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I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs, and it's pretty shady to ride another project's coattails when their intent is ess
by overgard 12y ago
I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs, and it's pretty shady to ride another project's coattails when their intent is essentially to cannibalize it by being sublime-but-free. You can discuss the merits of open source and paying for tools all you want, but basically their goal is to put a man out of business who's made something that a lot of people love, because he has the gall to charge $60. Anyway. I'm all for competition, but do it under your own banner with your own ideas.
Also, I think it's weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch. I mean, unless I'm contributing... I don't care. You could write it in brainfuck if it does the job.
- oridecon 12y agoI agree, but the main reason for most people (I can't comment on the author's intention) is that Sublime is lacking updates and transparency about the development. They did announced something recently, like getting ready for ST 4. And 3 is not even a major upgrade from ST2, IMHO.
- Aldo_MX 12y agoAs long as Sublime doesn't go the Jetbrains way where they never reach a stable status, but they keep increasing the version number every year, I'm fine.
- dyeje 12y agoI've been using Sublime Text 2 for a few years now. I'm not sure what a major upgrade would entail when it works so well already. Do Emacs and Vim get 'major upgrades'? [actual question]
- klibertp 12y ago> Do Emacs and Vim get 'major upgrades'? Yeah, they do. It's very hard to do in both cases, for different reasons - licensing for Emacs, code quality/style for Vim - but it happens. For Emacs just read this: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Antinews.html#Antinews http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ant... and this: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Antinews.html#Antinews http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ant... (or look at normal changelog, but I kind of like this "backwards in time" format, it's fun :)) to get a feeling for what you'd miss by not doing a "major upgrade".
- wooter 12y agono, but emacs and vim don't charge 60 bucks per version. I'm not saying this is necessarily negative for ST, but its the point he was making. I frankly think 60 bucks is worth robust support which ST certainly did not have. Anyways, theres no satisfying HN. When Atom came out, the consensus was that they should've come out and said it was an ST clone upfront. Now someone does that and it seems the tide has changed. While we're on Atom, since switching I've found its everything ST should've been. Its open source and has a huge community developing very useful plugins (not to mention, they're well integrated from a usability perspective - git/terminal status/linter/etc). Also, I have yet to run into a serious bug/versioning issue which ST plugins were rife with before I dropped it.
- at-fates-hands 12y ago>> no, but emacs and vim don't charge 60 bucks per version Not that it matters much, but it's actually $70 now: http://www.sublimetext.com/buy http://www.sublimetext.com/buy
- wldcordeiro 12y agoI don't think Atom is ready to replace Sublime yet for me. The way it renders text just bugs me for one. The other thing is that it's lacking a good way to do syntax specific settings like in Sublime. Aside from that it's a matter of the plugin ecosystem not being as mature.
- sigzero 12y agoThis isn't a "fork" though or at least it doesn't look like it from a cursory look at their website. So they shouldn't be riding the coat tails of sublime at all. I understand a fork doing that but not this.
- shangxiao 12y agoI guess it depends, at least for me, on how much it looks and feels like Sublime Text and whether it is compatible with the numerous addons there are.
- MagicWishMonkey 12y agoYea, I'm still using v2.0 because I don't want to get burned again. He released v3 a few months after I bought it. I understand software development isn't cheap but it's kind of annoying that $60 doesn't include free upgrades.
- jeffreyrogers 12y agoI think it does include free updates. At least, I just copied my code from v2 into v3 and that worked.
- Aldo_MX 12y agoExpiration Date Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4. From: http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq
- grrowl 12y agoWhat the hell? Sublime Text 3 isn't even out of beta, nor featured on the Sublime Text homepage.
- Guvante 12y ago> And 3 is not even a major upgrade from ST2, IMHO. From a development standpoint it likely was. Doing a plug-in rewrite is a ton of work.
- trevor-e 12y agoI don't think people care so much about how it's 60$. At work that makes little difference to me. The big thing is how this is open source.
- Someone1234 12y ago> The big thing is how this is open source. And how does that make a difference? You could already contribute plugins to both to add/remove/alter functionality, so other than a warm fuzzy feeling, what does Open Source add to your productivity?
- Igglyboo 12y agoIf something breaks or development stalls or he wants new features and the developer has abandoned the project he can then pick it up himself if he wants.
- stronglikedan 12y agoI'm sure that if he were to abandon Sublime, then he'd open source it. The community is too big not to. Besides, $60 is not a bad price for something that will always be ahead of Lime's curve.
- k__ 12y ago$0 is not a bad price for something that will always be behind of Sublime's curve. I used closed and open source software. It just feels much better if I see a bug, fix it, place a pull request and be done with it, than discuss with some devs in a bug tracker if and when they want to fix a bug I hate.
- Diamons 12y agoAnd that's the problem. Every single open source software looks like it was cobbled together with no vision or coherency in design. It's no surprise that most open source software is clunky and hard to use whereas closed products always have that visual polish.
- gangstaplot2 12y agoOddly enough, I've been using ST2 for a while and have been too lazy to actually buy a license for it (or Divvy). I think I'll do so now for exactly this reason.
- Kequc 12y agoI can't because still after all these years the only payment option is still Paypal. Trying to buy a serious development tool here I'm not shopping on grandma's home sewn teddy bears and scarves. It's ridiculous in my strong opinion. This is like someone trying to get me to buy a domain on Godaddy just because I like to use Heroku for hosting. I don't use Paypal.
- stronglikedan 12y agoFrom the second section of the Sales FAQ [0]: Alternative Payment Methods PayPal is currently the only way to purchase a license for Sublime Text. However, for most countries a PayPal account is not required; you can purchase as a guest using a credit card. Unfortunately, PayPal requires users in some countries, such as New Zealand, to create an account. [0] http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq
- slang800 12y ago> I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand They aren't claiming to be associated with Sublime - they're saying that they're trying to make something _like_ Sublime. And that is actually a pretty good way to explain it. When I first found LimeText (about a year ago) I was searching for an "open source ST2 clone". I already knew that I wanted something like Sublime, I just wanted it to be open source so I could contribute to it. Having to compare the features of LimeText to the ubiquitous features of Sublime would have just made it harder for me to "get" what LimeText is. > because he has the gall to charge $60 I don't think that the 60USD was a big deal. I was fine with that, I just wanted something that's open-source. > weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch I think that the reason why is because LimeText is marketed towards people who want to contribute to their editor. Sublime is probably a more stable solution for people looking for something like Sublime, so right now the big feature is that it's open-source. * Also, I should note that I've never used LimeText... I ended up switching to Atom instead. My primary experience with it is just finding it and evaluating it as an alternative to Sublime.
- Shorel 12y agoSub-LimeText They use wordplay on the sublime editor to name themselves. It's up to trademark lawyers to prove if the name is associated with Sublime Text or not.
- desireco42 12y agoI think it would be fair to say that it was inspired by sublime, I agree completely with your sentiment. It does seem that Sublime will end up open sourced most likely, unless author is willing to continue development with same intensity he did before. As for price, I was happy to pay for the editor, even though I use vim most of the time, I am happy to support modern editors and use them.
- cloverich 12y ago> I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs Its competition. Thats the market segment they are aiming to attract and serve. They aren't claiming to be Sublime Text, they are claiming they want to be better than it. Its the market leader in that area, and if that is the segment they are interested in serving, imho it wouldn't make sense to not compare themselves to Sublime Text. > Also, I think it's weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch. I mean, unless I'm contributing... I don't care. Play the other side. You're interested in an open source alternative to Sublime Text, and you love working in Go. Is it relevant now? Because I'm willing to bet by its open source nature, they are as interested in attracting committers as they are users at this point.
- Guvante 12y ago> They aren't claiming to be Sublime Text Pretty close, calling your project Lime text is pretty sketchy IMHO. > it wouldn't make sense to not compare themselves to Sublime Text But they aren't comparing themselves, that would be a feature page showing how many features they have. Instead they are branding themselves in a very similar way.
- overgard 12y ago> They aren't claiming to be Sublime Text, they are claiming they want to be better than it Sure, but, they're using sublime text's brand to draw attention to their own project. If they called themselves, say, "Cherry edit" and just had a comparison matrix to sublime text without saying "we want to be sublime", I bet this wouldn't have made it to the front page. They're piggybacking off the other projects success by invoking its name and lineage, while positioning themselves as a competitor by undercutting the price (in this case: free). That's what I mean. It's not illegal or whatever, it just feels like poor sportsmanship.
- adrusi 12y agoGo is part of the pitch because the project is still is its relatively early stages (I believe it's about a year old). It's just as important for them to attract developers as it is users.
- duiker101 12y agoI see your point of the not liking "sublime-but-free". But isn't that what basically everyone does with "it's like uber meets airb&b for x"?
- alexvr 12y agoYou've got to hand it to them for the clever name. They manage to imply that it's better than Sublime while using fewer letters.