adding to all the other comments about communication: it would be nice to have a progress report a la the Dolphin emulator or This Week in Rust. I honestly think it would be worth hiring someone to do. The added press would make up for itself in costs.

nikolay 6y ago

Ewww, ugly tabs with no space/delimiter between them.

tomcooks 6y ago

One of the best software I've used, a multiplier of speed and editing powers. Pity it's not free software (as in freedom), and that it would lose all its superpowers in a CLI environment. If only I could replicate its functions in vanilla vim

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

The 2->3 switch had similar issues as the Python 2 -> 3 switch: Half of your plugins were incompatible with the old version, the other half incompatible with the new version, so you were stuck between a rock and a hard place for a long time. That seriously put me off Sublime (and anything that follows a similar strategy). I really don't like tools that intentionally become barely usable for years at a time, repeatedly. I really hope they'll keep plugins compatible across this version jump.

ben-schaaf 6y ago
We've learnt a lot from that. A lot of effort has been put into keeping ST4 fully backwards compatible with ST3.

young_unixer 6y ago

I still prefer Sublime Text over VS Code for the simple reason that it has much less visual clutter. VS Code is cognitively stressful for me to use, there is too much stuff going on in the interface.

baby 6y ago
That is definitely one downside of VSC.
ggregoire 6y ago
There is a Zen Mode that displays nothing else than your current file. (View > Appearance > Zen Mode, or shortcut Cmd+K Z)
damsta 6y ago
The interface is customizable, if you want you can hide everything except the code editor with those preferences: { "workbench.editor.showTabs": false, "workbench.statusBar.visible": false, "workbench.activityBar.visible": false, "editor.minimap.enabled": false, "breadcrumbs.enabled": false }
PufPufPuf 6y ago
Too much stuff going on in VSCode? I like VSCode for the very reason that the interface offers comparable functionality to IDEs while not flooding you with tiny buttons and tabs on each side of the screen...

modeless 6y ago

I just upgraded to 4 last week and discovered that the Goto Anything (Control/Command-P) feature is significantly faster when a project has millions of files (all of Chromium in my case). That was actually my main complaint with Sublime before so I'm pretty happy. I still prefer Sublime over any other editor. My biggest feature request now is color support in the build output window. And maybe some quality of life stuff around adding/editing build systems and iterating on build output regexes which is clunky right now and could be much easier. I'm not a huge fan of the code indexing stuff. It bogs down on large projects, and fuzzy search is never good enough for me. I want precise completions that can only come from LSP. Built in LSP support would be better. Actually, with good LSP support the build output window becomes less important because you can fix all your errors before building, so maybe do that instead of working on build systems.

tkuraku 6y ago

I really like Sublime Text, but I have mostly moved on to VScode. I will probably buy a license just to support their software, especially Sublime Merge. For me the Sublime Merge git client is an essential.

ggregoire 6y ago
Curious why you would need Sublime Merge if you already use VSCode? The git integration is pretty good. What features are you missing?
- tkuraku 6y ago
  Sublime Merge is just much easier to use than VSCode git integration. Yes VSCode can do everything, but Sublime Merge is just a much better experience.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    I tried using it but the one built into JetBrains IDE's to me is just better. /personal preference.

deliveryboyman 6y ago

Is the editor still written in C++ and assembly, or is the front end now based on something like Electron? The front end shown in the video looks similar to something like VS Code or Atom.

gekkonier 6y ago

I love Sublime. I use it for ruby coding, and I think I will buy an upgrade to version 4, just to support this great editor. I don't know how long I have my license.... Must been 5 or 6 years now I guess. I hope there will sometimes a feature to load the actual selection into irb (and irb should be inside Sublime). That would be great! Dr. Racket is very cool for this, well for Racket. Repls for the win!

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voceboy521 6y ago

everyone talking about irrelevant boot times. how many times a day do you boot your editor? for me like 0.2

voceboy521 6y ago

i use vscode AND sublime. even on the same files sometimes. sublime is just way better at editing text. don't know why vscode won't just copy their ideas. like, ctrl+f in vscode is busted

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

The only thing that bothers me about literally every text editor out there today besides Atom is that because plugins are almost necessary these days and none of them cloud sync, it's really hard for me to move off Atom. I want that speed of Sublime Text back. I really do. VSCode's slight differences compared to Atom make it hard for me to move over. New system? `apm stars --install` done. I can't do that out of the box with VSCode. I can't do it out of the box with Sublime Text and Package Control. But I have to get off Atom, it's just a disgrace. I can't multiline find and replace all project-wide on it. Can you believe that? Incredible. And no, I don't want to put my config in a gist or put it on Dropbox. It's 2021. Please, for the love of editors, put these configurations in places where iCloud and OneDrive can pick them up automatically or give us a cli to pull down packages from our accounts. Am I missing something? Is there an editor out there that takes care of automatically syncing packages for me besides Atom? No, I don't want a package to sync my packages. I can't go to vim or neovim. I don't have all day to get my plugins and configurations just right. I want to be productive, now.

horsawlarway 6y ago
It's built into vscode... https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/settings-sync https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/settings-sync
dsego 6y ago
https://packagecontrol.io/packages/PackageSync https://packagecontrol.io/packages/PackageSync
markogresak 6y ago
Given your goal, I’m surprised you haven’t found a solution to this already. I had a similar goal, and with Atom, I’ve solved it with a hacked-together script that automatically backed up the installed packages and replayed the apm install when I called the script. When switching to VSCode more than 2 years ago, there was a popular plugin to sync (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.code-settings-sync https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.cod...). And as a sibling comment mentions, there’s now a built-in sync. I’ve used it since the beginning and it works flawlessly. I’ve even used it between macOS (primary device), Windows and Linux (popOS) machines and it works great. VSCode does a great job in keeping platform-specific settings so you don’t break it for the other device. It’s much better than the approach I’ve used with Atom because I do not have to think about it, it just happens in the background. The only thing you need to do is to enable the sync and then let it do its job.

didip 6y ago

The Go related plugins for Sublime is a pain point of mine. How do you guys use ST for Go development?

strzibny 6y ago

I love Sublime and how fast it is. I currently write all my code and my book[0] in it. I wish their focus is in plugins for some main languages to be more on par with Code. I don't really need anything else. [0] https://deploymentfromscratch.com/ https://deploymentfromscratch.com/