[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)