Personally I love the Swiss army knife that come with Sublime Text, the possibility to play with a huge tool-set of possible customisations. The flexibility of the editor is remarkable, and the editor itself is really good looking. Lately I’ve been trying out the Soda theme, and it is really great looking. I like the search and replace functionality and multi selection features of the editor. I must admit as well that I am really impressed with the huge number of updates that are being pushed, and the involvement with the community from the developers. If the program should be priced based on the work put into it, the price tag should be gigantic. But then the developers wouldn’t really sell any copies.
My problem is that while I think it is a good overall editor, I can’t really find out which tool it replaces. I’d prefer an IDE for coding any day, these general purpose editor often presents interesting possibilities, but do not have the tight integration with any specific language than an IDE has. Code insight, debugging functionality, even language specific documentation, these are tools that really increase productivity.
Personally I’ve played around with ST2 for writing Latex documents (using the LatexTools plugin), I haven’t really found any Latex editors for windows I liked, I’ve tried Texniccenter and WinEdt but none of them really felt any good as editors. ST2 gives a good feeling when writing in it, it is unobtrusive in many ways and I like that. But again it has its problems, some of which I am sure are only there because the software is still in its beta phase. But some again seems to be fundamental design decisions.
I am not impressed with the spell checker, while it is a widely used spell checker, used in many other programs, it is not good for doing any serious writing. It catches some spelling mistakes, but is not capable of finding grammatical errors like say Word is. And while I’m not aware of any other Latex editor (at least for Windows) that has that possibility I still think it is a pity. Further more there doesn’t appear to be an option to change the colour of the misspelled words, making them hard to read on dark background colour themes.
The project support, is to put it mildly lacking, projects are close to not existing in the editor, and it is in no ways targeted towards team usage, which I often personally find relevant. Project files includes system specific settings, absolute paths, etc. A solution could be using relative paths, and separating system specific settings to a different file, like most other editors do.
These are some big concerns, especially the project file implementation. But having said all this I still like the editor, and even though I only use it for Latex out of lack of better alternative, I do think I will have a hard time letting go of it, and I will probably purchasing a license, whether these features find their way into the editor or not.
Valve did a survey once (you know the guys behind Steam, that they make lots and lots of money on), I can’t exactly remember when, and while searching the web before I couldn’t find a link to it, but again I didn’t search thoroughly in anyway so I’ll have a look later. What they tried to find out, was how a reduced price of a product influenced the sales of the product, and more importantly the overall money made on the product.
What they found out was that, the lower price was the more they sold, this is in itself not surprising, the surprising part is, that the total amount of money made on a product went up, when the price went down. There were simply that many more that bought the product. As far as I recall they didn’t discover any lower limit (other than the obvious free one of course ). Now Steam games, which they observed this behaviour on is of course different in many ways from a general text editor like Sublime Text, and the target audience is different. But it does provide an interesting point. The higher the price is, the more consideration it takes before buying a product.
Sublime text needs to adjust its price based on the alternatives, and as it is mentioned it is to be compared to text mate, so a price in that area is in my opinion fitting. But I think the price as it is, is fine, but in the upper limit of what I find acceptable for my use. If the price go up any further there will be other alternatives for most usages.