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If there is one app I've always been thrilled to pay for, it's Sublime Text. I've purchased and renewed the licence ever since v1 came out. While it may not be

If there is one app I've always been thrilled to pay for, it's Sublime Text. I've purchased and renewed the licence ever since v1 came out. While it may not be open sourced, you can see it was created with a lot of love for code and openness. Today there are thousands of amazing plugins to enhance it. And though I fully respect the open source initiative, I, for once, am very happy to support / give some money to a peer developer who has made our world much better.

Chronic29 12y ago
What a touching story you have there. Comments like these are why the "HN bias" spreads.
sqren 12y ago
I completely agree with what you say. Sublime is awesome and I don't mind paying money for closed-source software. What I do mind is, that the development seems to have stopped, and being closed-source nobody can move it forward but the original maintainer. It once again brings attention to the most important "bus factor" [0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
- frou_dh 12y ago
  The funny thing being that the impetus for a lot of people moving to Sublime in the first place was that happening to TextMate 1.
  - bloke_zero 12y ago
    I'm pretty happy with TextMate 2 at this point - pretty regular updates, mature eco system, continuous improvement and its open source.
    - atmosx 12y ago
      The TM2 phenomenon is something weird. TM had a huge traction when it was payware. Then it stalled, then it went open-source and everybody started looking for a new payware solution. Apparently some people, still believe the theory that all you need to know about a product is on the price tag, which is absolutely false (e.g. emacs/vim have no price but are exceptional programmig editors, hardly matched by payware solutions). Anyway, it's good to have choices.
      - frou_dh 12y ago
        By my memory, the looking-for-an-alternative phase began long before the surprise open-sourcing.
      - yoklov 12y ago
        I don't think anyone saw the open source version coming. Development had totally halted for several years before that happened.
      - jonstewart 12y ago
        I switched to Sublime because it was far faster and had the killer feature of offering a consistent UI between Linux, MacOS X, and Windows.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > TM had a huge traction when it was payware. Then it stalled, then it went open-source and everybody started looking for a new payware solution. IIRC -- and I was never a TM user but was following it from the outside -- search for a TM replacement started before the open-sourcing; once TM became popular, people started looking for a cross-platform equivalent (because even lots of people who are primarily OSX users don't do all their editing there) and as the perceptions was that development was stalling, an even more people were searching for alternatives. The open-sourcing was sometime after that. I don't think ST has been adopted because it is payware (that is, I don't think a significant force in its adoption is a preference for paid over free software), I think its been widely adopted because its features well match what a lot of people are looking for in an editor, and they are willing to pay for it.
    - emehrkay 12y ago
      We need split window/panes and TM2 would be perfect for me.
- felixrabe 12y ago
  Development has not stopped, there were some distractions to the developer. For the July 2014 status update, see http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16517 http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16517
  - unfamiliar 12y ago
    While this is encouraging, I've heard it several times over the last year, and commits would speak louder than words in terms of commitment. Here is another post from March: https://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&start=50#p58951 https://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&...
- Keyframe 12y ago
  If he doesn't want to/can't continue with development, he can always pull off what Blender did. Start a campaign to raise a certain amount of money and release source after raising it.
- craigc 12y ago
  I'm pretty curious about what new features you are looking for in Sublime. I spend more time in Sublime Text than pretty much any other application. I understand the idea that "development may have stopped", but there are not any glaring bugs, sublime text 3 is super fast, and there is a huge community building sublime plugins. The editor was built in such a way where it allows the entire community to keep moving it forward even if the original developer has moved onto other things, and I happen to think that is great. I'm not sure that editors like vi and emacs receive regular updates. It seems that emacs releases can have up to 2 years between versions, and I can't find the last time that vi was updated. Those do have the advantage of being open sourced, but unless there are glaring holes in Sublime then I don't see this as a big problem. Besides all that it DOES look as though there are plans for the future of Sublime as someone mentioned in a forum post on here. If it is true that development has been focused on improving the payment system for purchasing Sublime then I am all for that.
  - oblio 12y ago
    Both Emacs and Vim are updated regularly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29#Release_h... In between major releases they have tons and tons of bug fixes (Vim probably has hundreds per release). Editors can suffer a lot from code rot since they have to integrate with a lot of things. An Open Source version could be quite interesting from Sublime's community point of view. I don't know about the developer's income while this happens, though.
    - usaphp 12y ago
      Looking at the links you posted - vim is updated once every 3-4 years, emacs - once a year. Looking at sublime text release log (http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/ http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/) it's been updated much more often than emacs and vim combined.
      - johnwalker 12y ago
erikb 12y ago
I suppose being open source doesn't stop you from giving user licenses for money, though. True, people can just use your program by violating your license. From coder to coder that is way less likely than, for instance, between the movie industry and the movie viewers, though. And being open source, even the violating users might add value to your product by fixing bugs and adding features.
- gabemart 12y ago
  > I suppose being open source doesn't stop you from giving user licenses for money, though. True, people can just use your program by violating your license. I don't follow your argument here. To qualify as "Open Source" rather than "source available", people have to be free to modify and redistribute the source code. So even if you charge for a license, there's nothing to stop the first licensee redistributing for free. In other words, if it's open source, people can use the program for free without violating your license.
  - philbarr 12y ago
    Yes this always got me about the, "free as in free speech, not as in free beer" argument. Ok, so technically it's only, "free as in free speech" but in practicality it's also, "free as in free beer".
  - Tomte 12y ago
    But most people are not interested in the source code, they'd like to get a binary. Seems to work for XChat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XChat#Shareware_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XChat#Shareware_controversy
    - FichteFoll 12y ago
      Except that, also for XChat, there will be people providing these binaries for free because the software is open source and they are not violating the license by redistribution for free.
  - erikb 12y ago
jokoon 12y ago
60 bucks for an editor is quite expensive I think. There are nice alternative to such an editor. I wonder what features makes sublime text so much valuable...
- jbrooksuk 12y ago
  Have you downloaded the "forever-free" trial?
  - jokoon 12y ago
    Yes, I use that, but I'd also love to buy just for the sake of it. But 60 is a lot. I guess he just targets developer who are constantly using an editor instead, increasing the price and making that bet. The pop up message must be quite unnerving for heavy users.
    - jbrooksuk 12y ago
      $60 for a tool that you'd probably use every day? Well worth it in my opinion.
      - welly 12y ago
        When people complain about the cost of iPhone and Android apps ("What! This is going to cost me a buck?!") $60 to many people today must seem like an absolute fortune.
- phpnode 12y ago
  60 bucks is less than an hour's pay for many developers. We're talking about a tool that gets used for > 8hrs/day in many cases. Other industries would DREAM of having tools this cheap! * edited to remove the word "most" which seems to be upsetting some people.
  - jokoon 12y ago
    Yes he might target developers who make an everyday use of it, I just use a C++ IDE. I still don't understand what are those features though. Isn't it just good for web/python development ?
dan_bk 12y ago
> there are thousands of amazing plugins It would be excellent if they were compatible with Lime...
on_and_off 12y ago
The author is very unresponsive (both to mails and on its own forum), progress is extremely slow, to the point that there are always many threads asking if the project is dead. In these conditions, I don't mind seeing an open source project aiming to replace SublimeText.
- at-fates-hands 12y ago
  There are already plenty of other alternatives out there. I think I've used every IDE under the sun in the past two years. From paid versions (ST2, Dreamweaver, WebStorm) and plenty of opens source options like Aptana and Notepad++. The best alternative I've seen is Adobe Brackets (http://brackets.io/ http://brackets.io/). This is Adobe's IDE that gets regular builds and is essentially the nightly build of their new Edge Code IDE (https://creative.adobe.com/products/code https://creative.adobe.com/products/code). The newest plugins come out on Brackets first, then make their way to Edge. The best thing about Brackets is its built in HTML,JS and CSS so it opens up a huge development community for plugins. Interesting that WebStorm is only $49.99 for a single license and $29.99 to renew versus ST2 is $70 for a single license and the upgrade cost I believe is $70 as well?
swah 12y ago
Me too. Even though I'm an die hard fan of the Emacs ideas on extensiblity (which is more similar to Github's Atom) speed and good defaults have to come first, the this Sublime has excelled.
- gerbal 12y ago
  Also being available everywhere. I like Text Mate quite a bit, but being single platform makes it harder to recommend.
  - josteink 12y ago
    > Also being available everywhere. Emacs is everywhere. Windows. Linux. GUIed. And in a terminal where I've SSHed into a remote host. TextMate? Nope. Sublime text? Nope. Atom? Nope. LightTable? No chance. These modern GUI-only editors is IMO a major step back considering the Unix-y audience they are targeting: Any decent Unix-editor needs to work on my console. No exceptions.
    - hollerith 12y ago
      >Any decent Unix-editor needs to work on my console. Not everyone feels that way. For example, I used Emacs in text mode for over 15 years, but now that I have tried editing text in a GUI, I do not ever want to go back.
      - peatmoss 12y ago
        Not everyone feels that way, but enough people feel that way. I rarely use vi or emacs in a terminal these days, but I don't see a good reason to take the retrograde step back to a GUI-only editor. Also, network access isn't equivalent to console-accessible for quite a few use cases--fixing networking on the target box for starters.
    - swah 12y ago
      And I don't see anyone teaching how you write an editor with multiple front-ends! People normally start with the front-end.
smrtinsert 12y ago
I used to pay for it, then it was nothing but crash for a while. Went to vim, forgot about it.
peatmoss 12y ago
For many people, the opportunity costs of paperwork to get their employer to sign off and reimburse the purchase of a new tool exceeds the monetary costs of the tool. This is an oft under appreciated aspect of the free-as-in-beer distribution of Free-as-in-freedom software.
njharman 12y ago
Opensource is not about price. Its value is not in having $0 price. Never has been, never will be. How can people still be confused on this? Also, you can and should support / give some money to open source developers as well.

Chronic29 12y ago

What a touching story you have there. Comments like these are why the "HN bias" spreads.

sqren 12y ago

I completely agree with what you say. Sublime is awesome and I don't mind paying money for closed-source software. What I do mind is, that the development seems to have stopped, and being closed-source nobody can move it forward but the original maintainer. It once again brings attention to the most important "bus factor" [0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

frou_dh 12y ago
The funny thing being that the impetus for a lot of people moving to Sublime in the first place was that happening to TextMate 1.
- bloke_zero 12y ago
  I'm pretty happy with TextMate 2 at this point - pretty regular updates, mature eco system, continuous improvement and its open source.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    The TM2 phenomenon is something weird. TM had a huge traction when it was payware. Then it stalled, then it went open-source and everybody started looking for a new payware solution. Apparently some people, still believe the theory that all you need to know about a product is on the price tag, which is absolutely false (e.g. emacs/vim have no price but are exceptional programmig editors, hardly matched by payware solutions). Anyway, it's good to have choices.
    - frou_dh 12y ago
      By my memory, the looking-for-an-alternative phase began long before the surprise open-sourcing.
    - yoklov 12y ago
      I don't think anyone saw the open source version coming. Development had totally halted for several years before that happened.
    - jonstewart 12y ago
      I switched to Sublime because it was far faster and had the killer feature of offering a consistent UI between Linux, MacOS X, and Windows.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > TM had a huge traction when it was payware. Then it stalled, then it went open-source and everybody started looking for a new payware solution. IIRC -- and I was never a TM user but was following it from the outside -- search for a TM replacement started before the open-sourcing; once TM became popular, people started looking for a cross-platform equivalent (because even lots of people who are primarily OSX users don't do all their editing there) and as the perceptions was that development was stalling, an even more people were searching for alternatives. The open-sourcing was sometime after that. I don't think ST has been adopted because it is payware (that is, I don't think a significant force in its adoption is a preference for paid over free software), I think its been widely adopted because its features well match what a lot of people are looking for in an editor, and they are willing to pay for it.
  - emehrkay 12y ago
    We need split window/panes and TM2 would be perfect for me.
felixrabe 12y ago
Development has not stopped, there were some distractions to the developer. For the July 2014 status update, see http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16517 http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16517
- unfamiliar 12y ago
  While this is encouraging, I've heard it several times over the last year, and commits would speak louder than words in terms of commitment. Here is another post from March: https://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&start=50#p58951 https://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&...
Keyframe 12y ago
If he doesn't want to/can't continue with development, he can always pull off what Blender did. Start a campaign to raise a certain amount of money and release source after raising it.
craigc 12y ago
I'm pretty curious about what new features you are looking for in Sublime. I spend more time in Sublime Text than pretty much any other application. I understand the idea that "development may have stopped", but there are not any glaring bugs, sublime text 3 is super fast, and there is a huge community building sublime plugins. The editor was built in such a way where it allows the entire community to keep moving it forward even if the original developer has moved onto other things, and I happen to think that is great. I'm not sure that editors like vi and emacs receive regular updates. It seems that emacs releases can have up to 2 years between versions, and I can't find the last time that vi was updated. Those do have the advantage of being open sourced, but unless there are glaring holes in Sublime then I don't see this as a big problem. Besides all that it DOES look as though there are plans for the future of Sublime as someone mentioned in a forum post on here. If it is true that development has been focused on improving the payment system for purchasing Sublime then I am all for that.
- oblio 12y ago
  Both Emacs and Vim are updated regularly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Emacs#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29#Release_h... In between major releases they have tons and tons of bug fixes (Vim probably has hundreds per release). Editors can suffer a lot from code rot since they have to integrate with a lot of things. An Open Source version could be quite interesting from Sublime's community point of view. I don't know about the developer's income while this happens, though.
  - usaphp 12y ago
    Looking at the links you posted - vim is updated once every 3-4 years, emacs - once a year. Looking at sublime text release log (http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/ http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/) it's been updated much more often than emacs and vim combined.
    - johnwalker 12y ago

erikb 12y ago

I suppose being open source doesn't stop you from giving user licenses for money, though. True, people can just use your program by violating your license. From coder to coder that is way less likely than, for instance, between the movie industry and the movie viewers, though. And being open source, even the violating users might add value to your product by fixing bugs and adding features.

gabemart 12y ago
> I suppose being open source doesn't stop you from giving user licenses for money, though. True, people can just use your program by violating your license. I don't follow your argument here. To qualify as "Open Source" rather than "source available", people have to be free to modify and redistribute the source code. So even if you charge for a license, there's nothing to stop the first licensee redistributing for free. In other words, if it's open source, people can use the program for free without violating your license.
- philbarr 12y ago
  Yes this always got me about the, "free as in free speech, not as in free beer" argument. Ok, so technically it's only, "free as in free speech" but in practicality it's also, "free as in free beer".
- Tomte 12y ago
  But most people are not interested in the source code, they'd like to get a binary. Seems to work for XChat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XChat#Shareware_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XChat#Shareware_controversy
  - FichteFoll 12y ago
    Except that, also for XChat, there will be people providing these binaries for free because the software is open source and they are not violating the license by redistribution for free.
- erikb 12y ago

jokoon 12y ago

60 bucks for an editor is quite expensive I think. There are nice alternative to such an editor. I wonder what features makes sublime text so much valuable...

jbrooksuk 12y ago
Have you downloaded the "forever-free" trial?
- jokoon 12y ago
  Yes, I use that, but I'd also love to buy just for the sake of it. But 60 is a lot. I guess he just targets developer who are constantly using an editor instead, increasing the price and making that bet. The pop up message must be quite unnerving for heavy users.
  - jbrooksuk 12y ago
    $60 for a tool that you'd probably use every day? Well worth it in my opinion.
    - welly 12y ago
      When people complain about the cost of iPhone and Android apps ("What! This is going to cost me a buck?!") $60 to many people today must seem like an absolute fortune.
phpnode 12y ago
60 bucks is less than an hour's pay for many developers. We're talking about a tool that gets used for > 8hrs/day in many cases. Other industries would DREAM of having tools this cheap! * edited to remove the word "most" which seems to be upsetting some people.
- jokoon 12y ago
  Yes he might target developers who make an everyday use of it, I just use a C++ IDE. I still don't understand what are those features though. Isn't it just good for web/python development ?

dan_bk 12y ago

> there are thousands of amazing plugins It would be excellent if they were compatible with Lime...

on_and_off 12y ago

The author is very unresponsive (both to mails and on its own forum), progress is extremely slow, to the point that there are always many threads asking if the project is dead. In these conditions, I don't mind seeing an open source project aiming to replace SublimeText.

at-fates-hands 12y ago
There are already plenty of other alternatives out there. I think I've used every IDE under the sun in the past two years. From paid versions (ST2, Dreamweaver, WebStorm) and plenty of opens source options like Aptana and Notepad++. The best alternative I've seen is Adobe Brackets (http://brackets.io/ http://brackets.io/). This is Adobe's IDE that gets regular builds and is essentially the nightly build of their new Edge Code IDE (https://creative.adobe.com/products/code https://creative.adobe.com/products/code). The newest plugins come out on Brackets first, then make their way to Edge. The best thing about Brackets is its built in HTML,JS and CSS so it opens up a huge development community for plugins. Interesting that WebStorm is only $49.99 for a single license and $29.99 to renew versus ST2 is $70 for a single license and the upgrade cost I believe is $70 as well?

swah 12y ago

Me too. Even though I'm an die hard fan of the Emacs ideas on extensiblity (which is more similar to Github's Atom) speed and good defaults have to come first, the this Sublime has excelled.

gerbal 12y ago
Also being available everywhere. I like Text Mate quite a bit, but being single platform makes it harder to recommend.
- josteink 12y ago
  > Also being available everywhere. Emacs is everywhere. Windows. Linux. GUIed. And in a terminal where I've SSHed into a remote host. TextMate? Nope. Sublime text? Nope. Atom? Nope. LightTable? No chance. These modern GUI-only editors is IMO a major step back considering the Unix-y audience they are targeting: Any decent Unix-editor needs to work on my console. No exceptions.
  - hollerith 12y ago
    >Any decent Unix-editor needs to work on my console. Not everyone feels that way. For example, I used Emacs in text mode for over 15 years, but now that I have tried editing text in a GUI, I do not ever want to go back.
    - peatmoss 12y ago
      Not everyone feels that way, but enough people feel that way. I rarely use vi or emacs in a terminal these days, but I don't see a good reason to take the retrograde step back to a GUI-only editor. Also, network access isn't equivalent to console-accessible for quite a few use cases--fixing networking on the target box for starters.
  - swah 12y ago
    And I don't see anyone teaching how you write an editor with multiple front-ends! People normally start with the front-end.

smrtinsert 12y ago

I used to pay for it, then it was nothing but crash for a while. Went to vim, forgot about it.

peatmoss 12y ago

For many people, the opportunity costs of paperwork to get their employer to sign off and reimburse the purchase of a new tool exceeds the monetary costs of the tool. This is an oft under appreciated aspect of the free-as-in-beer distribution of Free-as-in-freedom software.

njharman 12y ago

Opensource is not about price. Its value is not in having $0 price. Never has been, never will be. How can people still be confused on this? Also, you can and should support / give some money to open source developers as well.