Hi Sublime Text friends,

I’ve had a flood of emails in the past few months regarding the lack of updates from Sublime Text, and responded to this previously (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15477&hilit=kari&start=50#p58951). However, wbond rightly pointed out that not everyone is digging deep in the forum archives for status updates, so I’m sticking this front and centre:

Sublime Text is still in development. We haven’t sold out to atom.io, Jon hasn’t died, there has been no hostile takeover by TextWrangler. We dropped back down to one developer earlier this year, and because that developer is also the director of the company, speed of updates was sacrificed in exchange for business planning, applying for a new payment platform and a vacation. Being a bit of a perfectionist probably contributes to the dearth of feature adds.

However, development is still active: when I spoke to Jon today he advised me that not only does he expect an update to the beta in August, he has also started mapping out some frameworks for version 4 which will help guide future development.

Many of you have kindly offered your assistance in the development of Sublime; Jon has made the decision that he will complete version 3.0 himself, and from there we will begin expanding the team of developers. I’m the only other employee at the moment, and my job relates to sales and day to day operations.

Sublime Text continues to flourish through this slower period thanks to some amazing users. If you haven’t checked out the bugtracker (bountysource.com/teams/st-undocs/fundraiser); the original series is a goldmine of Sublime Text secrets.

As always, feel free to email me with specific questions about Sublime Text’s future: sales@sublimetext.com

Cheers
Kari

You should make this post sticky on all forums

Also, any plans of ditching phpBB in favour of Discourse?

Thanks for clarification, Kari.
Very appreciated.

Awesome! Thank you for this information. Can´t await the versions 3 und 4

Thanks Kari for update!

I agree. Sublime itself is a slick clean editor, but the website could use some love, and the phpBB forums are very old feeling. I love the github bug tracker though. Discourse forums look really slick too (I don’t like Atom, but Atom has a beautiful web presence, and I think they use Discourse?).

Can’t wait to see more regular updates from Jon, even if they are small but frequent. There’s something about active development and user involvement that keeps people interested.

All this said… Sublime is still the best editor I have used, hands down. Keep it up!

Great news.

I’d also consider copying this post to the Sublime Blog so people visiting the website will be aware.

Thank you so much for the presence, Kari. I think that about covers the important issues, and does give us some expectation for the future.

[quote=“thecrumb”]Great news.

I’d also consider copying this post to the Sublime Blog so people visiting the website will be aware.[/quote]

A tweet with a link to this would likely be appreciated by your many followers.

[quote=“karisublime”]Many of you have kindly offered your assistance in the development of Sublime; Jon has made the decision that he will complete version 3.0 himself, and from there we will begin expanding the team of developers.
[/quote]

Not at least trying to hire wbond would be a crime.

Thanks for the update Kari!

I’m looking forward to all of the awesomeness which is about to come our way

Really great to hear an update - lots of doubt on the future of the editor is now gone.

I’ll be releasing my book in a few weeks, looking forward to seeing what is new with ST3 and beyond!

My 2 cents on all this is slightly different, so I thought it worth posting. For me, Sublime has paid for itself many, many times over. If I have a wish, it’s that the future of Sublime is that it does not turn into a buggy, feature-laden beast of which only a small fraction of features are truly useful. I prefer Jon’s approach to software over the usual hurried/pressured approaches. I am, personally, most happy to wait for thoughtful, stable, and considered updates. For everything else, or for the impatient, there’s always add-on packages.

I share this opinion. The amount of time I spend in Sublime Text compared to any other app is ridiculous!

Sigh…

My two cents for future development

• Focus on a stable
  core

• Provide a more extensive API, preferably language agnostic (e.g. with ZMQ)

• Design the new API with the community

• Move as much as possible out of core and make it community maintained packages

For some reasons, i believe that by doing this, more than half of the ST issues will magically be resolved

[quote=“schlamar”]
*] Move as much as possible out of core and make it community maintained packages[/list][/quote]

I’d love the core packages to be on the SublimeText GitHub org. I’ve forked a few before just to fix some things that are broken/missing (see ImprovedSQL as an example).

[quote=“jbrooksuk”]

I share this opinion. The amount of time I spend in Sublime Text compared to any other app is ridiculous![/quote]

So true.

IMHO:
if it were written in the blog a lot of questions about the future of the sublime would have ended.
I’m talking about two paragraphs only. Not so hard.
And a lot of belligerent posts would not have reason to be.

Thanks Karisublime for update!!!

Much appreciated thx for update

[quote=“Anomareh”]karisublime wrote:
version 4

Sigh…[/quote]

Back in the day, before package control, and the countless plugins, and large community, there were just a small group of people excited about a nice new editor, and the possibilities. I’m glad Jon still has the energy, desire and focus to push the envelope, and leave the past behind. People have complained about the disruption / evolution ratio in past releases, but it really hasn’t been that bad. ST3 starts in an instant and json config is better than the days.

Having said that, ST3 still feels much the same in spirit to the windows only, xml configured, editor I fell in loves with years ago. So I’m personally excited, having followed ST development since 0.x, because this will be the release that has everything that’s been postponed in ST2 and ST3, and all (or a lot) that’s been up Jon’s sleeve for under the hood changes.

Yeah, there’s a few bugs that annoy me, but no data losses or anything serious. Been wanting to know exactly what changed inside buffer modification events? ST4 is the release we’re likely to get it. New language grammar system? Ditto.

I’m optimistic this time this time we’ll see real change. Vote ST4! haha