[HN Gopher] Sublime Text 4 [video]
___________________________________________________________________
Sublime Text 4 [video]
Author : dsego
Score : 296 points
Date : 2021-03-31 12:08 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vimeo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vimeo.com)
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Nice, it seems text drag-n-drop will finally work on linux
| https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/1361#issuec...
| nikolay wrote:
| Ewww, ugly tabs with no space/delimiter between them.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Interesting that this is uploaded on Vimeo. I haven't heard much
| about them in many years, and I'm curious what their business
| model is like. It seems they're no longer in the running to
| provide an alternative to YouTube.
|
| One thing I found annoying about this page is the pop-up at the
| bottom of the screen that says "Upload, livestream, and create
| your own videos, all in HD" actually hides the video player
| controls. I initially thought Vimeo got rid of them until I
| dismissed the pop-up. Seems like a poorly thought out design.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Sublime Text isn't my main editor anymore but I still reach for
| it in certain cases. If I need to check a file out quickly it's
| nice to have a program that opens fast and yet still provides
| syntax highlighting.
|
| The other thing I use it for is multi-file search (and replace).
| As far as I know the only way to get VS Code to do this is to
| open the directory as a project. With Sublime I can enter any
| path I want. It's more ergonomic than grep and sed for this. When
| I search I can just pick a result from the list to jump to that
| location in a file. And when I replace I have the option to check
| over the modifications before saving (though usually I just make
| sure the number of replacements and files seems about right).
| fprog wrote:
| I used Sublime Text 3 through college and drifted between tools
| the past few years of my professional life, variously trying
| JetBrains' IDEs, VSCode, and some others. For Go, GoLand was
| nice, if heavyweight; for Python, VSCode had a fantastic plug-
| and-play experience, though it was hard to shake the feeling of
| using a web app, albeit a snappy one.
|
| The Sublime Text 4 dev builds pulled me enthusiastically back to
| Sublime full-time, and I'm excited that it's close to release.
| It's been carefully modernized and is a joy to use. In
| particular, writing Go in Sublime with LSP (gopls) and Sublime's
| Go Build System plugin essentially makes it an IDE for me, but
| still as snappy as, well, Sublime. That's a hard combination to
| beat. I suspect Sublime's approach of "do one thing well" (text
| editing) is especially well-suited for a language like Go, which
| has such an excellent selection of first-party tools. Sublime's
| approach lets those tools shine rather than hiding them away.
|
| It's hard to name all of the features that feel fast. Some are
| little, like scrolling; many are bigger, like starting up the
| editor, switching projects, and searching for symbols, all of
| which are instantaneous. Even the dev builds have been remarkably
| stable; the result of the care taken is that the whole
| application feels _crafted_. It 's a quality that HN (rightly!)
| laments is lacking in much modern software.
|
| There are caveats; in particular, to get gopls to work, I recall
| having to search around a plugin's GitHub issues to find a
| solution for some problem with my $PATH. Not everyone will want
| this upfront learning investment. For me, the tradeoff was worth
| it. Having gotten familiar with the Sublime console and just a
| bit of how its plugin system works, there are no longer any parts
| of my editor I'm scared of and consider a black box.
|
| Finally, I am happy that I _paid_ for Sublime; I own my copy. The
| VSCode community seems vibrant and sustainable, but when trying
| it, I couldn 't shake the feeling that I was living in
| Microsoft's world. They've shepherded it well so far, and it
| would seem they have incentive to continue. But despite being
| OSS, I never felt it was mine. One modicum of validation to that
| feeling: Microsoft recently (last year?) switched to a closed-
| source model for the Python language server that made the VSCode
| python experience so great for me. So overall, the transaction
| with Sublime HQ felt clearer to me. I paid them money for a great
| editor, rather than using an editor for free in exchange for
| goodwill or developer mindshare. That is a transaction I'd make
| again.
| memco wrote:
| I love Sublime, but like many others have not used it nearly as
| much in recent years due to how much more powerful VSC is for
| Python development: do you still do work in Python and if so,
| does ST4 have a somewhat comparable experience to VSC? Last I
| tried (which was two or three years ago) I couldn't get code
| navigation, completion and debugging to work on nearly the same
| level and remote editing in VSC was also much easier to set up.
| fprog wrote:
| Unfortunately I haven't worked with Python in some time, so I
| can't say. If my Go experience translates, then the basics
| (code navigation, completions, definitions...) have gotten
| much better, both in form and function. Those could be worth
| another try. I'm less sure about debugging, and as far as I
| know, there's no equivalent to VSC's remote editing. I've
| heard great things about that VSC feature and been meaning to
| try it out.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Like for many Sublime used to be the go-to editor for a slick
| editing experience. Easiness for people who didn't want Vim but
| found JetBrains too heavy. But today I'm afraid Sublime is far
| behind VSC as a tool to empower developer productivity, and it
| reminds me of Nova at this point (too late).
|
| Also no mention of the feature that changed the face of the
| ecosystem -- Intellisense or the language server protocol.
| tehbeard wrote:
| Sublime still holds king for ad-hoc grepping around large
| files.
|
| For dev work though, my daily driver is VSC at this point.
|
| I still use Sublime for notes as well, but that's more so I
| don't have to think about how closing/opening half a dozen
| workspaces in VSC affects which notes are open.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| I still use sublime text everyday. By far the boot speed, zero
| lag between file changes and other slight annoyances are not
| there. Plus the integration of Sublime Merge has been
| fantastic.
| kamranjon wrote:
| I also love sublime merge, any time im screensharing with
| someone pairing on some code and we finish up i pop it open
| straight from sublime to review our changes and they always
| want to know what tool it is. They just produce really great
| software.
| laddershoe wrote:
| Me too -- I live in Sublime Text most days. Hard to argue
| that VSCode wins on dev features, and most of my fellow
| developers use it for that reason. But I can't get past the
| speed; Sublime Text does everything instantly, while in VS
| Code, everything is just slightly laggy.
|
| To each their own, I guess, but given how much of my day
| editing text, it's hard to want to use a text editor that has
| noticeable lag. (Cue the usual rants about latency in 2021 on
| multi-GHz machines)
| warmwaffles wrote:
| I've also got most of the shortcuts committed to muscle
| memory and configured just the way I like it. Sunken cost
| fallacy is where I am headed. But I've always loved this
| editor and will continue to support it as long as they
| continue to support it.
| ericcholis wrote:
| I basically use Sublime in place of notepad on Windows at this
| point. If I need anything beyond advanced text editing; I'm
| using an IDE.
| tored wrote:
| I use Sublime Text as excellent grep/search tool. Superfast,
| easy to write filters for include or exclude, can quickly
| open the matching file and you can see it with proper syntax
| highlighting.
| systems wrote:
| then why not use notepad++ its free and open source, unlike
| sublime text
| psychometry wrote:
| Jetbrains is extremely fast for me these days because the
| indexing is good. The fact that the IDE and Java are using 1-2
| GBs RAM isn't really a problem when any dev machine is going to
| have at least 8 GBs.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| That's surprising. I used IntelliJ today after a pause and
| found it unbearably slow. For instance, scrolling a ~6 page
| source file lags so much it's extremely irritating.
|
| It's also fantastically bloated. There's so much stuff I have
| to disable to make it barely usable. And most of the
| supposedly helpful lightbulbs suggest changes that make
| absolutely no sense.
|
| I can absolutely believe that IntelliJ has its fans because
| it has a ton of features, but for me it's just unusable.
| benbristow wrote:
| 8GB is low for a dev machine nowadays. Your browser uses
| 1/2GB, IDE using 1/2GB+ (JetBrains Rider often uses like 4GB
| for me), then the OS itself, database servers, virtualization
| overhead (e.g. Docker) and other tools. Easily used up.
|
| 16GB is the bare minimum for a dev machine in 2021 IMO.
| Anything higher than that is 'nice to have' unless you're
| doing heavy stuff like data analysis, machine learning/AI,
| games development etc.
| wbond wrote:
| This is a little teaser of some of the more easily demonstrated
| visual changes in ST4, but we've got a huge collection of new
| features, tweaks and bug fixes coming.
|
| The community is actively maintaining an LSP package, and we've
| added a number of features in ST4 that the protocol requires,
| such as UTF-16 diffs.
| hn8788 wrote:
| I love sublime text, but I really wish you'd reconsider
| relying on a community LSP package. There was an issue a year
| or two ago where the LSP package couldn't be installed due to
| a dependency issue in the package, and since it's a community
| package, they could only fix it when they had enough spare
| time. I think it was a 1-2 month timeframe where there was no
| way for new installs to have LSP functionality since it
| required a third-party plugin.
| wbond wrote:
| We looked into the protocol, but unfortunately it made a
| number of poor architectural choices that leads to many
| language servers not implementing the protocol properly.
| This effectively requires custom integrations for most
| language servers. That wouldn't make sense to do in the
| core of the editor, since we'll never be primary users on
| the vast majority of servers.
|
| The open source model makes sense since it will need to
| have tweaks and fixes to support various language servers.
| That combined with a very small development team (six
| engineers across our two products), would probably lead to
| slower development, and it would be tied to the release
| cadence of the main product.
| modeless wrote:
| That's unfortunate, but I still think it would be best if
| you could at least add support for one or two servers in
| the core, with extensibility for others. Or officially
| adopt and support the community LSP plugin. My experience
| with the community LSP plugin has not been good, and it
| almost led met to switch to vscode. (That and debugging
| which is a whole other can of worms.) I really think
| working on LSP would be a better use of your time than
| continuing to improve the current fuzzy indexing engine.
| hn8788 wrote:
| That makes sense, I didn't know how small the team was.
| Thanks for the response, looking forward to ST4.
| kamranjon wrote:
| I'm really excited about the new release, thanks for building
| one of the fastest text editors in the game. I use it every
| day and couldn't develop without it.
| patjenk wrote:
| I use sublime.txt everyday. The main purpose is reading,
| editing, searching a "scratch.txt" file I have been prepending
| to for the last 11 years. Sublime loads, saves, and searches it
| better than any other text editor. I have found it's a helpful
| way to save random lists, notes, links, and common chunks of
| code.
|
| It's also my go to for wrangling weird txt.
| thefz wrote:
| I have a similar use case, although I am not a power user.
|
| I use it to open often giant .csv and .txt very very fast. I
| use it to quickly edit SQL because the select-lines command
| (ctrl+alt+up/down) makes batch edits of indented code a
| breeze. I use it to sometimes format and arrange weirdly
| formatted C#. I use it often for its lightning fast search
| and replace function.
|
| It has grown on me over NP++ which is still a very very nice
| text editor.
| tored wrote:
| Wasn't one problem that Sublime Text's plugin API was somewhat
| lacking, you couldn't do any advanced GUI in it?
| bogwog wrote:
| This is a big one. Being able to create a tab/window to view
| custom data would be awesome, like a live HTML preview,
| OpenGL surface, graph rendered from an open data file, custom
| image format, etc.
|
| I wouldn't mind the core ST app being so bare bones if the
| plugin API was more powerful, but unfortunately it is pretty
| limited in what you can do.
| wbond wrote:
| We've got quite a number of API enhancements in the next
| version, including HTML sheets for non-text content.
|
| That said, we are definitely focused on being first and
| foremost a really fast text editor that makes it easy to
| read, navigate and write code. Trying to implement a
| browser or be an IDE are outside of our area of focus.
| klibertp wrote:
| > Intellisense
|
| Could we please call it "autocompletion" instead? The feature
| did not originate from Microsoft IDEs, and while they are free
| to call it whatever when talking about their editors, the rest
| of the world (well, that 2m^2 part centered on me, at least)
| would appreciate if we used more general terminology.
| tehbeard wrote:
| I think at this point it's safe to assume Intellisense is
| fairly genericized and refers more to an "autocompletion"
| that takes additional information/context into account than a
| specific $company's implementation.
| dgellow wrote:
| I always understood "intellisense" as a way to say
| "contextual autocompletion based on structured information".
| So it is a form of autocompletion, but one that adapts
| gracefully to the context (like an IDE autocompletion
| experience). Autocompletion could just mean that you have
| some string matching (more like basic shell completion).
|
| It's good to have a way to specify when you're talking about
| the former meaning and I do not know another term for this
| than "intellisense".
| yunohn wrote:
| +1 to this. A lot of basic text editors have basic string-
| based autocompletion. Intellisense is way more than that.
| IntelliJ (atleast PyCharm) excels at this too.
| bogwog wrote:
| In my experience, "Intellisense" is shorthand for "broken
| autocompletion"
|
| I don't use Microsoft IDEs often, but have had experience
| with them many times over the past 15 years. And every
| single time, intellisense would freeze, get confused, or
| just stop working completely. Not once in 15 years have I
| had a passable experience with it, so nowadays when I'm in
| Microsoft land I always immediately disable intellisense
| before I start working.
| dgellow wrote:
| I completely understand your feelings. I also always
| faced quite a lot of issues with Visual Studio (not
| vscode) autocompletion when trying to write C++. But when
| it decides to work the experience is great.
|
| Visual Studio Code on the other hand is just fantastic. I
| was a hardcore emacs user until I switched to VSCode as
| my main editor a few years ago due to the crazy good
| auto-completion experience.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I could've written this comment. I made myself use VSCode
| for about a week, and that was about the last time I
| seriously used Emacs.
|
| I had the privilege of chatting with the VSCode booth
| people at PyCon a couple years ago. I was waxing
| enthusiastic about some feature or another and one of the
| other people at the booth spun around -- "I wrote that!",
| and then I got to tell him how much I loved his work.
| That felt great.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| Intellisense is a collection of dozens of IDE features and is
| far more than just autocomplete
| [deleted]
| hnbad wrote:
| I think the generic term for this feature is "code
| intelligence". Autocompletion often just means that the
| editor provides suggestions of other symbols in the same
| file, which is a far call from the language-aware and
| context-aware suggestions, auto imports and refactoring
| features IDEs provide.
|
| The distinction seems important as I personally wouldn't go
| back from VSCode to an editor that merely provides
| autocompletion but can't reason about the language beyond
| basic syntax highlighting.
|
| I caught myself using "Google" as a verb when talking about
| searching on Amazon the other day and "Xerox" has become
| synonymous with "copying" for an entire generation, so I
| wouldn't judge too harshly on people using "Intellisense" as
| a generic phrase even if it can harm communication ("But does
| this editor have Intellisense?").
| klibertp wrote:
| I'm ok with "code intelligence", or even more precisely
| "autocomplete based on code intelligence". All good. Just
| not "intellisense", please ;)
|
| > I personally wouldn't go back from VSCode to an editor
| that merely provides autocompletion
|
| Autocompletion can draw from multiple sources. By default,
| before LSP hooks have a chance to add themselseves to the
| list, I have following sources configured:
| '(ac-source-symbols ac-source-variables
| ac-source-functions ac-source-features
| ac-source-filename ac-source-abbrev
| ac-source-dictionary ac-source-words-in-same-
| mode-buffers ac-source-semantic ac-
| source-yasnippet ac-source-files-in-current-
| dir)
|
| Maybe that's why I don't think changing the name of the
| feature based on just the source it uses makes sense.
| RBerenguel wrote:
| GTAGS/CTAGS/"any other family of tag processors/generators"
| could be used for autocompletion in Emacs/Vim way before,
| and they were just "part" of autocompletion.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| balls187 wrote:
| Big fan of sublime text. It's my default scratch pad/note pad.
|
| Several years ago I switched development to Cloud9 and haven't
| looked back, but for text manipulation, I still rely on sublime
| text.
| adenozine wrote:
| Shipping an editor in 2021 without a terminal, I just don't get
| it.
|
| Do y'all really tab back and forth between the code and a shell?
| Maybe I'm just lazy.
| robenkleene wrote:
| How is moving between an editor and terminal splits any less
| effort than moving between separate editor and terminal apps?
| They both require either one keyboard shortcut or one click to
| go between? What's the difference?
| adenozine wrote:
| I lose my focus moving between two windows, and I'm always
| moving around, so I only ever have a laptop screen and not
| double monitors.
|
| I use VSCode very happily after using Gedit for many years,
| and it's just the layout I'm attached to, I suppose.
| dsego wrote:
| https://packagecontrol.io/search/terminal
| bogwog wrote:
| I actually used to do this, but got so tired of it that I made
| a custom plugin that sends my most common commands to an open
| terminal window on a second monitor via a keyboard shortcut. So
| now I can press F5 to 1) compile arm64 target and create an
| APK, 2) install the APK on an Android device, 3) run the newly
| installed application, and 4) execute logcat to view logs
|
| That's a hacky solution since it requires a server app running
| in the terminal listening for commands from ST3. There's also
| some logic in there to make sure nothing happens unless all
| files have been saved, to avoid some impossible to debug
| situations. As far as I know there's no better way to
| accomplish something like this in ST. I've seen some plugins
| that use a text buffer/tab as a command line output, but that's
| terrible.
|
| On the bright side, this does allow me to use whichever
| terminal app I want instead of being forced to use whichever
| built-in terminal the ST devs might include.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I definitely do, as iTerm is a much better terminal than the
| shell window of any terminal I've ever used.
| johnmc408 wrote:
| Any "virtual cursor" fans, know if it is supported in this
| release? (long requested feature, but not that common anymore...)
| voceboy521 wrote:
| everyone talking about irrelevant boot times. how many times a
| day do you boot your editor? for me like 0.2
| jcolella wrote:
| I used to be a big supporter and user of Sublime, using it for my
| day to day. Unfortunately, even though it still has faster boot
| time than VSC, the community around VSC is so much richer that it
| becomes a case of too little too late.
| lukaszkups wrote:
| cool video, what VSCode theme is that? ;>
| keb_ wrote:
| I switched from Sublime to VSCode around 2017, and then switched
| back to Sublime in 2019. My return to Sublime was triggered by a
| funfunfunction video[1] wherein Mattias recounts an anecdote
| where he spent an enormous amount of time learning and
| configuring his IDE, editors, and tools.
|
| I realized this is what I was doing with VSCode -- adding more
| and more extensions, and spending an increasing amount of time
| configuring them or troubleshooting them when they broke. I
| realized I was happier and more productive using a "dumber" tool
| like Sublime Text. I still use plugins with ST, but try to keep
| them to an absolute minimum. If there is a CLI for what I want to
| do, I prefer to just use that instead of an extension that
| obfuscates it. Also, ST is significantly snappier than VSCode, an
| Electron app.
|
| I've been using ST4 for over a week now, and it's been a breath
| of fresh air.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjKJjzRX_E
| musingsole wrote:
| I've seen far too many developers spend far too much time
| configuring literally everything but especially their IDEs.
| I've gotten so very tired of hearing that nonsense as an excuse
| in a scrum for no progress yesterday. I don't care. I don't
| need their tools to do my job; maybe they quite literally do
| and couldn't make any progress with out them...but I'm more
| convinced these types have little appreciation for work ethic.
|
| All the configuration knobs on an IDE don't make a lick of
| sense if your goal is being useful to those paying for your
| services. Each and every one (with the exceptions of
| autocomplete, goto and syntax highlighting) are better
| implemented as separate tools. But that mentality got lost
| long, long ago.
| jokoon wrote:
| Yeah well, it's still impossible to fold blocks of code based on
| syntax and not on indentation. They decided they would not fix
| this, which is quite a shame.
|
| https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101
| Narretz wrote:
| The last comment by a dev is from 2019 and indicates that this
| isn't ruled out. But if it's not in version 4 it's fair to
| assume that it's not gonna happen in the near future.
|
| https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/101#issueco...
| bogwog wrote:
| So after all this time the only thing they have to show is a
| handful of features that could've probably been implemented as
| plugins for ST3? I'm hoping there's a lot more, and that this
| video was just a rush job.
|
| I've been using ST3 as my exclusive development tool for the past
| ~5 years, and I've been very happy with it. It's extremely fast,
| stable, and customizable. I even have a bunch of custom plugins
| I've written to integrate with custom tools and workflows on
| different projects.
|
| But my biggest complaint is that the pace of development is
| glacial. The chances of them adding a feature you want/need is
| basically zero, so you shouldn't even bother asking.
|
| IMO, they should consider releasing it as open source software
| (at least partially), and accepting donations via a Patreon page
| or something similar.
| wbond wrote:
| This video was not a rush job, but purposefully shows off a
| couple of visually-focused changes as a teaser for our upcoming
| major release.
|
| None of these changes could actually be implemented as plugins
| - they all are much deeper architecturally than you may be
| aware, and the implementations open up a number of features for
| packages along the way.
|
| In terms of our development pace, we did large releases in
| 2017, 2018, 2019 and have put out over 50 builds in the past
| year leading up to ST4. We have addressed over 600 issues on
| the GitHub tracker during the current dev cycle.
|
| We do work differently than open source software, but we've got
| some upcoming changes with ST4 that will shorten our release
| cycles moving forward.
|
| Open sourcing Sublime Text isn't a rational thing, as there is
| no massive tech company who would be donating the primary
| engineering resources for the project.
| bogwog wrote:
| Good to know, and I'll be looking forward to seeing the full
| changes.
|
| > Open sourcing Sublime Text isn't a rational thing, as there
| is no massive tech company who would be donating the primary
| engineering resources for the project.
|
| Just sayin, there are porn video games making $20,000 per
| month on Patreon. I think something as popular and beloved as
| ST could make a lot more than that. I'd personally pay _at
| least_ $5 /mo to support a full-time development staff for my
| most important development tool (by far), and that's way more
| than the $80 I paid once for ST3 back in ~2016.
| geodel wrote:
| > Just sayin, there are porn video games making $20,000 per
| month on Patreon.
|
| I can see porn fans paying for their goods. But as a
| developer I found them remarkably ungenerous about paying
| for their tools. It is good that you like to pay but you
| are in very small minority of devs who pay for good tool
| when free alternatives exist.
| baby wrote:
| I'd pay.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Just sayin, there are porn video games making $20,000 per
| month on Patreon.
|
| Is that $20,000/month rolling in from businesses? I don't
| know anything about ST's financials, but I'd expect that to
| be the source of most of their revenue. Businesses have a
| habit of not paying for things unless they have to.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| People have been asking for ST to be open sourced for as long
| as the project has been active.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| Your position is totally reasonable, but I would argue that ST
| is better off with a smaller feature set and a robust plugin
| ecosystem. The last thing I would want to see is for ST to
| become the Microsoft Word of text editors, i.e. a million
| built-in features, of which you might only use 5%.
|
| Addendum: It dawns on me that building the Microsoft Word of
| anything is probably not a bad goal, considering it's the
| dominant word processor. It's not what I would want in a text
| editor, but it may very well be what most people want most of
| the time.
| hn8788 wrote:
| I think some features that are currently plugins could stand
| to be integrated into the main editor. For example, language
| server functionality is only available through a third-party
| plugin, and a year or two ago there was a couple month period
| where the plugin install was broken due to a dependency
| issue. Anyone who installed ST during that time would have
| been out of luck if they wanted to use progamming language
| plugins that required a language server.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| I'm not entirely familiar with "language server
| functionality", but it sounds like something that isn't
| needed for most text editing situations. So it's a perfect
| candidate for a plugin.
|
| I'm not knocking this functionality. It's probably super
| helpful, useful, or downright required in the work you do.
| It sucks that the plugin was broken.
|
| However, the fact that the plugin was broken tells me
| there's a problem with the plugin ecosystem, not with the
| editor.
| Shorel wrote:
| True, but at the same time it has evolved into something
| required for modern development.
|
| So: new features -> plugins. Required features ->
| converted from plugins to native.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| > new features -> plugins. Required features -> converted
| from plugins to native.
|
| I like that framing. What counts as required will always
| be up for debate, but I like that framing.
|
| > at the same time it has evolved into something required
| for modern development.
|
| Has it? Is the implication that any development done
| without it is somehow not modern? Or that most modern
| development tend to eventually bump into this
| requirement? Assuming you mean the second one, I'm not
| sure that's true... it certainly hasn't been true for me,
| but maybe I'm in the minority and don't realize it.
|
| Edit: I'm an idiot. Leaving this comment as-is, so as to
| not hide my shame. I see now why this feature in
| particular should probably be baked in.
| bogwog wrote:
| See language server protocol:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol
|
| If you have a programming language, you can write a
| "language server" for it that is compatible with the
| standard language server protocol. Once you have that,
| you can use your programming language in any text editor
| that implements an LSP client, and get full IDE-like
| features for free.
|
| Whether code intelligence/intellisense style features are
| important to you is another story, but it is an
| incredibly useful thing to have in a general purpose tool
| for editing code (and I believe most ST users are
| programmers). IMO, it makes much more sense to have that
| built in to ST as a first class feature, than to have it
| only available as a community plugin.
|
| > However, the fact that the plugin was broken tells me
| there's a problem with the plugin ecosystem, not with the
| editor.
|
| That's exactly why it should be built in to the editor.
| For many people, LSP support is a deal breaker.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| Now that I understand this functionality better, you may
| be right. I'm on the fence about whether it really should
| be built-in, but I can appreciate why you'd want it to
| be.
|
| In effect, you're asking for the ability to extend the
| list of supported languages by specifying them on an ad
| hoc basis, and I can definitely see why that's an
| absolute must-have if you're working in a language that
| isn't built into the editor. (I really hope I'm capturing
| the functionality correctly.)
|
| That being said, I suspect most developers rarely work in
| languages that aren't supported, so even IF this should
| be built-in, it seems like something that most users
| would never use. While I think that's perfectly
| reasonable in an IDE, I think a text editor should be
| limited to features that are used by a majority of its
| users for the majority of the time.
|
| It's not that I'm saying this isn't crucial
| functionality. It's that if we start requiring text
| editors to have every bit of crucial functionality that
| anyone might have, you end up with an IDE.
|
| I still think the problem is the plugin ecosystem. What
| would stop the Sublime team from saying, in effect: "This
| is functionality that should always and reliably be
| available for those who need it, so we're going to take
| responsibility for maintaining this as a plugin"?
| crooked-v wrote:
| > I suspect most developers rarely work in languages that
| aren't supported
|
| Well, obviously, developers who work in language A aren't
| going to use an editor that doesn't support language A.
| They might _want_ to use that editor, though.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| No argument there. But Sublime _does_ support those
| languages. You just need to install the right plugin.
|
| The question is whether this should be baked in, or
| whether it should be managed with plugins.
|
| There are _lots_ of features people might _want_.
| Including them all creates a bloated text editor at
| worse, and a mediocre (IMHO) IDE at worst. I maintain
| that Sublime isn 't and shouldn't be an IDE.
|
| So they're better off only including the features that
| are very widely needed for a text editor, and then
| supporting the rest as plugins.
|
| After all, isn't the ability to extend Sublime with
| plugins one of the biggest selling points? By being lean,
| it wastes as little computing power as possible on stuff
| you don't need, while giving you the ability to include
| virtually any functionality you _do_ need.
|
| I get that sometimes plugins fall out of active
| development or are broken for unacceptably long periods
| of time. But if the feature is something that the Sublime
| dev team wanted to support, there's no reason they
| couldn't support it as a plugin. Baking it in doesn't
| solve this problem, but it does create bloat.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is: Why does language server
| support deserve to be baked-in more than any other
| feature? I have plenty of mission-critical needs that are
| supported by plugins. I don't expect them to be baked in
| just because they're important to me. I accept that the
| plugin ecosystem is the solution for my needs.
|
| What makes language server support -- or any other
| beloved functionality -- so special?
| crooked-v wrote:
| > What makes language server support ... so special?
|
| It allows creating plugins across multiple editors that
| all use a single language server project, rather of
| making plugin authors reimplement functionality from
| scratch based on a particular editor's quirks.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| > It allows creating plugins across multiple editors that
| all use a single language server project
|
| Ahhhh. Lightbulb moment. I can see now why this feature
| in particular should perhaps be baked in.
|
| I thought it was just about adding additional language
| support, but I see now that it's about developing once
| for many editors.
|
| If I could still edit my previous comments about language
| server, I'd update them all to say "I'm an idiot, don't
| know what I'm talking about."
| kstrauser wrote:
| I had that reaction when I first learned about LSP. "It
| sounds like you're reinventing the wheel by, say, coming
| up with another way to autocomplete Python in addition to
| what was already there. Oh wait, what do you mean that
| you're planning on implementing LSP once for each
| language and once for each editor and then we're in
| programming heaven? Ohh...."
| Shorel wrote:
| Language server support can be considered as another
| plugin API.
|
| This is what makes it special.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| For more casual user (me) a large plugin ecosystem makes
| things complicated. It means you need to invest time to
| understand which ones to pick and this might be changing all
| the time as projects are abandoned and forked.
|
| For Eclipse there was (is?) something called MyEclipse which
| was paid software and contained a curated set of plugins.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| An excellent point. My solution to this would be
| (ironically) to add one feature to Sublime: Grouped
| Packages.
|
| Simply put, the idea would be to define a set of plugins
| needed (or recommended) for certain types of development.
| So you'd install Sublime, and then have a handy popup
| asking if you want to install any of the suggested Grouped
| Packages. There might be a dozen or so that are commonly
| useful for a Rails developer, another group that's useful
| for C, or for Wordpress, or whatever.
|
| That would allow for a minimal text editor, the infinite
| possibilities of plugins, and also easy onboarding for new
| users. It would also be useful for advanced users who are
| getting started in a new field.
| lsllc wrote:
| I think there's some stuff that needs to be built in, for
| example I like to keep tabs and indents separate e.g. indent is
| 2, TAB is 8. There's a smartindent-sublime package, but it
| doesn't work quite right and I've had it conflict with other
| packages. I think it'd work better if it was built in.
| voceboy521 wrote:
| i use vscode AND sublime. even on the same files sometimes.
| sublime is just way better at editing text. don't know why vscode
| won't just copy their ideas. like, ctrl+f in vscode is busted
| JediPig wrote:
| I have a ST license since day 5 when I saw it in the #macromates
| irc chat room. ANY man willing to make a cross platform editor,
| that was fast and decent, is my hero.
|
| C++... with a python enabled extensions.. is why it will prove
| itself better than vscode.
| fireeyed wrote:
| How many of you have paid for Sublime ?
| pytlicek wrote:
| I was a big fan of Sublime Text, but during those years of
| inactivity I got used to VScode. This I think surpassed the
| Sublime Text in all respects. In my opinion, ST4 is no longer up-
| to-date and uninteresting.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I bounced back and forth for the longest time... ST3 was way
| more performant on my 2 core, 8MB desktop.
|
| Then I upgraded to 16 core 3700 amd with 64MB Ram...
|
| Electron apps don't leave a dent in my performance anymore, so
| it's a non-issue and vscode has a lot bigger community,
| support, plugins, etc...
|
| Really, I don't think any other thing out there can compare
| except maybe vim/emacs but the learning curve to make it useful
| takes awhile and I keep giving up on that.
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| The world would be a better place if you could run Electron
| apps on 64MB of RAM!
| systems wrote:
| quick editing : Notepad++
|
| coding : vscode , jetbrains
|
| pim : emacs org-mode
|
| I think sublime text is somewhere between quick editing and
| coding, but there are better options for both
| Shorel wrote:
| Sublime Text is so superior to Notepad++ I can't agree with you
| at all.
| spupy wrote:
| There's one killer feature of Sublime that I can't find
| anywhere else (on Linux at least) and it's the reason I still
| use it:
|
| Upon closing it persist even unsaved tabs, and those tabs are
| named after the first line of text. I find this incredibly
| helpful when juggling multiple snippets of code/logs, without
| having to think about saving or worrying about accidentally
| closing the window. Intellij Idea and Zim offer something
| similar, but they are clunky in comparison.
|
| Anyone know another text editor that offers this functionality
| and run on Linux?
| JeanSebTr wrote:
| OH yes. Don't know why, but I've developed an habit of
| putting important stuff in unsaved files from my use of
| Sublime a few years ago. I've been bitten by this in VSC a
| few times but I still do it...
| mjhagen wrote:
| The best editor is the one you have with you.
| generalEvie wrote:
| I personally love Sublimetext for quick editing. Things like
| multiline selection on single documents.
|
| For anything else, vscode or jetbrains
| kuroguro wrote:
| All coding: Notepad2 (one of the more updated forks)
|
| Need to find some reference or search whole folder: Sublime
|
| IDEs are too fat, the only time I pull one out is when I need
| to design a WPF desktop app or sth.
| spiralx wrote:
| Replacing the built-in Notepad app with Notepad2 with code
| folding is one of the first things I do when setting up a new
| Windows box. It's a tiny app that starts instantly and for
| viewing text/code files and small- to medium-sized edits it
| has almost everything - multi-cursor editing is the one thing
| I'm so used to now that I notice its lack, truly a first-
| world developer problem ;)
|
| F12 opens a file in Notepad2 in Directory Opus and `e FILE`
| does the same from Bash or PS, can't think of a time where
| I'd need someone more than Notepad2 but less than Sublime
| Text, or VS Code today. I've installed Notepad++ several
| times over the years and just never wanted to have to use it.
| vardaro wrote:
| Love the native TS and JSX support. Will my Subl license carry
| over to Subl 4 or will I need to repurchase a new license to use
| this?
| eu wrote:
| Please release BSD binaries..
| happyrock wrote:
| I very much like Sublime and have used it on and off for years.
| But it has one annoying issue... if you do a text search across a
| project and the search returns too many results, it will beach-
| ball and you'll have to Force Quit! Drives me crazy.
| nepthar wrote:
| Probably worth a bug report!
| happy_pancake wrote:
| im going to start using word beach-ball now. never thought of
| it that way. thanks!
| [deleted]
| alert0 wrote:
| I've been using Sublime since 2013 or 2014. I absolutely love it
| and feel a little guilty getting so many years of usage out of it
| on a single license. My only request is ARM builds so I can run
| it on a Pi.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| There are text editors and there are IDEs, and each has its
| place. Sublime Text is, to me, the best GUI text editor around.
|
| (For those with the patience to master them, Vim or Emacs may be
| both objectively and subjectively better. But I've never had that
| patience. Emacs has a hell of a steep learning curve.)
|
| You can't knock Sublime for not having the features of an IDE,
| because that's not what it is. If we keep pushing for Sublime to
| be as "full featured" as an IDE, we're gonna kill what makes it
| great.
|
| VSC seems to be trying to be both, and by all appearances, those
| who like it, like it a lot. I'm not in that group, but I admit
| that there may be something(s) outstanding about it that I just
| haven't yet appreciated.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I was an avid user of Textmate then jumped to Sublime ages ago
| and have never looked back. I have all the key commands down
| with muscle memory and have never found another editor with
| better rendering quality and latency.
|
| my 4k setup: https://i.imgur.com/yRShjn9.png
|
| While doing a lot of Clojure at Farmlogs I genuinely tried to
| become an Emacs user, but I have always struggled with the
| sheer number of key commands. That being said, I love ctrl-e,
| ctrl-a etc... for day to day on macOS and admire that from
| Emacs.
|
| Vim is my goto for every cli based editing interaction.
|
| One thing I have never loved about vim/emacs is the fact that
| there are so many different ways to deal with plugins and
| configuration that I have never known 'the right way' to do
| things.
|
| Full blown IDEs have always felt brutal and cumbersome, plus I
| tend to obsess over the details and prefer applications who use
| native rendering tools versus things like Java/GTK/Qt/etc...
|
| Sublime has hardly any chrome, so I like that element as well.
| It has always felt the fastest, too. It will open massive files
| and scroll them no problem where other editors will struggle.
| alexaholic wrote:
| [off topic] I apologise in advance for the unsolicited review
| - I couldn't help it.
|
| First, in service.api.api:43-49 you do:
| filename = (file.filename if file else None) or
| request.form.get("filename") [...] try:
| stored_metadata = storage.store(filename, file)
|
| My understanding is you're receiving some file then storing
| it somewhere with the name provided by the client. That to me
| looks like a potential security issue. It looks like this
| function (what is this, Flask?) is both a view and a
| validator, yet it looks like the file name is not sanitised
| in any way. I would not accept all characters here. There are
| two problems: first is the name you use to save the file on
| disk. Think about e.g. slashes, dots, spaces and the non-
| printable characters. The other one is about access: if e.g.
| the file name contains "#" or other special URL character,
| the file might not be accessible at all.
|
| Second, in service.api.api:54-55 you have:
| except storage.FileTooBigException as e: raise
| FileTooBig(str(e))
|
| This masks the original exception. In order to avoid that,
| you have to tell the engine the new exception you're raising
| is the direct cause of some other exception:
| except storage.FileTooBigException as e: raise
| FileTooBig(str(e)) from e
|
| It might not be that important with a client error like this,
| though. At worst it helps with debugging. [/off topic]
| stickyricky wrote:
| raise FileTooBig(str(e)) from e
|
| I did not know this was possible. Thanks!
| alyandon wrote:
| I, too, learned something new today even though I don't
| even pretend to be a Python developer!
| whalesalad wrote:
| Hah, thanks for the review! Great feedback. This was a
| coding challenge from a few years ago when I applied for a
| gig at Zapier. It was time capped so I didn't spend any
| extra time making it perfect.
|
| Note that in the screenshot there are yellow boxes around
| the `raise` keyword - this is a complaint from the linter
| to do exactly as you suggest.
| richeyryan wrote:
| I've been trying out Doom Emacs recently. I'll admit that I
| have used Vim and Emacs for reasonable periods of time
| previously so I am somewhat used to their way of doing things
| but Doom is nicely prescriptive and gives a great vim first
| experience. There is a bit of getting used to it but it might
| be something interesting for you.
| whalesalad wrote:
| > Doom is a configuration framework for GNU Emacs tailored
| for Emacs bankruptcy veterans who want less framework in
| their frameworks, a modicum of stability (and
| reproducibility) from their package manager, and the
| performance of a hand rolled config (or better).
|
| This looks pretty neat.
| richeyryan wrote:
| I'd say the things to look out for are:
|
| - Keybindings aren't comprehensively listed anywhere
| (that I know of)
|
| - You have to go to the individual packages that are
| loaded and figure out how to use them
|
| - There is some discoverability where if you type C-w
| you'll start to see all the window related keybindings,
| so you can at least get into the habit of checking there
| when you forget something
|
| - I'm used to using C-c to return to normal mode in Vim
| which doesn't work here so my suggestion is to use C-[,
| jk or ESC I guess
|
| - Autosave is disabled by default due to a preference of
| the maintainer, so you'll want to install a package or
| tweak the config to enable that
|
| - I find window management difficult right now compared
| to something more conventional like VSCode or even
| compared to something like i3, it just doesn't seem to do
| what I want
|
| Overall I'd say its like good guard rails but you'll
| probably need to dive into Emacs stuff to accomplish
| certain tasks. With that said, the vim emulation is miles
| better than what's available in VSCode.
|
| There is also Spacemacs which aims to be much more
| comprehensive but I haven't tried that.
| baby wrote:
| I'm wondering why you're not putting ST and VSC in the same
| basket. They're the same type of text editor: light, extensible
| with community plugins. Hell, the design and the shortcuts are
| the same as well!
|
| I think it's going to be hard for ST to compete with VSC, their
| major offering seems to be native over electron, which is great
| but will it be enough?
| musingsole wrote:
| VS Code has never been sold to me as a lightweight text
| editor and I've only ever seen it coupled with atrocities of
| plugins for "developer productivity" that equates to do it
| the way the wizard in the corner created their environment to
| enforce or else feel their impotent wrath on your PRs.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| Fair comment. I struggle to categorize VSC in the Editor-IDE
| spectrum, and it may simply be a matter of market
| positioning. But let me take a stab at it.
|
| The way I've seen VSC used in the wild is as a highly
| customizable IDE. Yes, it _can_ be used as a minimal text
| editor. But it seems to want to be more than that. I 've yet
| to see anyone using it that weren't also using it as a
| terminal and a bug checker and git manager and and and...
|
| By contrast, most ST users (again, based on personal
| experience, I could be statistically way off) use it as a
| pure text/code editor, with plugins to help with code
| completion and such. ST can be extended, but it doesn't much
| care whether you choose to extend it or not. Using VSC
| without plugins just feels... weird, somehow? Like I'm
| missing the point of it?
|
| As for whether ST can compete with VSC, I don't think it
| _should_ compete. They 're each appropriate for different
| situations. They do overlap more than any other ST
| "competitor", granted, but I think there are situations where
| VSC is the better choice, some where ST is better, and some
| where a full-blown IDE is the best way to go.
|
| When the situation calls for a really great text editor, ST
| is, in my experience, the fastest and most productive way to
| go.
|
| I think the shift from ST to VSC is due to the fact that many
| (most?) developers actually want an IDE, but just don't like
| the other ones on the market.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I started out with vi and then Vim. When TextMate came out, I
| became an avid user. I liked how easily I could customize it
| but then it seemed kind-of abandonware (could be just my own
| perception) so I moved on to Sublime Text. I played around with
| others during that time including Visual Studio Code.
|
| All of the editors I've used are great and I don't knock them
| at all. About two years ago, however, I realized how much I
| love Vim. It is also easily customizable but most importantly,
| I just plain feel really productive with it.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| I _loved_ TextMate.
|
| But I think the facts speak for themselves now...
|
| - their site is now little more than a vanilla bootstrap
| theme
|
| - their News section hasn't been updated since 2014
|
| - the blog appears to be miscellaneous developer notes that
| may or may not even be related to TextMate
|
| ...I'd agree with the sentiment that development appears to
| be dead.
|
| That said, I think Sublime is as worthy a spiritual successor
| as any. (It also may be the biggest reason for TextMate's
| demise.)
| levifig wrote:
| FWIW, Textmate itself gets pretty frequent updates (latest
| one was on Feb 25th). It has also been open-sourced[1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/textmate/textmate
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| I had no idea... I was basing my conclusion on the
| TextMate site, and both of these facts are kinda buried.
|
| Gonna have to give TM another go sometime soon.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I was an avid Sublime Text user for versions 2 and 3. The speed
| and responsiveness kept me coming back.
|
| Then over time computers for faster, VSCode got more efficient,
| and plug-in developers started paying less attention to Sublime
| Text because we all assumed development had stopped.
|
| I started using VSCode because I needed a specific plugin that
| wasn't available in Sublime Text. From there I got comfortable
| with VSCode and slowly stopped using Sublime Text. I think an
| active plug-in ecosystem and IDE-like features are necessary
| for text editors to stay relevant in 2021. Sublime Text's long
| development hiatus may have stalled that process. Hopefully
| they can spring back.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| This may sound weird, but I genuinely hope they don't "spring
| back".
|
| IF we consider Sublime to be a text editor and not an IDE,
| then all I really want from the Sublime dev team is to fix
| problems if/when they arise. If there are no problems, then
| push feature development into the plugin ecosystem, but leave
| out-of-the-box Sublime mostly alone.
|
| When I look at that preview video, I see a team that shares
| my values in a text editor. They've made updates to keep with
| changes to operating systems, a few features that would be
| universally useful in a text editor, but not much else.
|
| For me and my idea of a text editor, that's perfect. It's
| stable. It's dependable. It's fast. I never have to worry
| whether the dev team is about to destroy the editor that I
| love, nor do I have to worry about it becoming obsolete.
|
| Some people may feel it's already obsolete, but every
| complaint seems to be for IDE-like features, not for a better
| text editor. If that's what you want, then by all
| appearances, VS Code is the way to go.
|
| That being said, I hear what you're saying about the plugin
| ecosystem. If plugin developers have interpreted the
| relatively quiet and deliberate release cycle of Sublime as
| "this is no longer being actively developed", then of course
| they won't develop their plugins for it. But if that's
| anyone's interpretation, I think they're wrong.
|
| To put it another way, I think of Sublime's approach like
| Google's approach to their homepage (at least when Marissa
| Mayer was running things): Job #1 is to say no to scope
| creep. Keep it simple. Keep it focused. If you can make it
| better at the focused list of things it's meant to do, then
| great, do that. But don't add, don't clutter.
| Shorel wrote:
| Except... it all was a marketing issue.
|
| Development continues, and having a stable API for plugins
| can be considered a feature.
|
| Let's see what will they do in the future. Both ST developers
| and plugin developers.
| caminocorner wrote:
| Sublime Text has never crashed on me (or been slow) and
| that's why I use it as my primary tool. VSCode is still slow
| for me, last I checked.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I use them the other way around - I do almost all my dev
| work in VSC these days, but I bought ST3 years ago (ST2
| originally I think) and I still prefer it for opening huge
| log files, XML, etc. which bog down VSC.
| whalesalad wrote:
| The performance and reliability of subl is unmatched in my
| experience as well.
| folkrav wrote:
| For some languages, VSC plays in IDE territory. Compared to
| other IDEs in the same space, it's pretty similar, if not
| lighter.
| rvanmil wrote:
| Exactly! Very happy with both; VSCode for... code :) and
| Sublime for everything else. As far as I'm concerned these two
| are not competitors.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Emacs is an IDE, though. It's greatest strength is that "I"
| part, not necessarily the text editor. Vim is more of a direct
| competitor.
|
| For me, to complete as best text editor, disk-based editing is
| a must. For that reason alone, Ultraedit remains the best text
| editor and has done for many, many years.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| I've been a Vim user for a long time and still use it today
| occasionally. VSCode has replaced most applications of Vim for
| me because of the good out-of-the-box experience for different
| programming languages.
|
| In VSCode all it typically takes to get started with a new
| language is to install one or two extensions, click one to
| three buttons, followed by a restart. Now you got syntax
| highlighting, auto-completion, go to definition, find all
| references, build system integration, test runners, debugging
| support, etc.
|
| You can also get these features in Vim or Emacs, but from my
| experience it takes a lot longer to setup and integrate
| properly.
| mstipetic wrote:
| I would pay a lot of money for a curated vim distribution
| that works out of the box. I've used vim heavily for years,
| and still nothing compares to it when things are working
| well, but every time I want to change something I get so
| frustrated. Every extension uses it's own set of principles,
| the learning curve is steep, error messages super vague.
|
| If anyone is looking for a side-hustle, I'd be your first
| customer
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Honestly, there is not a lot of Vim I really miss. Yeah,
| macros with motion commands are cool, but in many cases
| VSCode's multi-cursor is sufficient.
|
| Editing code in Vim is probably faster, but that speedup is
| neglectable if you are missing precise go-to-definition or
| auto-completion instead.
| mstipetic wrote:
| When it's set up nicely it works great, but any
| modifications are a pain. Also i can't put in words how
| much i hate using the mouse, after having tmux+vim+tiling
| wm set up
| ctas wrote:
| I'm building something like that. Feel free to reach out,
| would love to chat.
| stnmtn wrote:
| VSCode + vim plugins are this for me. Best of both worlds
| tomcooks wrote:
| One of the best software I've used, a multiplier of speed and
| editing powers.
|
| Pity it's not free software (as in freedom), and that it would
| lose all its superpowers in a CLI environment.
|
| If only I could replicate its functions in vanilla vim
| macrael wrote:
| Any plans to improve Find In Project? I constantly have to add
| -node_modules/ to my search paths and it's irritating.
|
| I switched back to ST3 once I could get Language Server to work.
| Go and Typescript work great there, and are so fast fast fast.
| wbond wrote:
| Find in Files has had a number of improvements in ST4,
| including defaulting to ignoring files in .gitignore,
| defaulting to ignoring files excluded from the project when
| right-clicking a folder, along with some other tweaks and
| fixes.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Ignoring files in .gitignore has my attention!
| macrael wrote:
| yay!
| niahmiah wrote:
| Yawn. VSCode.
| tkuraku wrote:
| I really like Sublime Text, but I have mostly moved on to VScode.
| I will probably buy a license just to support their software,
| especially Sublime Merge. For me the Sublime Merge git client is
| an essential.
| ggregoire wrote:
| Curious why you would need Sublime Merge if you already use
| VSCode? The git integration is pretty good. What features are
| you missing?
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Sublime is so, so good, no qualifications or buts about it.
| Startup is instant and the typing latency feels incredibly fast.
| Very thankful that it's still being developed.
| jonemi wrote:
| This is the most valuable feature for me. I love how
| lightweight and responsive it feels.
| ultim8k wrote:
| Sublime may lack the feature richness of VSC and while I switched
| to the second a while ago for my day to day coding needs, it's
| still my editor of choice when I need to edit huge files or paste
| content coming from a website and I always have a sublime window
| open just in case I need to quickly type something.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I only use sublime for sudo editing, cause it's easier to just
| install some nginx syntax highlighter, and ini/config into the
| sudo profile, and run sudo subl /etc than it is to use vscode,
| I mean vscode does ask "would you like to use sudo" but I'm not
| sure how good it is to use vscode for sudo editing or viewing
| of files... and I don't want to have to okay it on EVER file
| when I'm doing a lot of system edits for a new linux package
| I'm trying out and testing - like when I tried to get a system-
| wide proxy tool installed.
| zzzeek wrote:
| sublime text ignores huge issues like
| https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/2994 in favor of
| "just go buy our secret, not available for free evaluation
| sublime text 4 thing", which led me to try out vscode, which
| revealed I've been living in the stone ages all this time with
| sublime.
| deliveryboyman wrote:
| Is the editor still written in C++ and assembly, or is the front
| end now based on something like Electron? The front end shown in
| the video looks similar to something like VS Code or Atom.
| [deleted]
| modeless wrote:
| I just upgraded to 4 last week and discovered that the Goto
| Anything (Control/Command-P) feature is significantly faster when
| a project has millions of files (all of Chromium in my case).
| That was actually my main complaint with Sublime before so I'm
| pretty happy. I still prefer Sublime over any other editor.
|
| My biggest feature request now is color support in the build
| output window. And maybe some quality of life stuff around
| adding/editing build systems and iterating on build output
| regexes which is clunky right now and could be much easier.
|
| I'm not a huge fan of the code indexing stuff. It bogs down on
| large projects, and fuzzy search is never good enough for me. I
| want precise completions that can only come from LSP. Built in
| LSP support would be better. Actually, with good LSP support the
| build output window becomes less important because you can fix
| all your errors before building, so maybe do that instead of
| working on build systems.
| dopu wrote:
| I struggle to think of a piece of software I've been as happy
| with paying for as ST. It's just a reliable and snappy text
| editor that _feels good to use_. Sure, it doesn't have all the
| fancy new things Atom and VSCode often do, but that doesn't
| really matter to me. I work on fairly small codebases (scientific
| data analysis, mostly) and ST is more than good enough for it.
| Whenever I feel the need for something more advanced, I'll switch
| to neovim. But ST + neovintageous usually get the job done. I'll
| happily continue to support ST!
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Honestly like the philosophy of a lightweight editor for
| programming with a focus on basic functionality and speed.
| However, feel so well serviced by Geany that I can't justify the
| expense in terms of time and energy that would need to go into
| buying a commercial piece of software.
| gekkonier wrote:
| I love Sublime. I use it for ruby coding, and I think I will buy
| an upgrade to version 4, just to support this great editor. I
| don't know how long I have my license.... Must been 5 or 6 years
| now I guess.
|
| I hope there will sometimes a feature to load the actual
| selection into irb (and irb should be inside Sublime). That would
| be great! Dr. Racket is very cool for this, well for Racket.
| Repls for the win!
| edm0nd wrote:
| Still cant print from Sublime QQ :C
| xattt wrote:
| Sublime has a sweet spot for LaTeX editing with Latextools.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The 2->3 switch had similar issues as the Python 2 -> 3 switch:
| Half of your plugins were incompatible with the old version, the
| other half incompatible with the new version, so you were stuck
| between a rock and a hard place for a long time.
|
| That seriously put me off Sublime (and anything that follows a
| similar strategy). I really don't like tools that intentionally
| become barely usable for years at a time, repeatedly.
|
| I really hope they'll keep plugins compatible across this version
| jump.
| cyberlab wrote:
| Does anyone know if this is a valid point:
|
| If you can't code without a feature-rich text-editor, you might
| then ask: how good are you _really_ at coding, and how much skill
| are you off-loading to the editor? Because if you can 't code
| with Windows' notepad.exe you need to re-evaluate your perceived
| skill and your /reliance/ on an editor.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I don't think it is valid. Everyone has their own preferences.
| Some coding tasks are straight boilerplate and some are more
| general. When I'm banging out boilerplate I like to have and
| IDE that completes for me, but usually I don't like that when
| I'm coding up a difficult problem. I'm not wrong, I'm just
| different. Other people have other preferences and that's just
| fine.
| b3kart wrote:
| Doubt there's anyone who literally _can 't_ code without a
| full-fledged IDE. There's just people who are used to certain
| conveniences, and it would take them longer to write code
| without them. I don't see anything particularly wrong with
| that. Most professionals use tools that make their job easier,
| and might get worse at doing the job without these tools -- but
| so what?
| _benj wrote:
| I don't think that that's a fair statement. I remember when I
| was learning Linux and in KDE there was this huge "Developer
| Tools" section... IDEs, UI designers, documentations tools,
| etc.
|
| I opened each one of those tools and had absolutely no clue how
| to use that! Looking at them now, they seems quite easy and
| similar, but that is only because I know how to program now.
|
| Think about MS Access. It could be said that you don't know how
| to use relational DBs is you can't write perfect SQL on a
| napkin, but MS Access is certainly a skill and just because it
| can make it easier to view/manipulate data doesn't invalidate
| the need of skill to use the tool.
| the_bigfatpanda wrote:
| In my opinion, I don't think its a valid point. The main skill
| of a developer is problem solving, whether its business logic
| or code related problems like structure, integrations of
| different layers etc.
|
| If you can code in a notepad, good for you, but if an IDE or
| something like VSC or Sublime increase your productivity then
| that's more valuable then remembering the exact names of
| methods or imports
| romanovcode wrote:
| You could argue that plumber only needs adjustable spanner,
| otherwise he is a bad plumber. Sure, technically it would be
| possible to do most of the job. But it's stupid and
| ineffective.
| bdcravens wrote:
| The features that make a difference are the ones that aren't
| text editing. Bare minimum is file management, but things like
| integrated git, terminal, linters, are good productivity
| improvements.
| kstrauser wrote:
| "If you can't build a house with a hammer, you might then ask:
| how good are you _really_ at building?"
|
| If I hired a carpenter and they showed up with a pair of pliers
| and nothing else, I wouldn't let them start. Even if they were
| competent and motivated, I'd know they were going to get sucked
| into completely avoidable problems and they'd be way less time-
| efficient than a less competent peer who actually uses the
| appropriate tools.
|
| If I were interviewing a software engineer and they didn't use
| at least _some_ programming editor (I don't really care which:
| Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, PyCharm, _anything_ ), I'd assume they
| were either not very good at this or that they're so
| idiosyncratic their coworkers would wish harm on them.
|
| It's not my job to tell a carpenter which hammer to use. But if
| they see a nail and reach for a spirit level, I'm sending them
| home.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Sublime Text has the strangest development cycle I can think of.
|
| It does big-bang releases with lots of features, followed by
| frequent bug fix releases that quickly resolve issues, followed
| then by years of silence even though there are still issues...
| until there's a major version bump and the cycle starts again.
|
| This then means that the plugin ecosystem is fairly under
| developed and inactive because there's little incentive to
| actively develop plugins for software that appears to be dead.
|
| I used Sublime for many years and it was hard to let it go, the
| speed was great and the SublimeGit plugin was the best Git client
| I've used, but multi-project development was a pain because the
| Python/JS/etc plugins didn't have good support for
| virtualenvs/per-project config/etc, and it was clear that they
| were out of active development.
|
| I switched to another editor and it's slower, but fast enough.
| It's not quite as nice in many ways but it's nice enough.
| Critically though it's got a great plugin for most things.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Yup. Twice now I think "I guess the dev is probably just
| sitting on all the money they made/are making now, there
| probably wont' be any more dev" -- to be surprised by a major
| release.
|
| Wonder what's going on there.
|
| Oh wait, will we need to pay to upgrade to ST4? That would
| explain it -- but unclear, ST3 was offered as a free upgrade to
| ST2 licenees I think.
|
| At this point, if you had to pay to upgrade to ST4, I wonder
| how many people will be lost to VS Code instead. I hate
| learning/setting up new tools, but if i have to pay to upgrade
| to ST4, I'm gonna consider trying to switch to VS Code instead,
| which I hear good things about, seems very similar to ST, seems
| actively maintained, and is free. There is nothing I am aware
| of that is in ST but missing from VS Code, I've just been using
| ST since before VS Code existed.
| ggregoire wrote:
| I've switched from ST to VSCode 5 years ago and never looked
| back.
| syspec wrote:
| I down own a sublime license myself as I prefer intelli-j,
| but I never understand the aversion of developers to pay for
| tools especially what is easily the most important tool they
| use.
|
| I've had colleagues marvel at the capabilities of my editor,
| then ask if it is free, then grumble and go back to wasting
| hours at a task I just showed them how to do in seconds.
|
| These are developers making closer to 200k than 150k, and
| they will just not buy software!
|
| Blows my mind
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Devs are entitled. News at 11.
| brnt wrote:
| Believe it or not: a majority of us does not in fact work
| in Silicon valley and earn 100k+.
| signal11 wrote:
| > Oh wait, will we need to pay to upgrade to ST4?
|
| Maybe not. Depends how/when you bought it, I think. From
| https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text:
|
| > Personal licenses are a once off purchase, and come with 3
| years of updates. After 3 years, an upgrade will be required
| to receive further updates. One license key is all you need
| for all your computers and operating systems.
|
| Edit: the site seems to be a bit inconsistent about pricing
| info. https://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq says:
|
| > Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire,
| however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.
|
| Can anyone please clarify what the correct answer is?
| fprog wrote:
| From the FAQ on the Sublime Discord:
|
| > Any license bought after Sept 2019 warrants three years
| of updates, including "major" ones, analogous to the
| Sublime Merge licensing model. A road for upgrading a
| previously purchased license (potentially recently) has not
| been decided on yet.
| donatj wrote:
| > I switched to another editor and it's slower, but fast
| enough.
|
| I never understand the desire to switch. An editor is a tool,
| and I keep multiple tools. I use VSCode, Sublime and various
| JetBrains products and often have all 3 going at the same time.
| They all have strengths and weaknesses.
| tehbeard wrote:
| I think the implication here is a switch of which tool is
| your "daily driver", the one you lean on for most common
| tasks.
| Arainach wrote:
| Agreed. VSCode became my daily driver for 99% of things,
| and ST only comes out for very specifics scenarios it does
| better - which for me means multi-cursor and rectangle
| select scenarios, since even though some of them are
| possible in VSCode, they're keyboard-only and nowhere near
| as simple or intuitive as they are in Sublime.
|
| .....although apparently at some point VSCode finally added
| Shift+Alt+drag, so now I have no idea what reasons I'd have
| for opening Sublime.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I keep Sublime around for opening giant files, which it is
| the best by far, but like many, switched to VS Code for
| development.
| tartoran wrote:
| Never tried sublime before but I use Notepad++ for large
| files. Sublime does look sublime. Does it have a keyboard
| oriented workflow or is it for the mousey workflows only?
| retSava wrote:
| I love it. There's not enough praise I can give it for reducing
| friction and making me more productive. Part of that comes from
| making it very easy to write plugins, so I can quickly make
| small plugins.
|
| Was about to describe them but turns out to be quite long to do
| so didn't. :)
|
| Edit: mostly write C, js/python, makefiles and similar things.
| Going to buy this again, perhaps twice just because they are
| def worth it.
| achikin wrote:
| I agree, the plugin ecosystem is far from VSCode. I usually use
| Sublime/VSCode as a lightweight editor to learn new languages
| and technologies and VSCode plugins for Haskell/Clojure/etc are
| far ahead of Sublime. I don't care much about editor speed, but
| I do care about getting unfamiliar environments up and running
| as fast as possible.
| mikece wrote:
| "...followed then by years of silence even though there are
| still issues... until there's a major version bump and the
| cycle starts again"
|
| Sounds like a band that releases a great album, does a bit of
| touring, and then breaks up because they hate each other....
| and reunite a few years later and repeat the cycle. I've heard
| the comparison between musicians and developers made over the
| years, but this is a different spin on it!
| wbond wrote:
| We actually went from a singer/songwriter to a duo and then a
| full six-piece band between 2016 to 2019! We've been putting
| out albums and EPs quite a bit, just been quiet in the public
| sphere since late 2019 since we've been working on a double-
| album. ;-)
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| This was how the majority of software development was done
| before Hamster Wheel Development became popular. There are a
| lot of people who prefer their software to just do each day the
| same things it did the previous day and not require a lot of
| attention beyond that.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > virtualenvs/per-project config/etc
|
| To be fair, ST isn't an IDE. Handling virtualenvs and configs
| can be automated outside your text editor. I just use batch
| files and automate the sh*t out of setup including starting the
| project on ST.
|
| We should do more simple automations rather than expect an
| already souped up, beefed up text editor to do everything and
| bake the cake.
|
| But I do hear your point.
| slifin wrote:
| Maybe it looks that way if you don't go out of your way to use
| or follow the Dev build but development has been consistent
| over the last couple of years
| danpalmer wrote:
| Opened Sublime text - no updates since Oct 2019. Went to the
| website - everything about ST3 from Oct 20190. Went to
| Download - Build 3211 from Oct 2019. "For _bleeding edge_
| releases, see the dev builds" - last build September 2019,
| older than the stable one.
|
| I'm all for using "bleeding edge" (although I don't with
| VSCode because I don't need to in order to have a working dev
| environment), but I've had a really good look in all the
| places I'd expect to see this and am thoroughly convinced
| that I'm using the very latest version of ST and that it is
| therefore out of development.
|
| I understand that this thread saying something different, but
| if I've had a good look _knowing there is a later version_
| and can't find it, then how would a customer know? A
| sufficiently hidden development process is indistinguishable
| from a project being dead.
|
| Edit: really keen to use a later version if one is available,
| can anyone point me towards a download link? I own a licence
| for ST3.
| benfrain wrote:
| Here's the discord server https://discord.gg/D43Pecu
|
| I agree it's not straightforward to know it exists but
| that's probably the point. Once you do know I literally
| just googled 'Sublime Text Discord' and it was the first
| result. Look in the #announcement channel there. Been using
| v4 builds for months. Love it so much I'm recording a
| course on it!
| danpalmer wrote:
| > Once you do know I literally just googled 'Sublime Text
| Discord' and it was the first result
|
| This is kinda my point. I don't know or even want to know
| about their Discord, I want a text editor that is updated
| more regularly than once a year.
|
| It reminds me of that scene from Hitchhiker's Guide To
| The Galaxy:
|
| "But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local
| planning office for the last nine months."
|
| "Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to
| see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone
| out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I
| mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
|
| "But the plans were on display ..."
|
| "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to
| find them."
|
| "That's the display department."
|
| "With a flashlight."
|
| "Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
|
| "So had the stairs."
|
| "But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
|
| "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the
| bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused
| lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the
| Leopard'."
| ybbond wrote:
| about the release cycle:
|
| from the release of version 3 to the upcoming version 4, they
| actually release a lot of beta enhancement, new features, bug
| fixes. the beta link is in their Discord forum, and can only be
| accessed if you have the license.
|
| even though they dub the frequent releases as "beta", I never
| feel them as beta software because they are stable, very low
| occurrence of bug, and many major improvements.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| This seems an increasingly common dev cycle on software that
| hasn't adopted subscription pricing. See it a lot in the Mac
| ecosystem, big numbered release that you need to pay again for,
| fast follow with about 4 bug fix releases then silence for 3-5
| years and repeat.
| apozem wrote:
| Absolutely. If a developer can only cash in on a big-number
| new version, that incentivizes holding back features to sell
| the new version. It just does.
|
| I understand the frustration with subscription pricing, but
| it's a business model that actually aligns my incentives with
| the developer's. I want an up-to-date product and they want
| ongoing revenue for their ongoing work.
| ric2b wrote:
| I agree, but with the option to keep whatever version you
| had when you stop paying the subscription.
|
| Maybe applying only after a N consecutive months with an
| active subscription, to prevent paying for a single month
| behaving as a lifetime purchase.
| aembleton wrote:
| This is what JetBrains does. They give you a perpetual
| fall back licence to where you were 12 months ago. More
| info: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
| gb/articles/207240845-What...
| azornathogron wrote:
| God no. Subscription has the opposite problem that the
| publisher is incentivised to keep changing the damn
| software underneath me. It means I can't decide "this
| version works fine for me, I'll just keep using this for
| the next decade", which is something I totally can do with
| Sublime.
| wbond wrote:
| Just to clarify, we've done major releases in 2016, 2017,
| 2018, 2019, and now early 2021. We also released a second
| product (Sublime Merge) in 2018 and did a major release of
| that in 2020.
|
| There haven't been any significant gaps in our release
| cadence since before I joined the company in 2016.
|
| That said, the current dev cycle has been a little longer
| because people do _expect_ more from major version releases.
| We've got a large collection of new features, improvements
| and bug fixes coming with this release.
|
| We've addressed over 600 issues on GitHub in the current
| release, added some pretty significant changes, and laid the
| foundation for more to come. IMO, it is by far the most
| significant release we've ever done.
|
| We've also got some changes planned to help shorten our
| release cycles moving forward!
| imdsm wrote:
| I know you have your reasons and I won't question your
| capacity or vision, but I'd definitely be more interested
| in an active 'Sublime Text' that is maintained on an
| ongoing basis than the current major release model you
| have.
|
| Back when ST started to get popular, you were up against
| Notepad++, TextEdit2, Visual Studio perhaps, and others.
| Now there's Atom and VSCode that are actively maintained
| and have active communities. I doubt I'll use ST4, but I
| wish you all the best, but I do think the model is wrong.
| wbond wrote:
| The "active" version of Sublime Text are our development
| builds.
|
| We've just been releasing those discreetly during this
| current dev cycle since we've got a huge user base and
| wanted a smaller group to test some of our bigger changes
| on.
|
| For our future dev cycles, our dev builds will be
| returning to our site.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Interesting. As a long-time ST user, I was unaware that the
| level of ongoing work on ST is what you say it is.
|
| I'm not interested in using a discord server to keep up.
|
| But a monthly blog post with "what's happened in ST this
| month" might go a long way for letting users understand
| that it is still alive. The monthly post could even include
| things happening in the plugin ecosystem, interesting new
| plugins or popular plugins with new releases. But just 2-3
| paragraphs a month would suffice.
|
| As it is, I go to the ST website and it _looks_ like it 's
| stagnated, I see no sign of life. I'm not interested in
| intensively following dev releases, but I am interested in
| every once in a while checking out what's been going on
| that I might want to know about, and seeing evidence that
| ST is still alive.
|
| I don't know for sure how typical I am, but based on this
| HN comment thread, I suspect I'm not alone.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Instead of taking 2 years to close 600 issues, why not ship
| a release each month with just a handful addressed? I think
| plugin developers are more likely to keep their plugins
| maintained if it looks like Sublime Text is alive.
|
| I'd much rather pay $50 a year for ~monthly releases than
| $70 every 2-3 years for one release and a few bug fixes.
| NDizzle wrote:
| Am I in the minority that I don't want to see updates
| monthly for a desktop application? It seems like every
| time I launch paint.net, for example, it wants to update.
| I don't want to update! I want to edit an image.
| wedowhatwedo wrote:
| I completely agree.
| ggregoire wrote:
| If I used paint.net 8 hours a day on daily basis as I do
| with VSCode, yeah I'd would probably want to keep it
| updated as much as possible. Also I rarely "launch"
| VSCode, it's always open. Which means the updates are
| downloaded in background and it just shows a small icon
| at the bottom right when it's ready to be restarted. It's
| almost invisible and doesn't bother me at all, and I can
| wait as much as I want before restarting it.
| wbond wrote:
| 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| > 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?
| kemayo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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).
| pizza234 wrote:
| > 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| hnrodey wrote:
| Do you have any options for a reduced cost license? Ideally
| I get enough value from the tool that I'd like to
| contribute financially but the current cost is (for me) too
| high. Perhaps I should just continue with the occasional
| nag popup.
|
| I really enjoy using Sublime Text for some parts my daily
| workflow yet that equates for me using like 5% of the
| actual functionality. I don't actively write code within ST
| but use it for stuff surrounding my coding workflow.
|
| Nonetheless, thanks for the product. I really enjoy it.
|
| edit: lol downvotes because I'm trying to give someone
| money
| wedowhatwedo wrote:
| I bought the product in 2015. I don't remember the cost
| but let's assume it was $80. (EDIT, I just looked and it
| was $70 at the time) That's $16 a year. If you use even
| 5% of the functionality, isn't it worth that? I don't
| know what country you are from and there my be economic
| differences but sublime text has been one of the best
| software purchases I've made. It's worth every cent.
|
| If you don't feel it's worth $80, you can use Visual
| Studio Code for free.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Are you offering to purchase this product for the parent
| commentor?
|
| Unless you are offering to pay for it because the cost is
| so little I'm not sure your rebuttal holds water.
|
| $80.00 US is a lot for an editor that doesn't provide
| updates.
| wedowhatwedo wrote:
| No, the downvotes are because you aren't willing to pay a
| very fair price for the product and have admitted you
| depend on it and use it without paying and will continue
| to do so.
| signal11 wrote:
| Maybe a Twitter account that focuses on what's new and
| what's coming down the pipe? Most people don't really
| follow forums. The current Twitter account last tweeted
| about Sublime _Text_ in March 2019, I think -- exactly 2
| years ago.
|
| I guess the blog could also work, especially if it auto-
| publishes to social media, but of late that too, like the
| Twitter feed, has been mostly about Sublime Merge --
| whereas I care a lot more about Sublime Text.
|
| I think Sublime is really good and has lots of value even
| in a world with VS Code, but it's important to ensure
| people inclined to giving it a go sense that the project is
| ticking along well.
| Narretz wrote:
| Development for v4 has been going on semi-publicly on Discord
| for 2 years now. For Sublime Text 3 the dev builds were on the
| website, and im both cases the dev builds can be used as daily
| driver. Regarding plugins, Language Server Protocol really
| helps against defragmention and dead projects. There's an
| actively developed LSP plugin that theoretically works with any
| server.
| dangelov wrote:
| I really like(d) Sublime and used it till somewhat recently.
| If there was semi-public development going on, it wasn't very
| discoverable.
|
| Just tried the LSP plugin before reading your comment. Wanted
| to use it for Go development, but it can't even do basic
| autocomplete or suggestions. Actually, I can't even tell if
| it's running. The VSCode PLS gets stuck sometimes, but 99+%
| of the time it works great.
|
| Even so, damn, Sublime Text is fast. I really do wish they
| catch up in other aspects.
| kamranjon wrote:
| If you don't have autocompletion and suggestions working
| with LSP and Go it's almost certainly not setup correctly.
| I use it every day and it's great, the goto method def and
| preview popups are super slick too.
| jonnytran wrote:
| Which plugins do you use exactly? The last time I tried
| to set this up, there were multiple options, and I ended
| up never really figuring it out.
| danpalmer wrote:
| As a previous customer, who is very interested in being a
| customer again in the future, I can find no mention of
| Discord on the website, no development activity since Oct
| 2019.
|
| Even if I could find it, distributing releases via a chat
| room feels a bit 90s. I'd expect to just get auto-updates
| through the auto-update mechanism in Sublime Text.
| kamranjon wrote:
| I keep hearing the argument that the plugin community appears
| to be dead, but I've never had any issues. It pretty quickly
| got support for LSP and that covered most languages I use. The
| JS plugins for specific libraries like react/JSX/Sass are
| great. There is some configuration you have to do for some
| plugins but that's the case with any editor.
|
| I actually really like the development cycle, if it allows the
| devs to keep the same payment model, I'm all for it. Also
| sublime merge is just awesome, I will pay for and support
| whatever they build cause they seem to really understand what
| users want and put out really good quality software.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I had many issues with the Python ecosystem. It's fairly
| fundamental to multi-project workflows to be able to use
| virtualenvs. Most of the community and tooling has
| centralised on them at this point. With VSCode you can launch
| the editor from a Terminal session with your virtualenv
| activated and it "Just Works". This will for the most part
| pick up your auto-formatter if you have one installed, that
| formatter will use the config in your project directory, etc
| etc.
|
| With ST3 and the available plugins I was at the stage of
| editing my config every time I switched project to configure
| the paths, and it still didn't work as expected. Getting
| plugins to use config from a project directory rather than
| their own config was often impossible (e.g. black formatting
| plugin using pyproject.toml instead of the sublime black
| formatter configuration).
|
| If I was working on projects with no other developers this
| might not be much of a problem, but working on a team where
| all canonical config is committed into the repo was
| essentially impossible.
| kamranjon wrote:
| Hmm I'm not super familiar with python ecosystem though I
| know some python devs at my company also use sublime.
|
| In the JS ecosystem there are quite a few project specific
| configs (prettier, eslint, nvm) that seem to be read in by
| sublime and accounted for fine from project to project
| (possibly requiring package level config in some cases).
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's the one reason above all others why I stopped using
| ST. I just couldn't get it to work at all.
| young_unixer wrote:
| I still prefer Sublime Text over VS Code for the simple reason
| that it has much less visual clutter.
|
| VS Code is cognitively stressful for me to use, there is too much
| stuff going on in the interface.
| baby wrote:
| That is definitely one downside of VSC.
| damsta wrote:
| The interface is customizable, if you want you can hide
| everything except the code editor with those preferences:
| { "workbench.editor.showTabs": false,
| "workbench.statusBar.visible": false,
| "workbench.activityBar.visible": false,
| "editor.minimap.enabled": false, "breadcrumbs.enabled":
| false }
| ggregoire wrote:
| There is a Zen Mode that displays nothing else than your
| current file.
|
| (View > Appearance > Zen Mode, or shortcut Cmd+K Z)
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| Too much stuff going on in VSCode? I like VSCode for the very
| reason that the interface offers comparable functionality to
| IDEs while not flooding you with tiny buttons and tabs on each
| side of the screen...
| agambrahma wrote:
| fwiw, I used to use ST2/3 a long time back and stopped
| completely. I recently discovered their Discord (should _really_
| be communicated better!) and downloaded ST4 to try it out, and
| ... there is nothing as SNAPPY as ST4.
|
| The LSP integration rocks, basically "just works".
|
| Now, a decade is a long time and there will be inevitably be
| comparisons to VSCode and Jetbrains, and ST4 is _not_ an IDE, so
| it's not clear how it will fare, but it's definitely still the
| fastest :-)
| faitswulff wrote:
| Adding to all the other comments about communication: it would be
| nice to have a progress report a la the Dolphin emulator or This
| Week in Rust. I honestly think it would be worth hiring someone
| to do. The added press would make up for itself in costs.
| smasher164 wrote:
| I used Sublime as my only editor for many years on end. But I
| could never quite get a handle on the plugins and editor
| configuration, experimenting with options that didn't exist or
| affect the editor in any way. With the introduction of LSP, like
| many non-VSCode editors, integration lagged behind, and older
| language-specific plugins were no longer seeing much maintenance.
|
| I do still prefer Sublime for the specific use-case of opening a
| random text file. Its startup time is far faster than any other
| editor.
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