Just a wild guess, but I’d reckon at least 50% of Sublime’s potential market chooses VS Code instead. MS will always be able to put more resources into development of VS Code than Sublime will ever be able to, by orders of magnitude, so it will continue to improve by leaps and bounds faster.
Hard to believe Sublime’s profitability isn’t decreasing rapidly. Perhaps it’s time to open source this project.
I agree that VSCode is developing at a great pace and continues to innovate but if active development of Sublime continues and it remains faster than VSCode, I would continue to use/buy it.
Oh, and VSCode still doesn’t have ‘Goto Symbol in Project’ for CSS which is priceless for me.
And once more, rinse and repeat:
As an aside, the way VSCode just mushes background colours on top of each other for search results, matching words and primary selection eventually drove me crazy trying to adjust my theme (alpha blending three colours ends up in a mess) so I just closed it and will give it another look if they ever let you change the selected text foreground colour like SublimeText does. When I select one character, I don’t want a barely visible change of background colour, I want a bright border and white text - the selection is important at that moment.
How long did it take for you to work out that the best solution to “decreasing profitability” was to give away the product for free? It’s pure genius. Maybe we can nominate your for the Nobel prize for economics.
The other thing is that MS does have more resources, yet VS Code is still shit.
I personally would like to think that Sublime Text’s unique native cross platform design and components could be re-used in another SublimeHQ product - I for one would like a decent web service test tool, (despite SOAP not being as popular these days,) as using plugins in ST doesn’t have the same feel as a dedicated UI could have. Therefore, it would seem like a good idea to keep ST closed source for extra IP and potential income.
It would be great to see a ton of small QoL improvements to ST though.
They probably never tried to open a huge SQL file and multi select on it. Sublime Text is just way too fast to get beaten.