Introduction
I still remember when I was the cool kid in my programming classes using Sublime text with everyone gathering around me in awe. Now let’s fast forward an entire decade I’m no longer a student but the director of software engineering for a pretty large firm. However, I’m using a resource hungry editor called VSCode (blah) because it ‘just works’ out of the box for what we do. We are an Angular/.NET Core shop and we’re all running Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code on all of machines (laptops/desktops).
During one of our meetings a couple of weeks we came to the realization that due to the scale of our project and what we do on a daily basis 16GB of RAM is just not enough to do what we do. When we work remotely we are all running a DELL XPS 13/15 and the performance on VSCode is absolutely horrendous. Our applications are growing on a daily basis which results in slower look-up and file opening. I encouraged the entire team to stop complaining on Code’s github page and try Sublime.
After a week of using Sublime everyone was in agreement that performance > code and productivity skyrocketed because we could actually ‘work’. The responsiveness, behavior, and overall experience just outweighed the ease of use.
So then why are you writing this post?
Essentially we want Sublime to come out of its comfort zone and be more than just a ‘text editor’. Why can’t it have the same functionality out of the box as VSCode? It’s a native application and it has been held back over the years by being closed source. Sublime literally watched Atom/Code step past it do the nature of how the project has been structured.
There will be some people out there that come out and scream ‘Leave Sublime alone’ right out the gate. I’m under the belief that people need options and competition is good. Maybe all that Sublime needed was to see an application like Code to succeed to return as an even better option.
Plan
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Open source Sublime, but still charge for a commercial license (or find alternative revenue stream).
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Gather known larger companies that use Sublime to help build it
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Outline a community road-map and work towards the goals on a quarterly plan. Become transparent.
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Release every 3 months
Users and companies will come together to support this product. There are performance bugs and complaints everywhere on the issues list for vscode. I personally believe that Sublime already has a better git integration at this point than competitors. Sublime Merge is perfection <3
I’m currently on a plane to Chicago and promised my team I’d get something on here this weekend. Sorry for typos/mistakes/etc. I will come back and provide better context and reasoning if needed.
Sublime <3