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Sublime Text 3 Updated

115 points| jimhart3000 | 11 years ago |sublimetext.com

85 comments

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ceronman|11 years ago

I love this editor and it makes me sad to see how the project is stalled.

In 2002 the investors behind Blender launched the "Free Blender" campaign. They asked for 100,000 EUR as a one-time fee for open sourcing it. At the time the project was dying as a proprietary product. The investors got the money and today Blender is a healthy open source project.

I would love to see something similar with Sublime Text. The author seems uninterested in continuing with its development while many users want to see it moving forward. I believe it can raise much more money than Blender at the time.

thaumaturgy|11 years ago

I'd like to see Jon sign up for something like Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/

As near as I can tell, they would qualify as a creator, the signup process is fast and easy, and with Sublime's massive user community, it would probably give them a nice little revenue stream on the side. Patreon seems like a good way to extract money on a regular basis from people who actively want to give it to you. One of the webcomics I follow daily, Questionable Content, is currently pulling down $9,000+/month from Patreon support alone: http://www.patreon.com/jephjacques (HUGE as webcomic revenue usually goes).

I'd pledge like $10/month just to get regular monthly software updates. Hell, I'd pay $5/month just for regular monthly blog updates on he's been working on, and there'd be absolutely zero downside to his writing a blog update once a month.

guiambros|11 years ago

Stalled? I can't understand why people has this perception. You're not the only one; SublimeHQ forums are full of people complaining that "Sublime project is dead".

The guy releases a new version almost every month. He doesn't talk much, but keeps chugging along, fixing bugs and releasing incremental functionality every month or two.

True, it is still beta. But so what? ST3 has been incredibly stable since the first version, and all beta versions are a free upgrade to all ST2 licensed users till it is out of beta.

Plus, if you're really missing any functionality, just go ahead and develop a plugin. It's easy, and you don't need to open source the entire editor for that.

I think we should give the author a break. He built one of the best editors out there, and I really hope he can make a living out of this product, in whatever way he can.

psychometry|11 years ago

A lot of ST users are former Textmate users, too. So we've certainly been through this rigamarole before.

coldtea|11 years ago

>I love this editor and it makes me sad to see how the project is stalled.

Stalled? It just had an update.

It's also in the 3rd version, under development, which came just a couple of months after the 2nd version had been released. He could just have released ST2 and keep it at that version for 3-4 years.

Instead he immediately started development ST3, which had frenetic development in the first months, and has been completely stable for a year or more (I know, I use it everyday, along with several plugins).

And in the forum he even mentioned ST4 base libs he is preparing a month or so ago.

ggreer|11 years ago

Please note that this is a dev build of Sublime Text 3. You can only get it by manually downloading or checking for updates using a dev build. The most recent stable build of ST3 is from December of 2013.[1]

Dev builds are alpha-quality and generally unsuitable for everyday use. The current build will change permissions on any file you save.[2]

1. http://www.sublimetext.com/3

2. http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16696&s...

eknkc|11 years ago

He says he'll fix it in the next build..

Which I assume, will be released in 6 to 36 months. Yay!

tuananh|11 years ago

hmm weird, i cannot reproduce the bug on os x. (3dev channel)

touch hello.txt; chmod 777 hello.txt; subl hello.txt; add something and save ; 777 still.

polyvisual|11 years ago

I've almost given up with Sublime Text. I have a bug with the Linux version on xubuntu which causes the application window to shudder when I scroll. It's something to do with smooth scrolling.

I can't register at their forums as it requires a keyword which you can only get by emailing keyword@sublimetext.com - I've tried three times and each time I've been ignored. I've also tried email the other ST employee, but been ignored also.

Very frustrating when I've paid for a licence.

bithush|11 years ago

xyzzy3

edit: before anyone gives me shit for doing this it isn't exactly a big secret, it is a pretty poor way of 'securing' the forum. Just stick a captcha on it for gods sake.

demetris|11 years ago

There is a setting that can help with the scrolling:

"scroll_speed": 0

I have it in my user preferences (on Debian Sid) and it works well for me.

jbrooksuk|11 years ago

Unfortunately there is a rise in spammers recently.

Have you emailed sales@sublimetext.com?

bproctor|11 years ago

It's kind of sad that this project has become so dead that an update to a dev build is news worthy.

Karunamon|11 years ago

Not sure I subscribe to the idea that ST is "dead". The base editor is stable enough for day to day use ("dev" build be damned) and all the extra functionality (i.e. new features) is provided by plugins anyways.

ST could never see another update and would remain a competitive editor for daily use due to its plugin ecosystem.

velodrome|11 years ago

Is LimeText a viable alternative?

a2tech|11 years ago

The article doesn't link directly to the list of changes which are as follows:

Improved quote auto pairing logic

Selected group is now stored in the session

Fixed a crash triggered by Goto Anything cloning views

Windows: Added command line helper, subl.exe

OSX: Added 'New Window' entry to dock menu

Posix: Using correct permissions for newly created files and folders

jrochkind1|11 years ago

I don't really understand why these new releases are called 'dev' builds, and there isn't an official non-dev ST3 build yet.

Are most people using ST3 anyway, despite the releases being labelled dev builds? Are they in fact pretty stable? Are most widely used plugins updated for ST3 (and maybe no longer supported for ST2?)

Should I just go ahead and switch ST3 "dev"?

All multiple years of 'dev' releases gets you is confusion, if this is what most people are using and most plugin developers are targetting, i wish the developer would just call it a release.

hit8run|11 years ago

Sublimetext 3 beta is really stable and fast as hell. I don't know what black magic they use under osx but it is even smoother than http://chocolatapp.com which is a native cocoa based editor with nice builtin code completions for many languages.

kolev|11 years ago

Agreed. That's why we all love Sublime Text and why we are so pissed off that we can find the pulse.

shurcooL|11 years ago

The magic is called OpenGL and hardware accelerated graphics.

wickchuck|11 years ago

Anyone have a clue as to what were supposed to be able to do with this "Windows: Added command line helper, subl.exe". I'm guessing it's mainly for a shorter exe name to add to your path when launching sublime from the command line, but maybe I'm missing something?

dedward|11 years ago

It's just to launch the editor from the command-line.

IT's nothing new - sublime text 2 (at least on OS X) had the "subl" command so you could launch an edit session from the cli.. I assumed the rest had the same.

It's certainly not a new feature or anything to celebrate.

gcassie|11 years ago

If it works like the OSX subl command, it integrates with git nicely so it can pause git commands to allow you edit commit messages in sublime and resume the command once you save. If you try to do this with standard exe in windows, the git command will run start to finish and you will not be able to edit the commit messages in sublime.

Tyr42|11 years ago

The reason it exists is for things like git, so they can launch the editor aimed at a commit message, then block until the editor closes and then continue.

It's also useful if you want to open the editor aimed at a file in the current directory without re-navigating there in the gui.

coldtea|11 years ago

People talk about the "bus factor", and how OSS would have been a better option.

But far more often I've been beaten from the:

1) "Yeah, core devs moved on now, and nobody cares to maintain this OSS software".

2) "Yeah, core devs decided to rewrite everything from scratch and change APIs and ABIs".

krondor|11 years ago

Because that doesn't happen outside of the OSS world?

tuananh|11 years ago

hardly a noteworthy update.

tokenizerrr|11 years ago

Sad to see there is still no word on an ARM build.

tuananh|11 years ago

At this rate, it's best you forget it and revisit the idea in the next few years.

crxgames|11 years ago

Glad to see the project is still alive :)

kolev|11 years ago

It's hardly still alive. These aren't even cosmetic changes, honestly!

Walkman|11 years ago

Wow, another update (3064)!

steveeq1|11 years ago

I read up on this editor a little bit, but the thing that gets me is: what's wrong with emacs? I don't see anything this editor does that emacs can't do.

captainmuon|11 years ago

Just my 2 cents...

Sublime feels more lightweight and faster.

It has sensible defaults, and there is not much need to configure stuff.

It has a really "standard" interface (e.g. Tabs, Ctrl+PageUp/PageDn to switch between them, Ctrl+XCV for Clipboard, on Mac it uses the corresponding modifier keys instead). Emacs is rather idiosyncratic, to put it mildly.

It is prettier, and it's easier to install pretty themes (although not perfect yet), and while that may sound petty, it is important if you stare at it the whole day. I found you can make emacs look nice, but there was always some things that annoyed me.

Most importantly, antialiased fonts didn't work on some platforms (I'm sure you can make it work everywhere with some effort though). With sublime, you get native looking, readable fonts on every platform.

You have extensibility, but not so much that you can easily break the editor. The LISP environment in emacs is not beneficial for me, but rather a source of problems. Though, I would like a tiny bit more configurability in sublime - mainly the ability to place icons in the sidebar.

Last but not least, it has the killer feature of multiple selections (Ctrl+D). This allows you to do many cool editing maneuvers that you would use special emacs commands, key combos, regexes etc. (or in vi: movement combinations), but with just one simple key combo + cursor keys + shift, and most important, interactively. You don't have to think "I want to select this and that, but not that" before you press the buttons, you can "just do it".

Of course, emacs can do some things sublime can't. Extreme extensibility is one, but that's not important to me. More important is that it can run in a terminal (e.g. over ssh). It also has the ability to use different fonts and to embed images in its editor (useful for LaTeX).

It's not that there is anything emacs can't do that sublime can. Sublime is just more pleasant to use in my opinion.

----

IMHO there is no justification nowadays for most apps to not work instantaneously, given how fast computers are. If you have to initialize stuff, do it at install time, not at startup time. I want to click the button and have the gui immediately there. Interestingly, emacs pioneered this. IIRC, it has a function to dump its memory to disc, and to just load the memory image at startup.

chr1|11 years ago

To understand what's wrong with emacs pretend that you are a new user that doesn't know emacs, but is familiar with editors in browsers, and other places ordinary people use.

When you start to use emacs everything will be wrong, the few shortcuts you know such as ctrl-c/v/x/z/f will do strange things, scrolling won't move text smoothly like other programs but will jump several lines always keeping first line exactly aligned, so you feel lost all the time. When you select something and scroll emacs will destroy the selection and keep cursor in viewport (i am still not sure if this is a feature, or just a glaring bug that no one cares to fix).

Now you try sublime and it is beautiful! It comes with beautiful theme, beautiful chrome-like tabs (they even scroll!), fantastic smooth scrolling, pretty minimap that helps you see whole document at once, built in fuzzy search, and easily configurable plugins.

Why would you even try learning emacs where you constantly feel lost, instead of sublime which makes you feel powerful?

> I don't see anything this editor does that emacs can't do.

in short it's not only important to do something, but do it with style;)

coldtea|11 years ago

It's not what it can't do or how many things more Emacs can do, it's how each goes about them.

Not being tied into a BS-pseudo-Lisp runtime is an essential for me. And not having been designed with 1990 display technology in mind too.

steveeq1|11 years ago

Why is this being downvoted? As an emacs user, I'm trying to figure out what's the advantage to using sublime.

jrochkind1|11 years ago

emacs? The thing that gets me about you emacs users is, what's wrong with vim?