Sublime Forum

New User Clarification

#1

I am going to try out Sublime Text 3, but as I’m starting to, I want to ask a few questions:

  1. How many people are working on Sublime Text?
  2. Is there any differences between ST2 and ST3?
  3. Is there any differences between the trial version and the registered version?
  4. Any big differences from Notepad++?(Anything that would really affect work)

I couldn’t find this information easily, sorry about asking. If you do answer, though, I thank you.

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#2

There are two developers, @jps and @wbond that work on the core of Sublime itself. Besides the application, it also ships with a set of packages that provide syntax support for a variety of languages. That aspect is online on GitHub and open to pull requests from volunteers in the community working together, so in that case there are many people working on things.

Quite a few (too many to list :wink: ) but for a general overview ST3 is under active development but ST2 hasn’t been updated in years. Despite it being referred to as beta, it’s rock solid stable for production work (unless you’re using one of the development versions, and even then they are pretty stable as well) so I wouldn’t let that scare you away.

At this point the only real reason to use ST2 over ST3 is either because you absolutely require a package that doesn’t have support for ST3 or because you’re ultra paranoid of labels like “beta”. If you buy a license right now, you get access to both versions (including ST3 when it is “officially released”).

The only difference between the trial and the registered version is that every so often after you save a file you get a message dialog reminding you that if you like the program and find it useful, you should register it, and that the title bar and about box remind you that it’s unregistered.

Aside of that it’s 100% identical to the licensed version (no missing/reduced features).

This I can’t comment on, as I’ve never used it. This search on the forum pops up some presumably relevant material. The first hit in particular is probably the most in depth of them, at first blush.

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#3

I used Notepad++ for years and it is a very good sophisticated and fast Text Editor (even faster for large files then Sublime Text). But this doesn’t matter in the very most situations. Btw.: ST is still much faster than VS Code or Atom.

But in the end I found me no longer touching my Notepad++ for a while now. The legacy Windows like GUI can’t offer the features for a fast and efficient workflow Sublime Text or the other younger editors can do.

  • Command pallet to gain quick access to most functions with quick fuzzy search
  • Many many keybindings and shortcuts
  • Many functions that enable efficient workflow I not even dreamed of being possible
  • Multiple cursors to mention one big thing
  • Many packages which make it possible to customize Sublime Text heavily (even though it may take some effort to find a good set of packages)
  • Multi view layouts allow to display several documents side by side to compare things
  • The project sidebar works much better than all the approaches I found in Notepad++
  • All plugins are written with python, so no compiler or toolchain is required to start customizing
  • The new sublime-syntax system is easy to use (after some learning) and much more powerful than Notepad++'s user syntax system

The con is you’ll need some time and effort to learn about the sometimes hidden or not so obvious features in order to get the best out of Sublime Text.

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