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Part of our development pace is that we are a small team (six engineers), bootstrapped, maintaining multiple products, and looking to do things in a way that fi

by wbond 6y ago

Part of our development pace is that we are a small team (six engineers), bootstrapped, maintaining multiple products, and looking to do things in a way that fits with our vision for the products. We want to build products that are around for the long haul – Sublime Text has been around for 15 years. We'd rather focus on quality and performance than adding lots of features. We are doing a big release because our current licensing scheme requires a "major version" release for paid updates. If we did a release once a month, they would all be trivial features, and wouldn't justify a major version bump. For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. However, since this is a major release, it has some very significant changes that need testing, refining and polishing. I don't think anyone in their right mind would ship a half-finished product and call it a major release, so we've been doing the work that shows it is a major release. The downside of bigger releases is that sometimes they end up dragging on a little longer than you want, and we'd rather uphold our vision for the product than have a release done a few months earlier. As I mentioned in my post above, we've got some changes coming that will help address the "major version" issue and allow us to take on a faster release cycle. That said, I'm not sure I agree that new releases once a month are a good fit for the majority of users. We do, however, provide dev builds for users who do like seeing changes quickly. We've got a super active group of some of the more prolific plugin developers that we interact with on a daily basis on our public Discord server. They definitely provide a lot of feedback and we make a point of listening to what the have to say. The reality of it is that most open source developers wax and wane in their development work. The ones who stick with projects for years and years tend to either do open source work related to their day job, or are at least partially employed to work on the open source work. Others will get an itch, scratch it, share it, improve it and then be satisfied.

danpalmer 6y ago
> For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. I'm a licence holder and I haven't seen an update since October 2019. Despite reading most of this thread I haven't managed to figure out where any more recent releases are. Can you point me towards them?
- kemayo 6y ago
  You need to join their Discord to find the Sublime Text 4 dev channel. It's not marketed anywhere, you just have to have searched their forum for it. https://discord.gg/D43Pecu https://discord.gg/D43Pecu Sublime Text 3, as you say, has gone without dev updates since 2019 with no announcements about why or pointers to the new version. Yes, they're very bad at some of these communications issues. :D
  - wbond 6y ago
    We intentionally decided to have the dev builds for ST4 go to a smaller group of people, paired with a low-friction communication medium. Clearly you disagree with that decision, but we do communicate with our users pretty much every day. We simply decided trying to communicate and gather feedback from tens of thousands of users was less productive for a team of six than hundreds of engaged power users.
    - kemayo 6y ago
      My only disagreement with your chosen course was the lack of update on the ST3 dev builds page. As-is, it gives the impression to users like the ones I replied to that there's no progress being made. Sticking a note at the top of the ST3 dev build page akin to the one on the ST2 dev builds page, even without a link to the discord or new builds, would have changed their perception of things. Or even just a post on your news blog that you're moving active development to an upcoming version? A pinned post on your forum? There really was no communication to users who're not actively involved in the community, that I could find.
      - bbbbbr 6y ago
        Yes, this ^^^ While posting new builds in a not easily discoverable location is technically compatible with the statement of: > For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. In practice the result is that (by stated design) the majority of sublime text license holders will not be aware of new builds for several years at a time until they are announced in the easily discoverable public location again. I think it's good for them to pursue whatever development and community engagement model feels most sustainable, but it is disingenuous to claim that both users have access to the current dev builds while also trying to hide those builds from most users. (edit: grammar)
kstrauser 6y ago
I’m saying this because I like Sublime Text and want you to succeed: As an end user: that model doesn’t work for me at all. Most other apps I use get regular feature and bugfix updates and I admit that I’m spoiled by those regular updates. That ST2 went so very long between releases made it feel like a dead project. Even if behind the scenes it was still active and healthy, I didn’t see that and couldn’t tell the difference between “actively developed, thriving project that just doesn’t release often” and “developer woke up one month and thought ‘hey, I should close a feature request or two this quarter’”. Again, I’m definitely not arguing that you’re not hard at work on it. I mean this in the spirit of feedback: as an end user who wasn’t active in the plugin developer forums, I didn’t realize anyone was still working on it full-time. And because of that, I stopped using ST because it felt like it was a dead end and I wanted to put my mental resources toward learning and using something still alive and thriving.
- dralley 6y ago
  I don't necessarily agree. I like VSCode, and I use it for a lot of IDE-like stuff. But for normal reading and writing code? I use Sublime Text. Sublime Text is so much faster and more fluid, and able to handle much larger files, and has a better set of text editing tricks in my opinion. And that is worth enough to me that I wouldn't trade it for being able to do everything in one editor. Sublime + plugins has "enough" features that I only switch when I really need to. And while I can't put my finger on exactly why I feel this way, text just seems to look more pleasant than on other editors, even when using the same fonts and similar color schemes.
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    I didn’t mention VSCode in that comment, and I don’t think it’s really relevant to what I was saying. I switched from ST to a different editor (and not directly to VSCode) because I was under the impression that ST was no longer being actively developed. I don’t have anything bad to say about ST other than I didn’t like how it didn’t handle Python project environments well, and if I had believed it was still being actively worked on, I might have stuck with it.
- 6y ago

by wbond 6y ago

danpalmer 6y ago

> For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. I'm a licence holder and I haven't seen an update since October 2019. Despite reading most of this thread I haven't managed to figure out where any more recent releases are. Can you point me towards them?

kemayo 6y ago
You need to join their Discord to find the Sublime Text 4 dev channel. It's not marketed anywhere, you just have to have searched their forum for it. https://discord.gg/D43Pecu https://discord.gg/D43Pecu Sublime Text 3, as you say, has gone without dev updates since 2019 with no announcements about why or pointers to the new version. Yes, they're very bad at some of these communications issues. :D
- wbond 6y ago
  We intentionally decided to have the dev builds for ST4 go to a smaller group of people, paired with a low-friction communication medium. Clearly you disagree with that decision, but we do communicate with our users pretty much every day. We simply decided trying to communicate and gather feedback from tens of thousands of users was less productive for a team of six than hundreds of engaged power users.
  - kemayo 6y ago
    My only disagreement with your chosen course was the lack of update on the ST3 dev builds page. As-is, it gives the impression to users like the ones I replied to that there's no progress being made. Sticking a note at the top of the ST3 dev build page akin to the one on the ST2 dev builds page, even without a link to the discord or new builds, would have changed their perception of things. Or even just a post on your news blog that you're moving active development to an upcoming version? A pinned post on your forum? There really was no communication to users who're not actively involved in the community, that I could find.
    - bbbbbr 6y ago
      Yes, this ^^^ While posting new builds in a not easily discoverable location is technically compatible with the statement of: > For license holders, we've actually been shipping new dev builds every one to two weeks. In practice the result is that (by stated design) the majority of sublime text license holders will not be aware of new builds for several years at a time until they are announced in the easily discoverable public location again. I think it's good for them to pursue whatever development and community engagement model feels most sustainable, but it is disingenuous to claim that both users have access to the current dev builds while also trying to hide those builds from most users. (edit: grammar)

kstrauser 6y ago

I’m saying this because I like Sublime Text and want you to succeed: As an end user: that model doesn’t work for me at all. Most other apps I use get regular feature and bugfix updates and I admit that I’m spoiled by those regular updates. That ST2 went so very long between releases made it feel like a dead project. Even if behind the scenes it was still active and healthy, I didn’t see that and couldn’t tell the difference between “actively developed, thriving project that just doesn’t release often” and “developer woke up one month and thought ‘hey, I should close a feature request or two this quarter’”. Again, I’m definitely not arguing that you’re not hard at work on it. I mean this in the spirit of feedback: as an end user who wasn’t active in the plugin developer forums, I didn’t realize anyone was still working on it full-time. And because of that, I stopped using ST because it felt like it was a dead end and I wanted to put my mental resources toward learning and using something still alive and thriving.

dralley 6y ago
I don't necessarily agree. I like VSCode, and I use it for a lot of IDE-like stuff. But for normal reading and writing code? I use Sublime Text. Sublime Text is so much faster and more fluid, and able to handle much larger files, and has a better set of text editing tricks in my opinion. And that is worth enough to me that I wouldn't trade it for being able to do everything in one editor. Sublime + plugins has "enough" features that I only switch when I really need to. And while I can't put my finger on exactly why I feel this way, text just seems to look more pleasant than on other editors, even when using the same fonts and similar color schemes.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  I didn’t mention VSCode in that comment, and I don’t think it’s really relevant to what I was saying. I switched from ST to a different editor (and not directly to VSCode) because I was under the impression that ST was no longer being actively developed. I don’t have anything bad to say about ST other than I didn’t like how it didn’t handle Python project environments well, and if I had believed it was still being actively worked on, I might have stuck with it.
6y ago