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by kstrauser 1905 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.

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.

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".

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.
+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!

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.

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.