[naltun]

Even though I haven't met a Sublime user in a few years, it still must be popular since it's at v4. Last time I checked, Sublime was still proprietary, which is the reason I had skipped using it. I've heard Sublime has some useful features, though. If it's in their interest, I hope they decide liberate / open their source code.

E: misspelling

[hn_throwaway_69]

It's a paid product with a team who need to earn a living wage. It's not like VS Code where the team is bankrolled by a big organisation making its money on other proprietary products.

In light of the above, it makes sense for it to be proprietary and closed source.

Were it open source, people could fork it and distribute it freely, with no remuneration going back to the developers. I doubt the developers could offer any other incentive such as support to make up the shortfall.

"Source available" licences where the user is prohibited from providing the software to others doesn't meet the FSF's definition of freedom, so even that wouldn't please everyone.

[jmull]

As a software developer I prefer to pay for my text editor.

As one of the people supporting it’s continuing existence, I think there will be more focus on what I need. For open source projects, the focus will be (and should be) on what the people putting in the time and money need.

There’s considerable overhead (in terms of optimizing workflows) to switching editors too, so just because an editor is good for today doesn’t mean it will be good tomorrow. Not that proprietary editors can’t change in a way negative for me. I just figure it’s less likely and, over time, will happen less often.

Of course, I could have the perfect editor by doing my own, but it’s orders of magnitudes less effort to pay someone $x. (Personally, I think sublime should go to a subscription model. Pay per release encourages feature bloat, which I do not want in a text editor.)

[dralley]

I use Sublime as my primary editor.

It's just so much faster than every other GUI editor, even VSCode which is "tolerable". I can open multi-gigabyte XML files without bringing my computer to its knees. The extension ecosystem is pretty weak compared to VSCode but it does what I need. And something is just better about the way Sublime renders text. It's easier on the eyes. And the multi-line / multi-cursor editing flow is better.

I still pull out other editors if I need some advanced refactoring or debugging feature but if I can avoid it, I do.

[e-dant]

As of writing there is no disclosure of any particular license on their website for sublime text.

I must have overlooked this. While most of my programming is over ssh with vim, I’ve very much enjoyed Sublime on my own systems. Minimalism and unobtrusiveness has been very appealing to me. Free software is more important, though, so perhaps it’s back to vim, then.

I wish that the Xi editor was maintained more efficiently than it is.

Are you aware of good IDE’s besides vim and emacs? What do you use? I love vim but sometimes I just want something “friendlier” for a change.

[tomrod]

Honestly? Gedit, vscodium, geany are wonderful tools. Not bloated, just enough to hop into code.

A lot of people swear by jetbrains. I'm still a newb with it but I can see it being useful. But I learned to not hold my shift key too much (and disable defaults). Search everywhere is nice but difficult to use if you have motor difficulties.

[rahen]

Good, lightweight, OSS text editors for the main platforms:

- Linux: gedit, geany

- macOS: TextMate

- Windows: Notepad++

And the one to rule them all: emacs (also gvim).