I’m torn between purchasing a few Sublime licenses for my company, or use a certain Sublime-like alternative. Some of the guys in the shop are using Sublime, some are not, but we’ve finally agreed to standardize on a single editor to avoid duplicating work on our plugins.
Unfortunately, we have a few stability issues with Sublime on recent Linux and OS X releases and would like to know if these are being worked on or not (there are tickets on github, but I’m not sure if the developer monitor these)
Thing is, even if you do search the forums there’s no definitive answer on the status of ST. Jon may have built a great editor, but he sure isn’t too great at communicating with his customer base; the blog and official Twitter account have been silent for 10 months, his latest post to these forums is from six months back.
Before anyone pipes in, I’m not saying we’re “entitled” to anything more, and all of this is readily available information and the software is sold as-is, BUT I understand why new users would be confused as to the current status of Sublime Text as a project, given that there’s absolutely no official word one way or another.
I, for example, don’t have a habit of poking through support forums for software I’m interested in, unless I know to expect something out of the ordinary, I mainly go by the official website, and only venture to the forums if I’m facing issues with the software. In the case of ST, going by the official homepage and the buy page, there’s no indication that the development might have stopped/slowed down, and unless one specifically checks out the ST3 Beta page, there isn’t even a mention of how old ST2 is, or that development has moved on to ST3.
What I’m trying to say here, in the most diplomatic tone I can possibly muster, is: cut new users a little slack when it comes to figuring out the status of Sublime Text development.
I know there are a lot of people who fervently believe that Jon will surely deliver and/or notify everyone accordingly in case he can’t, but to someone like me, halfway around the world, who’s never had any sort of contact with him, I don’t even know if he’s alive, let alone the project.
I’d not pay for the licence unless there is some evidence that the project is even remotely alive. The last blog post is from March 2015. Luckily there are very promising (and good) free alternatives.
First of all, you should let your developer’s decide which tools they are most comfortable (and therefore most productive) with, and they all may not agree. Standardizing on one editor, while I understand the motivations behind that, is a mistaken approach. Consider it a contributing factor to losing your best talent. As long as the team uses a mono-spaced font, in whatever editor they decide to use, it won’t affect Git, Mercurial, or SVN.
Secondly, regardless of whether Sublime Text 3 is still in active development or not, what you’re paying for is for working software today. And today, ST3 remains one of the most efficient editors available - it just works. I like it better than Adobe Brackets, Atom, Visual Studio Code, NotePad++, and JetBrains WebStorm. I do like Adobe Brackets, but it doesn’t work with the Windows Server Roaming Profiles our company uses, whereas ST3 does. And after forcing myself to change the way I work, in small increments by using the mouse less, I am finding that I prefer ST3 even when I can get Adobe Brackets to work, like at home. I am learning the shortcuts, and they are making me far more efficient than I ever thought was possible; it is a fun discovery.
The majority of functionality that most programmers need is already implemented in ST3, available right now. Save the company some money, and let the developers buy their own editor. That way it follows them, and the company won’t have to manage it at all. Sublime Text 3 costs $10 more than the lastest PS4 or Xbox One game. Not a lot, even for the most junior programmer.
Here’s my perspective as a long-time (3+ years) power user/plugin developer:
To get to the original question of Sublime vs. Atom, I still say Sublime hands down, full stop. There are significant issues that prevent me from using Atom even on a part-time basis that have been core Sublime features for years. Sublime is nearly language-agnostic, although users of Java and the Visual Studio-integrated languages like C# would likely benefit a lot more from an IDE than a tricked-out text editor. Atom seems to be very strongly focused on main web development languages (HTML/CSS/JS) and their offshoots like CoffeeScript, with things like the integrated rendering engine. I’m not a web developer, so that has zero benefit for me, and a lot of other people. The plugin ecosystem for Sublime is vastly superior to Atom’s IMO, with a lot of that credit going to @wbond and Package Control. While Sublime’s exposed API isn’t perfect (can we PLEASE get a sidebar API and integration with UI themes?), Python is an all-purpose language with a huge std lib, not to mention the incredible number of third-party modules that can be adapted for use within Sublime. CoffeeScript is a derivative of JavaScript, originally (and still, for the most part) intended for use in browsers and communicating with them (yes, I know about Node). Everything goes through the DOM, which makes sense for some things, but makes others rather difficult. It’s more difficult than it should be, for example, to just do straight source file parsing and manipulation, whereas with Python it’s all just text in a Region. Maybe it’s just my lack of JS/CS experience, but attempting to use the API in any kind of significant manner was an exercise in frustration - lousy/incorrect/missing documentation, multiple ways of trying to do the same thing (possibly with different side effects), multiple ways of naming/accessing functions and methods, etc. Maybe I’m just too used to PEP-20:
On the topic of whether Sublime is still alive: yes it is. OK, we go through fits and starts of dev builds being released one right after another, then a quiet period, then more builds, etc. We’re obviously in a quiet period now, but I’m sure Jon is still working on the project. ST4 is in the planning/architecting stage at the moment, while ST3 final is still waiting to be released, so he has plenty to work on. He has always been rather non-communicative on this forum, except in the hours and days immediately after a dev build when dealing with major bugs. He is very much aware of the SublimeTextIssues repo on Github, and I’m sure it figures into his planning. Some members of this forum are in direct contact with Jon, and have periodically reassured us that yes, he is still alive and still working on Sublime.
Could the communication be better? Absolutely. Should Sublime be made open-source? IMO yes, but it likely won’t happen, at least for a while, unfortunately. Should you switch to Atom? It all depends - does it fulfill your needs? Do you mainly use the languages it focuses on? Are you comfortable with its design and API architecture? Do the available plugins and extensions meet your needs? It’s all up to you. Personally, I don’t prefer Atom, because it doesn’t meet my needs (no equivalent of SublimeREPL, confusing API, package manager implementation is poor, etc.) while Sublime mostly does. That may be different for others. I chose a long time ago to pay for Sublime because it was the best editor I’ve ever used (which is saying a lot) and I wanted to support future development. I would make the same decision today in an instant.
They all agree on standardizing. We build highly specialized hw interfacing software and need a large amount of plugins to streamline the process. Everybody agrees that using a single editor for this part of the job is essential.
That’s profoundly wrong. If we invest a few hundred thousand dollars on plugin development, the editor better work 5 years from now. My understanding is that ST3 is not maintained and have stopped working on some recent Linux distros, for instance. There are also reports on problems on 5k macs (we’ve noticed some of these ourselves)
After careful consideration we ended up with Atom and everybody is happy so far. Super-easy to write plugins, pace of development is insane, and we have the source code if need be.
Everyone can safely ignore AbrahamD, wbdor, JacobWille, etc. All the same person posting from the same IPs (especially Tor), pretending to be new/different people, creating discussions between his various personas, glomming on to any bug report that can be found to claim Sublime is totally busted. He/she likes Atom more than Sublime and can’t stand it that other people disagree.
Obviously I’m disappointed with the lack of updates and input from jps but I’ve never had a problem getting SublimeText to run on Ubuntu which others seem to be saying is not even possible at this time. I’m currently using build 3095 on both Ubuntu 15.10 and the development version of Xubuntu 16.04 without any problems.
At least ST recognises my flavour of the English language which other seemingly popular advanced editors do not.
I really don’t understand why is so important to be angry.
I paid my licence, and for some plugin, used ST for quite long and nice time, now I don’t use it. I found some software that works better for me this moment. Simple.
As soon ST gets updated and gets some functions I really need and like - I am back (they are promised long time ago, sidebar, ftp related). No hard feelings.
I got back my licence money by working with ST many times, made my work a lot easier.
What I want to say, paying for licence does not mean you will have new versions for life, sometimes work stops, that is it.
All the best.
