6 ms·

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

by 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.
    - bogwog 6y ago
      See language server protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol If you have a programming language, you can write a "language server" for it that is compatible with the standard language server protocol. Once you have that, you can use your programming language in any text editor that implements an LSP client, and get full IDE-like features for free. Whether code intelligence/intellisense style features are important to you is another story, but it is an incredibly useful thing to have in a general purpose tool for editing code (and I believe most ST users are programmers). IMO, it makes much more sense to have that built in to ST as a first class feature, than to have it only available as a community plugin. > However, the fact that the plugin was broken tells me there's a problem with the plugin ecosystem, not with the editor. That's exactly why it should be built in to the editor. For many people, LSP support is a deal breaker.
      - nickelcitymario 6y ago
        Now that I understand this functionality better, you may be right. I'm on the fence about whether it really should be built-in, but I can appreciate why you'd want it to be. In effect, you're asking for the ability to extend the list of supported languages by specifying them on an ad hoc basis, and I can definitely see why that's an absolute must-have if you're working in a language that isn't built into the editor. (I really hope I'm capturing the functionality correctly.) That being said, I suspect most developers rarely work in languages that aren't supported, so even IF this should be built-in, it seems like something that most users would never use. While I think that's perfectly reasonable in an IDE, I think a text editor should be limited to features that are used by a majority of its users for the majority of the time. It's not that I'm saying this isn't crucial functionality. It's that if we start requiring text editors to have every bit of crucial functionality that anyone might have, you end up with an IDE. I still think the problem is the plugin ecosystem. What would stop the Sublime team from saying, in effect: "This is functionality that should always and reliably be available for those who need it, so we're going to take responsibility for maintaining this as a plugin"?
- jpalomaki 6y ago
  For more casual user (me) a large plugin ecosystem makes things complicated. It means you need to invest time to understand which ones to pick and this might be changing all the time as projects are abandoned and forked. For Eclipse there was (is?) something called MyEclipse which was paid software and contained a curated set of plugins.
  - nickelcitymario 6y ago
    An excellent point. My solution to this would be (ironically) to add one feature to Sublime: Grouped Packages. Simply put, the idea would be to define a set of plugins needed (or recommended) for certain types of development. So you'd install Sublime, and then have a handy popup asking if you want to install any of the suggested Grouped Packages. There might be a dozen or so that are commonly useful for a Rails developer, another group that's useful for C, or for Wordpress, or whatever. That would allow for a minimal text editor, the infinite possibilities of plugins, and also easy onboarding for new users. It would also be useful for advanced users who are getting started in a new field.
lsllc 6y ago
I think there's some stuff that needs to be built in, for example I like to keep tabs and indents separate e.g. indent is 2, TAB is 8. There's a smartindent-sublime package, but it doesn't work quite right and I've had it conflict with other packages. I think it'd work better if it was built in.
hnlmorg 6y ago
People have been asking for ST to be open sourced for as long as the project has been active.
wbond 6y ago
This video was not a rush job, but purposefully shows off a couple of visually-focused changes as a teaser for our upcoming major release. None of these changes could actually be implemented as plugins - they all are much deeper architecturally than you may be aware, and the implementations open up a number of features for packages along the way. In terms of our development pace, we did large releases in 2017, 2018, 2019 and have put out over 50 builds in the past year leading up to ST4. We have addressed over 600 issues on the GitHub tracker during the current dev cycle. We do work differently than open source software, but we've got some upcoming changes with ST4 that will shorten our release cycles moving forward. Open sourcing Sublime Text isn't a rational thing, as there is no massive tech company who would be donating the primary engineering resources for the project.
- bogwog 6y ago
  Good to know, and I'll be looking forward to seeing the full changes. > Open sourcing Sublime Text isn't a rational thing, as there is no massive tech company who would be donating the primary engineering resources for the project. Just sayin, there are porn video games making $20,000 per month on Patreon. I think something as popular and beloved as ST could make a lot more than that. I'd personally pay at least $5/mo to support a full-time development staff for my most important development tool (by far), and that's way more than the $80 I paid once for ST3 back in ~2016.
  - bachmeier 6y ago
    > Just sayin, there are porn video games making $20,000 per month on Patreon. Is that $20,000/month rolling in from businesses? I don't know anything about ST's financials, but I'd expect that to be the source of most of their revenue. Businesses have a habit of not paying for things unless they have to.
    - therealdrag0 6y ago
      I find the opposite. Most places I've worked have offered to expense dev tools.

by bogwog 6y ago

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.
  - bogwog 6y ago
    See language server protocol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol If you have a programming language, you can write a "language server" for it that is compatible with the standard language server protocol. Once you have that, you can use your programming language in any text editor that implements an LSP client, and get full IDE-like features for free. Whether code intelligence/intellisense style features are important to you is another story, but it is an incredibly useful thing to have in a general purpose tool for editing code (and I believe most ST users are programmers). IMO, it makes much more sense to have that built in to ST as a first class feature, than to have it only available as a community plugin. > However, the fact that the plugin was broken tells me there's a problem with the plugin ecosystem, not with the editor. That's exactly why it should be built in to the editor. For many people, LSP support is a deal breaker.
    - nickelcitymario 6y ago
      Now that I understand this functionality better, you may be right. I'm on the fence about whether it really should be built-in, but I can appreciate why you'd want it to be. In effect, you're asking for the ability to extend the list of supported languages by specifying them on an ad hoc basis, and I can definitely see why that's an absolute must-have if you're working in a language that isn't built into the editor. (I really hope I'm capturing the functionality correctly.) That being said, I suspect most developers rarely work in languages that aren't supported, so even IF this should be built-in, it seems like something that most users would never use. While I think that's perfectly reasonable in an IDE, I think a text editor should be limited to features that are used by a majority of its users for the majority of the time. It's not that I'm saying this isn't crucial functionality. It's that if we start requiring text editors to have every bit of crucial functionality that anyone might have, you end up with an IDE. I still think the problem is the plugin ecosystem. What would stop the Sublime team from saying, in effect: "This is functionality that should always and reliably be available for those who need it, so we're going to take responsibility for maintaining this as a plugin"?
jpalomaki 6y ago
For more casual user (me) a large plugin ecosystem makes things complicated. It means you need to invest time to understand which ones to pick and this might be changing all the time as projects are abandoned and forked. For Eclipse there was (is?) something called MyEclipse which was paid software and contained a curated set of plugins.
- nickelcitymario 6y ago
  An excellent point. My solution to this would be (ironically) to add one feature to Sublime: Grouped Packages. Simply put, the idea would be to define a set of plugins needed (or recommended) for certain types of development. So you'd install Sublime, and then have a handy popup asking if you want to install any of the suggested Grouped Packages. There might be a dozen or so that are commonly useful for a Rails developer, another group that's useful for C, or for Wordpress, or whatever. That would allow for a minimal text editor, the infinite possibilities of plugins, and also easy onboarding for new users. It would also be useful for advanced users who are getting started in a new field.

lsllc 6y ago

I think there's some stuff that needs to be built in, for example I like to keep tabs and indents separate e.g. indent is 2, TAB is 8. There's a smartindent-sublime package, but it doesn't work quite right and I've had it conflict with other packages. I think it'd work better if it was built in.

hnlmorg 6y ago

People have been asking for ST to be open sourced for as long as the project has been active.

wbond 6y ago

This video was not a rush job, but purposefully shows off a couple of visually-focused changes as a teaser for our upcoming major release. None of these changes could actually be implemented as plugins - they all are much deeper architecturally than you may be aware, and the implementations open up a number of features for packages along the way. In terms of our development pace, we did large releases in 2017, 2018, 2019 and have put out over 50 builds in the past year leading up to ST4. We have addressed over 600 issues on the GitHub tracker during the current dev cycle. We do work differently than open source software, but we've got some upcoming changes with ST4 that will shorten our release cycles moving forward. Open sourcing Sublime Text isn't a rational thing, as there is no massive tech company who would be donating the primary engineering resources for the project.

bogwog 6y ago
Good to know, and I'll be looking forward to seeing the full changes. > Open sourcing Sublime Text isn't a rational thing, as there is no massive tech company who would be donating the primary engineering resources for the project. Just sayin, there are porn video games making $20,000 per month on Patreon. I think something as popular and beloved as ST could make a lot more than that. I'd personally pay at least $5/mo to support a full-time development staff for my most important development tool (by far), and that's way more than the $80 I paid once for ST3 back in ~2016.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > Just sayin, there are porn video games making $20,000 per month on Patreon. Is that $20,000/month rolling in from businesses? I don't know anything about ST's financials, but I'd expect that to be the source of most of their revenue. Businesses have a habit of not paying for things unless they have to.
  - therealdrag0 6y ago
    I find the opposite. Most places I've worked have offered to expense dev tools.