Brackets is picking up a lot of steam in Sublime Text’s market too. With ST3 about to have been in beta for two years and plugins continuing to be fragmented between it and ST2, it’s not giving me a great feeling about this project’s ultimate fate.
Did ST3 development stopped?
wbond
#22
Haven’t you guys had enough discussions about Sublime Text and open source, Atom, Brackets, etc? Use what works for you.
The data seems to show otherwise – over 4/5 of packages work on ST3. packagecontrol.io/stats
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Ryan_Williams
#23
[quote=“wbond”]Haven’t you guys had enough discussions about Sublime Text and open source, Atom, Brackets, etc? Use what works for you.
The data seems to show otherwise – over 4/5 of packages work on ST3. packagecontrol.io/stats[/quote]
Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean the latest and most feature-rich version of the plugin is available on both. Only a few months ago I was trying to use ST3, but I was experiencing some buggy behaviour that eventually forced me back to ST2. However, I then discovered that some of the plugins I was using only had older/limited functionality available for ST2.
It isn’t good for plugin developers, the community, or users for a beta period to be protracted for this long — especially when at a glance there doesn’t even seem to be that much distinction between them that warrants both existing for multiple years. This has become a stale project and I’m seeing fellow developers and teams actively leaving it behind.
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Dragonmaster_Lou
#24
[quote=“thecrumb”]There is an open source ‘clone’ of Sublime at Lime:
Has 42 contributors on GitHub… Slow news there too - their last blog update was in July.
And they don’t have a forum so it’s difficult to guage how much support they have. I don’t see an obvious ‘donate’ button but they link to Bountysource where it appears you can pay $$ for features.
[/quote]
They don’t update their blog posts and they don’t have a forum, but they tend to use the GitHub bug tracking interface in lieu of a forum. There’s certainly a fair bit of discussion there about bugs and feature requests.
[quote=“linkor”]Most developers lost steam when Atom was released. Atom is basically a Sublime clone too, and they have the force of github behind them.
Now that Atom works great on all platforms, I can’t really see the point of another “clone”.[/quote]
Yeah, Atom is an editor with a lot of potential. I’ve jokingly referred to it as the “Emacs of the 2010s,” just substitute “web-based technology” for “LISP interpreter” and it’s a pretty fair mapping.
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gregor.hoch
#25
By the way, Sublime Text donated $4000 to the unofficial ST docs four month ago: bountysource.com/teams/sublimetext
Not saying that changes the whole discussion but I still think it’s interesting.
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mwb1100
#26
[quote=“wbond”]Haven’t you guys had enough discussions about Sublime Text and open source, Atom, Brackets, etc? Use what works for you.
[/quote]
Personally, I don’t mind hearing about alternatives even if this might not be the most appropriate place for them (though the continual call for ST to be open sourced is getting old). I’m always interested in knowing about the “latest/greatest” editor.
[quote=“gregor.hoch”]By the way, Sublime Text donated $4000 to the unofficial ST docs four month ago: bountysource.com/teams/sublimetext
Not saying that changes the whole discussion but I still think it’s interesting.[/quote]
That is interesting, not that I have a clue about what it might indicate.
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mstaniszczak
#27
So maybe the solution as in the past with Blender? Social fundraising to buy and OS release of Sublime?
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Dragonmaster_Lou
#29
[quote=“tux.”]
Emacs doesn’t rely on a potential security risk (WebKit) just for editing tasks.[/quote]
No, it relies on another potential security risk (LISP) for editing tasks.
Note that I’ll refer to “WebKit” as “WK” below due to it apparently tripping the spam filter here for some reason.
You run some random LISP you downloaded from some random website in Emacs without making sure it does what it claims to do and nothing more, and boom, you’re pwned.
You run some random Python plugin for Sublime that you downloaded from some random website in Sublime without making sure it does what it claims to do and nothing more, and boom, you’re pwned.
You run some random HTML/JavaScript from some random website in WK (whether the browser, your editor, or anything else) without making sure it does what it claims to do and nothing more, and boom, you’re pwned.
WK on its own is no more nor less secure than any other language environment on your desktop. It’s only when you connect to random websites and therefore download random code that may or may not be nefarious does it become a security risk. The same applies to Python, Ruby, compiled native code, etc. The main issue is that WK’s most common use is explicitly connecting to random websites and executing random bits of code. Browsers have sandboxes to mitigate this problem, but sandboxes aren’t perfect, hence why JavaScript running in a browser is often a vector for security problems. However, if all you ever put in WK is stuff you’ve got sitting on your hard drive that doesn’t connect to random websites and that you’ve got pretty good reason to believe it doesn’t do anything fishy (vetted it yourself or by someone you feel is competent and trustworthy), it’s just as secure as anything else that can execute code.
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tux
#30
Thanks for your in-depth insight of computer security, linkor.
Dragonmaster Lou, well, the number of known WebKit remote holes is somewhat larger that that of known remote Emacs Lisp holes, that’s all I was referring to. Indeed, since Emacs has a built-in web browser, the borders are starting to blur. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, having switched from ST to GNU Emacs for good, but I can’t really point my finger at why Atom should be any better than ST just because it has an active development now.
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Chipotle
#31
Well. With the full understanding that this is a bit of devil’s advocacy, I think a lot of the concern about ST’s development state rests on the fact that everything hinges on one guy who is, let’s face it, bad at communication. One can make a good case that TextMate is now being more actively developed than Sublime Text is, but TM lost the vast majority of its community solely due to its single developer, Allan Odgaard, spending years being uncommunicative and releasing very little code. Over 2014, what we saw from Sublime’s Jon Skinner makes Odgaard look positively chatty. I know a lot of ST fans insist that this shouldn’t matter, but it really does.
Okay. So what does Atom potentially offer? It has multiple developers and the support of a fairly substantial company behind it (GitHub), it’s improving at a rapid and highly visible rate, and its open source nature means there’s an excellent chance that it will continue even if its current developers get sick of it. It has the development model and theoretical longevity of Emacs or Vim, but with a modern codebase.
Personally I don’t feel like I can use Atom yet, but I’m watching it. I don’t particularly like the design model they’ve chosen – I don’t like JavaScript much and they’re already putting a lot of effort into making WebKit’s performance not suck, which might have been better spent by not using WebKit – but that doesn’t mean they can’t make it work. And I’m not really seriously concerned about security holes in it. (No more than I am about any other plugin architecture, including Sublime’s.)
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JacobWille
#32
[quote=“Akarin”]Is it still a good idea to invest time in learning/customizing ST3 or did the development stopped? Last blog entry is from over a year ago and last beta build from last August.
Just wondering if it’s time to move to atom.io or TM2.[/quote]
I personally recommend atom for new users. But if you’re happy with ST, just use it.
I still use SublimeText, because I’m so used to it, but I wouldn’t do it if starting today. As far as is possible to tell externally: Development has stopped completely and there are many unresolved bugs.
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JacobWille
#34
[quote=“tux.”]
Where can I see the source code repositories? Where did you see them?[/quote]
Just apply logic.
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iamntz
#35
Applying the very same logic, we should assume that the following pieces of software are also dead:
- Windows - last release was couple of years ago;
- OSX - last release was about an year ago;
- 3d Max - nine months ago;
- Latest Vim is almost two years old, latest Emacs is one year old and so on;
- In fact, there are very slim chances to find a commercial product with a daily/weekly release cycle.
Don’t forget that until a year or so ago, almost any company followed exactly the same pattern: silenzio stampa between releases, probably a couple of updates ( just look at what Adobe use to do: release cycle at about two years, one or to minor updates; almost no responses on their forums). They all recently started to invest more in communities (Microsoft, Adobe and so on)
Bottom line: it’s funny how every other week there is a guy that come here and starts shouting that the editor is dead, they are using Atom (or whatever), yet they are spending time not only reading, but also commenting on this forum. How so?
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simonzack
#36
You are comparing apples to oranges. They have completely different release cycles, and have completely different amounts of manpower behind them. Explain then, why so many people think that sublime text is dead, but nobody will ever think that the above projects are dead.
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iamntz
#37
There were much more people used to think that Earth is the center of the Universe.
Just to be sure that we are on the same page: I was burned once with E-text, when the developer simply disappeared; I’m nervous about the lack of updates (either blog/forum updates or app updates) from Jon? A bit. Enough to search for another editor? No, not really. The editor is pretty robust as it is. Yes, it has its own quirks, but doesn’t all editors have their own?
Btw, most of those many people are new users to forum, less than 5 posts. As I said earlier, it’s very interesting how people that are using and recommends Atom register to this forum just to let us know that ST is dead. 
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Dragonmaster_Lou
#38
[quote=“tux.”]
Dragonmaster Lou, well, the number of known WebKit remote holes is somewhat larger that that of known remote Emacs Lisp holes, that’s all I was referring to. Indeed, since Emacs has a built-in web browser, the borders are starting to blur. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, having switched from ST to GNU Emacs for good, but I can’t really point my finger at why Atom should be any better than ST just because it has an active development now.[/quote]
That may be true (about remote WebKit (WK) holes), but if the particular WK implementation (in this case Atom, but it could refer to any WK implementation outside of a web browser) does not open any internet connections, whether to connect to another site or listen for connections, then isn’t the point moot? Yeah, if I start using Atom as a web browser and surfing to random sites, then I could see how it would be a problem. If I’m only using it to edit local source files on my machine, then it doesn’t really matter. In theory, I suppose I could edit (as opposed to execute as a plugin) some malicious JavaScript via a specially crafted file that takes advantage of a buffer overflow in Atom or some other low-level security hole, but if they’re doing things at that low of a level, they’d probably just use one of the pre-existing remote shellcode assembly examples kicking around the net instead of doing something clever with JavaScript.
Of course, as you pointed it out, if you used Emacs’s own built-in browser, it could potentially download some malicious elisp (since I don’t think Emacs has any JavaScript implementation in it) as well. It’s just that no one bothers writing malicious elisp since the target space of people who use the Emacs browser is just too tiny for miscreants’ attention. You’re also potentially just as vulnerable to the “specially crafted file” exploit, but that applies to just about every piece of software that can open arbitrary files.
Nothing wrong with switching to Emacs from ST, provided you’re still as productive in Emacs (though I personally can’t stand its 1970’s UI and keybindings, but that’s a separate issue 
).
Atom does have the 800-lb gorilla of GitHub backing it, along with community development, in its favor. I wouldn’t call Atom any better than ST at present as ST is certainly a mature product whereas Atom is still very raw. It has the potential to be better than ST (and has a lot of nice features as a result of its WK core that I think would be nearly impossible to implement as an ST plugin), but I wouldn’t say it’s there yet.
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JacobWille
#39
[quote=“simonzack”]
Applying the very same logic, we should assume that the following pieces of software are also dead:
- Windows - last release was couple of years ago;
- OSX - last release was about an year ago;
- 3d Max - nine months ago;
- Latest Vim is almost two years old, latest Emacs is one year old and so on;
- In fact, there are very slim chances to find a commercial product with a daily/weekly release cycle.
You are comparing apples to oranges. They have completely different release cycles, and have completely different amounts of manpower behind them. Explain then, why so many people think that sublime text is dead, but nobody will ever think that the above projects are dead.[/quote]
Exactly! The undeniable truth is that ST3 is very buggy and as far as we can tell, hardly anything gets fixed.
I will personally still use SublimeText (with atomic_save off to make it usable), but won’t recommend it to others until HQ starts communicating properly and some of the longstanding bugs gets fixed.
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tux
#40
What, you think, is the release cycle of Sublime Text?
You can change them. 
Admittedly Emacs will probably - and hopefully - never have a HTML5/CSS/JavaScript live preview. That’s simply not what it’s made for.
(But then again, there’s twittering-mode…)
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