[wbond]

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.

[kstrauser]

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.

[doubleunplussed]

Just to provide push from the other side, I'm completely fine with this model. I don't get the need for churn.

Who cares if it "feels" like a dead project? I know it's not dead, I don't care what it feels like.

I don't use software for the feeling of being up to date on the cutting edge, I use it because it suits my needs.

[kstrauser]

By “feels” I meant “as far as I can tell without investing a ton of research”. Dead projects don’t get bugfixes, or builds for new versions of the OS. They’re ticking time bombs. I would not voluntarily use an abandoned product, and would much prefer investing my time getting good at a maintained one.

Turns out ST wasn’t actually a dead project, although it seemed like it. The ST team probably lost more users than just me from not communicating.

[abenga]

It is a text editor. A really good one. It could edit files really well last year, and continues to do so really well now. Which possible bugs can be surfaced day to day, or week to week that need fixes?

I am glad to pay for software that doesn't keep me on the run like a treadmill. It is possible for software as simple as a text editor to be "finished".

[jostyee]

Plugin developers do care, there are so many active maintained plugins now dead, for me the 2 Go official plugins had been abandoned for years, they didn’t even bother to merge bugfixes.

[spurgu]

+1, I've used ST for ~6 years now and never had any issues. To me it just feels solid to not get updates every damn week but instead every couple of months where I browse through the changelog and then go back to using an awesome editor.

Really excited about ST4, looks like a major upgrade!

[dralley]

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]

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.

[danpalmer]

> 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?

[danpalmer]

I've now managed to get the update.

Respectfully, ST devs, I think you might need to have a hard look at how you do customer communication. I stopped using ST essentially because of stagnation that hadn't actually happened!

[musingsole]

> Respectfully, ST devs, I think you might need to have a hard look at how you do customer communication

You have really odd expectations of a small team making a targeted tool and for which you have expounded at length about how it doesn't work for you. Cool beans, my dude.

I love Sublime. The devs have earned a good portion of my trust to keep on rocking; they'll get my license fee whenever they ask for it (the benefit of trust).

[danpalmer]

I just find it odd that they'd lose customers over lack of communication. I'm not the only person in this thread who didn't realise it was under active development.

I'm all for small dev teams doing things that let them stay small, but we're not talking about substantial changes here, we're talking about a sentence on their website saying "ST4 is in active development, you can follow progress on the forums", or other small changes like that.

[pizza234]

> You have really odd expectations of a small team making a targeted tool and for which you have expounded at length about how it doesn't work for you

I actually agree with the parent.

I've been a long time ST, and I've found significant limitations and bugs; since they haven't been fixed/improved for a while, and there were no news, I switched, and I'm not going back again.

While the parent's post may have been better phrased, I think that it's correct that with a better communication, they could have retained more customers.

[kemayo]

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

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]

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]

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]

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)