Sublime Forum

Goodbye Sublime Text

#1

I would like to thank the great community for all the awesome work that are going into plugins and helping people out. I have not been a member here, but have always been lurking to see what’s going on. I have, however, been a loyal customer since version 1.4, and no editor has even come close in my opinion in terms of raw speed and workflow features. Until recently, that is.

For the past year or so, I have seen that my needs have moved beyond what Sublime can offer me. I need an editor that I can hack on myself, and one that integrates nicely with github. Unfortunately, I find that the otherwise excellent API is just too limiting and progress is slow compared to the development of other editors out there. The fact that Sublime is closed source (which I can understand from a business perspective), make things worse.

I’m not going to “sell” the editor that I’m moving to, but I would like to say that I’m probably coming back to Sublime if it gets open sourced or the API becomes rich enough, because the foundation is clearly great.

Thanks and good luck!

amil

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#2

Sublime Text is easily extendable through Python.

What does that mean for you as a user?

I hope it’s Atom. Once you used Atom for a while, you’ll remember how much better Sublime Text is.

We’re happy to welcome you back any time.

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#3

[quote=“tux.”]

Sublime Text is easily extendable through Python.[/quote]

Only the parts that are exposed, and the sidebar api is especially limited (no good way to do scm integrations). Numerous people have complained about this and should hardly be a surprise.

[quote=“tux.”]

What does that mean for you as a user?[/quote]

It means that I cannot change everything as I can with open source editors. Duh.

Atom is better for me than Sublime right now. If you prefer Sublime, I’m fine with that too. (I used to complain about Atom performance, but with the stuff that went into perf this summer, I’m more than happy with that part as well. Sublime is still faster, but Atom solves so many problems for me because I can extend everything. I can’t even get a decent CSS color picker working in Sublime.)

Don’t get me wrong, Sublime has served me well in many years and I still love it. It’s just that it has fallen behind the curve. If that changes, I’ll be back :smile:

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#4

Thanks for mentioning Atom, i just tried it and it’s basically Sublime on steroids. Heck, I can even have inline preview of angularjs changes as I type.

I like how they reused tons of the keybindings from Sublime, moving over was painless :smiley: Like the original poster, I’ve been thinking about maybe looking for alternatives, since Sublime development feels dead and Notepad++ isn’t available on mac and I use multiple OS’s each day. Atom seems really great so far. Other editors I should try? emacs and vim are not for me.

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#5

Visual Studio Code is another one of the recent cross-platform editor, but I personally haven’t tried it yet becaue I disagree with their data collection policy.

Atom has always felt clunky to me, even post-1.0, but the possibility to add UI elements anywhere sure is tempting for a package dev like me. Javascript/Coffeescript is also nothing that I particularly like.

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#6

Tool selection is subjective. As a developer, it’s your call to use the right tool for the job. For instance, do you use Gulp/Grunt? Objective-C/Swift? Sublime/Atom/Vim? PHP/Ruby?

So long as you’re productive, it shouldn’t matter :smile:

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#7

I don’t really feel that, but I do have a beefy computer. Sublime still wins at startup, and probably always will, but on the other hand, I always have the editor open.

That said, I agree with jbrooksuk… use the tool that works for you. It’s just great to see an alternatives now that Sublime seems to be somewhat stalled in development.

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#8

The reasoning behind this troll post is so bad. You need an editor you can “hack on yourself”, and “integration with github”, dear god, then the troll says it’s not trying to “sell” a text editor.

What professional says “I love this editor, but I wish it was more tied to a specific technology and in particular the version a commercial website uses”. I mean, for real bro? for real?

Then the whole “hack on my self”, this is just such a pretentious hipsterism. The only people I would say have a legitimate claim to “hacking” on an editor would be the EMACS crowd and say what you will about them, I’ve never had one of them try to claim that having an editor that needs dirty hacks everywhere is a good thing.

I think sublime will continue to be the “go to” solution for professional developers who don’t want to use a CLI editor like VIM or EMACS.

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#9

I found that his or hers post raised completely valid points.

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#10

@amil, I feel your pain. I raised a few bug reports months ago, but they never got answered (online and by mail). I eventually uninstalled Sublime and moved on to a more vibrant community where help is a few minutes away. There’s an “unanswered posts” link, and pressing it leads to a depressing read.

I visit this forum from time to time to see if the situation has improved, but no… Besides, the forum is either down, or it’s up with posts like this one. What a shame, but HQ has itself to blame.

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#11

And it’s built on a web browser. The world’s first text editor which comes with its own malware. Neat, huh?

texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EditorIndex :geek:

Vim and Emacs have GUIs too; Vim even has different ones (including a Qt one) thanks to its capabilities to run “embedded”, Emacs’s default one can be customized very much though.

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#12

I can only agree. I just switched to atom for about 2 months and am now switching back. I can see that atom has certain advantages for people who really want to hack as much as possible and it also has some really nice built-in features. But overall, it just seems buggy and unstable. But the worst point by far for me is the speed. SublimeText is just lightning fast, while Atom still seems to have a lot of problems with large amount of open tabs or large files. It just gets clunky really quickly.

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#13

Keep on demonstrating your cluelessness tux. It’s kinda fun.

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#14

Maybe with no packages installed. Certain packages in Sublime makes startup really costly (but hey, at least it’s easy to spot which ones), while the Atom guys seems have a test regime in place to avoid that. All said, I have zero performance issues with the latest Atom release on Windows.

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#15

Sadly, I have moved away from Sublime to Atom and Visual Studio Code too.

Sublime did have many advantages before, but right now the only one I can think of is speed. And it is rarely an issue in Atom for me. It might be different for people with low end machines, or working with very large files and complex projects. In my experience Atom is on par (or even faster) with other “native” editors I have tried on OSX such as Coda, WebStorm, etc.

Atom’s community is growing at lightspeed, and is 100% customisable. It might not be the best editor for everyone, but it has everything I can possibly need and it’s only getting better.

I was a hard die fan too, but Sublime 3 (while very functional) is simply taking too long and is suffering from the typical single-dev problems. You can rely on a community or even a company, but relying on an individual is a risky business.

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#16

I’ve been lurking these forums since I bought a license back in April. Apologies for a bit of a rant:

I hope it’s not too cynical - but I really do expect that one of these days we will hear that ST has been shuttered. I would not blame JPS - he doesn’t owe anyone who paid a thing other than what we agreed to in the license.

That said, I probably would not have paid $70 for ST2/ST3 license if I had been under the impression that focus was being shifted to a nebulous notion of ST4. And I was told that I would need to buy another license for that product…Worse (in my opinion) is that the once-vibrant plugin scene seems to have dried up over the course of 2014/2015.

Sublime is working fine and is quite stable and quick. I cannot complain about that. However the community in the form of working packages and extensions was the reason I bought; a solid core that could be extended via Python. But isn’t that what the Vim gui clients are? With IntelliJ and VS Code and Webstorm and even Atom catching up to ST3 in performance, what is the benefit of sticking with it?

Like others, I pick these things by what works. And as a full-time engineer I must admit that even a cursory look I took at Atom this week has shown me through my improved productivity that it is a better editor than ST3.

It’s slightly slower, yes however far more extensible: I can preview markdown in the editor, eval non-REPL languages in a terminal pane, run Scala worksheets, see CI build status, see git/hg status, change hex colors with a picker, diff files, etc. Remote-pair programming was the easiest I have ever used and was intoxicating. Linking build errors directly to issue tickets on GitHub is very useful.

The community around Atom is friendly and growing, and almost any HTML/CSS/JS component can be easily integrated. That is awesome. It just keeps getting better, and it’s just plain not getting better for ST in my opinion.

So I’ve uninstalled Sublime, eaten the $70 as a business expense and moved on to using Vim, Atom and IntelliJ in different aspects of my tool kit.

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#17

The main reason people are switching to Atom in droves is that Sublime HQ the past two years has only done the bare minimum to keep interest up. People are figuring this out, so the communication is not only lacking, it comes across as disingenuous. I predict another small burst of releases this fall, then silence for six months. It’s appalling. But I also feel kinda bad for saying all this, because who knows what’s going on, maybe illness or financial troubles. Fact is, people are migrating to Atom and Bracket.io in numbers, and I tend to think some level communication would benefit Sublime (the uncertainty surrounding Sublime made me take another look at Atom, and I’m impressed by the editor and the people around it)

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#18

Thanks for your insightful argument. I’m convinced that I’m wrong now.

Where’s yours?

People are not. Deal with it.

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#19

[quote=“tux.”]

People are not. Deal with it.[/quote]

Oh, but they are.

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#20

I am not, friends are not. Oh, they are not.

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