Sublime Forum

Author's thoughts on Open Source

#1

I am curious if the author of SublimeText has ever made any comments about an Open Source SublimeText?

I feel if SublimeText was open source, it could really dominate the editor space with much more rapid development. Just my opinion.

The open source alternatives (sublime clones) out there are not has good. They are all developed in less efficient languages, and will never match sublimetext for performance.

Do you think it would be an odd concept to start a kickstarter to compensate the author for making Sublimetext open source?

I just love sublime text and I want to use it forever and ever :smile:

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Sublime Text versus Visual Studio Code in 2019
#2
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Open Source
#3

He says heā€™d rather see ST open-source than abandoned. That is a very important point and hopefully his opinion hasnā€™t changed (that link is from 2009).

Now, it would be good if he had a dead-manā€™s-switch to open-source the code, in case something ever happened to him.

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#4

Heā€™s not the only developer anymore, so things are looking better on that regard. Letā€™s hope that nothing happens to him regardless.

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#5

And, whatā€™s more,

but it is a commercial venture, and it just doesnā€™t make any sense to both release it as open source and continue working on it.

So it may be free and open-sourced, cheers!!!

Okay. that wonā€™t happen because itā€™s not abandoned yet, at least now.

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#6

The community should buy the code off him with kickstarter! :slightly_smiling:

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#7

Iā€™m a big fan of SublimeText and I would donate if it were open. That said I think the evolution of it will be that it fades away as the competitors fill in the gaps.

ST is ahead of the competitors but open alternatives will eventually catch up and obliterate ST.

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#8

My thoughts are similar. The only problem is the alternatives are written on what I consider inferior platforms. I want my editor to be on a fast native language, non-garbage collected speed demon.

That being said, at this rate I might just have to consider a switch to Atom. If you look at the release notes, the progress they make is quite significant.

I just recently made a topic about how bad macros are in sublime text. At this rate of development I doubt they will ever be improved.

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#9

I love the speed and lightweight of ST, and I love that plugins are done in python, a language I enjoy using, versus say JavaScript, a language I have to use. (Does anyone like JavaScript?)

Atom has tremendous open source energy behind it, and VS code has MS behind it. ST will likely be left behind at some point. I hope the author will open source ST if he doesnā€™t have the time or energy to continue working on it

I personally will keep using it because Iā€™m rather attached to it. No matter what, ST has had tremendous influence on features and aesthetics of modern text editors. It is also one of the most audaciously named software ever and has lived up to its name

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#10

Hi!

Indeed, Sublime Text is, with one (or few) dev(s), slower to create release. But, the community might help. Just consider this problem you just mentionned:

Havenā€™t you read the answers?

Sublime Text has a huge potential. Itā€™s super fast, super easy to make plugin, so it is up to us to add what we want, or complain. Because, it is the plugin that you will create that will be best suited for you need than anything else.

Though, I have to say, your complaints makes me want to create this macro implementation.

Exactly the same.

Matt

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#11

I would actually like to be paying more for Sublime Text in exchange for improved throughput. Iā€™m probably going to pay IntelliJ $150/year for a long, long time. Iā€™d sort of rather pay that towards Sublime Text.

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#12

I really enjoy Sublime Text and donā€™t mind that itā€™s not open source.

As long as the developers maintain interest in the project and donā€™t abandon it, I donā€™t care if it goes open source. But I agree with the idea that if a company (person/entity) is going to abandon something to the point of not even caring about the income from it anymore they might as well release it.

I appreciate the licensing model that allows you to essentially try it out as long as you need to realize itā€™s amazing and the author deserves to be compensated for it.

Iā€™ve contributed to a bunch of kickstarters for adding features to open source software. That being said Iā€™d be inclined to give less money to a paid product.

Until there is a viable competitor with the level of python support that Sublime has it wonā€™t be left behind. People will always have languages they prefer.

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#13

As my first though was: why isnā€™t that stuff open-source, now I donā€™t mind that itā€™s not open-source, too.
Sublime is probably the best investment of my money several years ago ā€“ working on a daily basis with Sublime only. C++: Sublime, Python:Sublime, LaTeX:Sublime, RubyOnRails: Sublime.

It is a text editor, not a collection of tons of pre-installed plugins and not a fancy IDE. With a sad look I realize the latest version with Phantoms seems to miss the original mission: ā€œbe the best text-editorā€ and is driving towards IDEā€™s.

Btw: Look at TexMaker as a deterrent example. The developed-by-a-community-version introduced features nobody will probably use and destroyed the GUI and workflow with all interactive functions.

The only reason I can imagine for making sublime open-source is proper source-debugging of C++.

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#14

With utter love to ST and full respect to the author, I donā€™t see how itā€™s going to standup against Atom. There is almost nothing in Atom, that scared me off anymore. A lot of plugins and speed is absolutely great. Few lags but all of them upon first load. Itā€™s acceptable.

I must say, that I paid for ST licence and if I didnā€™t I would probably love alternative even more.

In my humble opinion, in case ST doesnā€™t go open source now, it wonā€™t matter at all in few years. With KickStarter author could rase lot of money. For example, FontAwesome already raised almost $1ml, just in about a month.

Imagine, that you could install ST and its plugins from CLI in Linux default distros? I donā€™t know whatā€™s the revenue author expects but I think that it would be many times more with donations and KickStarter.

Otherwise, I will choose Atom just because itā€™s, first, open-source, and second, because it works the same well (nowadays already)

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#15

Sorry - Atom is still impossibly slow in comparison to the magnificent, speedy, smooth as sink Sublime Text. And it will likely always be that way in comparison, given the almost absurd overhead of trying to render a file using HTML/CSS especially with overlays and the like.

For example. I just run the Find command and typed a single Space character. It fairly quickly found 29k of them in my file and I was duly impressed. Then I decided to add the letter ā€˜cā€™ so that my search string was " c". It took 5 seconds at least before it erased all the highlighted spaces and display the 574 resulting matches.

[My laptop is a blazing 15" MacBook from last year]

That and things like it are not a place I personally am willing to go.

But boy do I wish a few things could be fixed/improved in Sublime. The API is almost good enough to do whatever we want, but there are some things missing.

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#16

It is time to open source Sublime Text! Editors based on inferior platforms (VS Code, Atom) are going to win out, solely because they are open source and progressing.

We are headed to a dark scary world.

Sublime Text needs to be open sourced!! Can we just start a kickstarter and give the dev some money? Or is there some sort of monetization that works with open source.

I love sublime but I am almost ready to deal with electron based editors. Sublime is dieingā€¦

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#17

Want to give the dev(s) money? Buy a 100 licences and hand them out for free. Same result. :slight_smile:

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#18

Really? Please elaborate.

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#19

How is it the same result? Open source is not just about freeā€¦it is about open sourceā€¦anyone can contributeā€¦

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#20

Really? Please elaborate.

Where it is accepted that desktop applications can be written in horribly inefficient interpreted languages that will never EVER actually be performantā€¦

I love when I load up a bloated java idea like Android studio and my first editor commands lag and jerk foreverā€¦java is bad enoughā€¦god forbid javascriptā€¦

People can argue all day or bend over backwards trying to make ā€œeasyā€ languages run ā€œfastā€. Or people can just learn to program and write applications in proper languagesā€¦like sublime text is.

If I am spending 8 hours a day in my editor, why do I want a clunker?

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