Sublime Forum

ST still alive?

#49

This has been my favorite editor by far, but frankly the lack of communication, especially to those of us who have paid a (in my opinion) significant amount for a text editor, is completely unacceptable. As of the time of writing jps has still not been online since Jan 29th and the last release was in mid-December. I wouldn’t even mind it so much if there were dev builds being sent out as an indicator of active work, but there hasn’t been – for a long time. It seems as if the entire thing has been given up on.

I understand if he doesn’t want to continue development. People get burned out and want to move on which is one of the unfortunate side effects of being the sole developer on a paid-for product model. But it means he needs to either give it to someone else to continue development (with the current Sublime Text fan base I’m sure there are a lot of companies that would be willing to take it on) or minimally to say “sorry, I’m done” instead of leaving everyone hanging. It’s a shame that such a great editor is meeting such a terrible end.

Not that ranting and complaining is going to do any good, but as someone who has paid for and invested a lot of time into this editor I feel I should voice my opinion.

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#50

I’m in exactly the same position, the lack of communication is precisely the downfall of sublime text. Spending at least a few hours a week on the forum is completely reasonable.

Jon, please keep your promise and open source sublime text. Everyone has spent so much time adjusting to sublime text, moving onto a new text editor is a huge investment, so you’re doing everyone a favor.

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#51

It’s rather premature to demand that. ST3 is in beta. Yes, things appear to have slowed down lately, but I’d be very surprised if the release version doesn’t arrive sometime this year.

I just hope that nothing bad has happened to jps or someone close to him that’s being made worse by all the online hostility.

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#52

I agree that all of this hostility will get you nothing. If I were in the position of the developer and I was getting this hostility it would likely make me less inclined to continue development or to contribute the source code to the public as it would be rewarding bad behavior. I see this kind of hostility directed at people who do Kickstarter campaigns all the time and frankly it erodes the community for the the product.

If you enjoy using Sublime Text please continue to use it and provide constructive feedback. Acting like the world has come to an end won’t benefit anybody. I have paid for more for a text editor I no longer use than I have paid for Sublime Text and I use it regularly.

The renewal fee for the other editor I was using up until I discovered Sublime Text 2 costs more in maintenance (90 USD) a year than the cost of Sublime Text full price. And because I haven’t kept up my maintenance of that product I’m obliged to buy the product again for $250 + $90 USD for the editor and to get back into the maintenance program.

Sublime Text has features that are extraordinary if not revolutionary and the price has been a steal.

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#53

Hostility, in any case, works both ways, treating a community with appalling uncertainty isn’t a passive-aggressive behavior? Yet, it only applies to communication, I feel, as community, we respect Jon very much, and we have a tremendous amount of patience towards him.

BTW, Asking for communication is not constructive feedback? If some people still can’t see why a road-map is sometimes critical…

Also, this thread exists because of Jon. Yes, he made his own very Joker. Ha.

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#54

[quote=“jbrooksuk”]See Atom.

People are saying (and hoping?) that GitHub has bought Sublime, but I doubt it.[/quote]

I’ve had a play with Atom, and the feeling I get while using it, although familiar in a lot of ways, is just not as refined as Sublime.

A prime example of this is the autocomplete, which offers dictionary words as well as stuff in the document. I’ll not be jumping ship any time soon.

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#55

[quote=“strongcode”]
I’m a new ST user and was very surprised by the negativity surrounding this amazing product.[/quote]

The negativity is more on the failure to communicate rather than on the product.

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#56

more live than ever, no words to express how fast and handy this editor is

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#57

I don’t really understand OS update concerns… what OS update has ever broken userspace software like a text editor? The only thing I can think of is when Apple moved from OS 9 to OS X, but even then they made a compatibility layer for the first like 10 years or whatever.

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#58

This isn’t a free product where he gets to make that kind of decision. We paid for this and not a trivial amount. If Jon was developing this on his own time and giving it away it would be one thing, but when you bring money into the matter it’s a whole other issue. When people are paying for your product, there is no difference between one person on his own and many people working for a larger software company from the perspective of customer service and development. Your customers are actively giving you money, which means that they get to say whatever they want, and you have to go on with development. I don’t understand how anyone can possibly justify forgiving him for any of this when if it were an “official” company there would be a complete uproar.

I also don’t understand why people think the ST3 release is coming out this year. There has been no development for months, not even dev builds (the last was December 2013). There is no indication that he intends to do any work whatsoever on this anymore. Which as I said before is not completely unreasonable; people get burned out, believe me I think we can all empathize with that. But it either needs to be handed off to someone else for development (open source or another company) or at least just say “this product is no longer under active development” instead of disappearing.

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#59

Sorry, but he does. There is nothing in the license agreement about continuous development or any kind of support. You buy it as it is and the developer has no obligation to fix any bug. Of course, that might alienate customers and you might not be happy about it but he has no legal obligation. He might even sale or discontinue the project. Just think about the all the companies that are bought and their service is discontinued (e.g. this email client google bought a couple of years ago). Luckily, the trial version is very generous so you can try as long as you want before investing. I got my license maybe a year ago (after a loooong trial) and I am very glad I did! ST is the best!

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#60

From the Sublime office: We are not selling to Github, we are not stopping development of Sublime. As noted by another poster, this is effectively a one man band (I’m here to answer sales questions, process your refunds and get the mail so Jon doesn’t have to). The past few months of silence on the development front have been a combination of boring back end work (taxes, new payment platform) as well as a break for the man driving this whole operation. No, we don’t currently have a loud internet presence, which is can be an understandable cause for concern-something we intend to address once we move into the production version of 3. There is a vision for continued growth and development, there is momentum behind Sublime Text; it is not dead, just slow.

I’m happy to field any specific questions you might have about the Sublime’s future: sales@sublimetext.com.

Cheers
Kari

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Re: Jon what is the future of Sublime Text?
Sublime Text wins the Net Awards 2014 — App of the year
Sublime Text 3 still in beta
What's happening
#61

That’s great to hear. I have saved literally hundreds of hours using the RegEx search and replace for a project I’m working on. Hundreds of changes I would have had to make by hand without the ability to do RegEx in the replacement text.

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#62

Now that we know Sublime is in fact alive, we can all get back to work :wink:.

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#63

[quote=“karisublime”]From the Sublime office: We are not selling to Github, we are not stopping development of Sublime. As noted by another poster, this is effectively a one man band (I’m here to answer sales questions, process your refunds and get the mail so Jon doesn’t have to). The past few months of silence on the development front have been a combination of boring back end work (taxes, new payment platform) as well as a break for the man driving this whole operation. No, we don’t currently have a loud internet presence, which is can be an understandable cause for concern-something we intend to address once we move into the production version of 3. There is a vision for continued growth and development, there is momentum behind Sublime Text; it is not dead, just slow.

I’m happy to field any specific questions you might have about the Sublime’s future: sales@sublimetext.com.

Cheers
Kari[/quote]

Thank you for the update Kari! It’s great to finally hear some official news. Periodic statements about the status of the project will go a long way with keeping the community happy and motivated to contribute. I fear that the lack of communication up to now has unfortunately driven some community members away and definitely demotivated some others…

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#64

Thanks Kari! This makes me happy to know. Once ST3 is in production mode and the vision of communication is realised can we please get the forum moved to a better solution? Or at least setup an email server to send mail?

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#65

I’ve regularly come back here just to check on the status of sublime text, and at first I was distressed over there being a lack of updates. But then over time I tried other editors, and am yet to find a replacement that performs as well as - and has the same flexibility via community extensions - as sublime does. The closest so far has been Brackets, which is still an order of magnitude behind when it comes to performance (OS X, retina). Then there is Atom, which hardly hits 30fps when scrolling through a document - even before code highlighting is finished.

I am still 100% happy with the latest nightly build of sublime text, and don’t see myself leaving for another editor unless it manages to get performance right (I’m honestly never sure a WebKit based editor will ever reach this) and implements multi-cursor etc. as thoroughly as ST3.

Would be nice to see a final release of ST3 so I can more easily recommend it to others; the fact the website is stuck in v2 mode is a bit disappointing.

Hoping for the best into the future. While the core app may not get updates, the community definitely isn’t dead (a huge thanks to all the awesome package authors out there).

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#66

Excellent. Thanks for the update! Personally I don’t care about a loud internet presence, just a little reassurance like that from time to time :smile:

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#67

Yes, finally some info. Thanks a lot Kari !!! :smiley:

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#68

[quote=“strongcode”]

You’re the kind of guy Microsoft loves. …[/quote]

I don’t know what any of this has to do with Microsoft. And I’m pretty sure that everything gregor.hoch said is correct.

Not that I’m any kind of authority on the matter.

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