The big changes in ST3 aren't primarily user facing. Yes, there are some useful new features, but the reason that this is ST3 versus ST2.1 is because of the API

The big changes in ST3 aren't primarily user facing. Yes, there are some useful new features, but the reason that this is ST3 versus ST2.1 is because of the API changes. Sublime Text X, which became ST2, started almost 3 years ago. Back then the API used Python 2.6, I imagine largely because that was the stable 2.x branch. 3.x was still bleeding edge, and not built into OS X. Over time as more developers learned about Sublime Text, the plugin community exploded. Now there were some warts from the very beginning. On Windows, Python 2.x can't import from paths that contain non-ASCII characters. To get around this, Jon had to implement some hacks to get it all to work consistently. As the plugin community has grown so much, we've found lots of edge cases and run into issues with developing against an aging version of Python. At this point, Python 2.6 is EOL in 7 months. It strikes me that it is a hard, but important choice to break backwards compatibility to fix a number of core issues in ST, but also to jump to a modern version of Python. Python 3.3 came out just 5 months ago. Jon has rewritten the python bindings and restructured the way packages are imported to allow for importing across plugins. Luckily it isn't that hard to write Python that runs on 2.6 and 3.3, especially with 3.3 adding back in support for u"" strings. So yes, it is going to continue to be a little while before the plugin community has finished all of the work porting plugins to ST3. There is a list of what already works at https://github.com/wbond/sublime_package_control/wiki/Sublime-Text-3-Compatible-Packages https://github.com/wbond/sublime_package_control/wiki/Sublim.... Also, Package Control is fully functional with ST3 now. The last remaining piece before the PC 2.0 release is taking this opportunity to fix some issues with the channel/repo/package structure of Package Control. That said, this break is positioning Jon and the community to continue to build great stuff that is really useful. So yeah, it kinda sucks, but I have a strong sense users of ST will be much better off in the near future.