ST3 Plans? What happened to all the activity last year?

[Sasha_Chernykh]

with a three person (two developer) company

@wbond,

1. Do I understand correctly that only you and @jps works in Sublime Text private code and get money for it?

2. You discussed to make Sublime Text open source? I understood that you are very very good programmers, but I think that 2 developers is small for such a large-scale project as Sublime Text. Other developers could accelerate the development process and fix issues.
   
   I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the Sublime Text can grow less intensively than [Atom] (https://github.com/atom/atom) and other open source text editors.

Thanks.

[wbond]

Do I understand correctly that only you and @jps works in Sublime Text private code and get money for it?

Yes, that is correct.

You discussed to make Sublime Text open source?

I can’t speak for Jon on this regard. However, imagine you spent more than ten years of your life coming up with a great product, building something unique and powerful, and making sacrifices along the way. Would you just give it all away and go find something else to make your living from?

Not to mention, running an open source project generally involves much different work than actually building a product.

[braver]

Not to mention, running an open source project generally involves much different work than actually building a product.

Also, it’s much more work than people generally think. Pretty much all successful open source projects are backed by large companies that are able to make the necessary investments to keep large teams afloat (lots of costs and no way to earn anything back). The Atom team for instance is pretty big and they spend a lot of time coordinating the community.

I’d say a focussed team of two developers is more likely to develop a great product than to manage a sprawling open source project with as many users as Sublime. Of course, you have to design well, keep the codebase small and be focussed. All of which are important anyway, and exponentially easier to do if there are fewer people involved.

This approach probably means Sublime has different goals and priorities than Emacs (extensibility), Atom (be even more extensible than Emacs), VS Code (tightly integrated Typescript development), TextMate (a proper editor for OSX) etc. Which is fine, because if they are doing those things, Sublime can be free to do something else. Maintaining feature parity with competitors is only one strategy, it’s not necessarily the smart thing to do. The fact that we’re even discussing this considering the editor landscape today, could tell you that it’s offering something that’s compelling all by itself.

[Chipotle]

I’d say a focussed team of two developers is more likely to develop a great product than to manage a sprawling open source project with as many users as Sublime.

TextMate is another interesting example here, in a sense—they’ve gone open source, and we don’t really hear much about them anymore. TM2 is still being actively developed, but it doesn’t really have a sense of being thriving. On the flip side, BBEdit is also being actively developed, and every major release brings some pretty cool stuff. (It vies with ST as my favorite editor, depending on the task at hand.)

Also, +1 for the shoutout to Acorn.

[Mana]

Sublime HQ isn’t going anywhere and we are continuing to work on making Sublime Text even better.

Super glad to hear this. I like ST3 a lot, but worried about it being abandoned due to the lack of blog posts and twitter comments – so I decided to check these forums. Your replies throughout this thread have been very, very encouraging to me!

[ionFreeman]

I’m a longtime TextEdit user. I started using Atom last year, and I’m dissatisfied with its responsiveness, so I installed Sublime Text 3 today. All of which is to say, I’m new here, so I apologize if this is a delicate question.

When do you all expect SublimeText 3 to come out of beta? What’s the outlook for GA?

[jnials]

Hmm… I won’t speak for the powers that be. But ST3 is pretty solid. My guess is it will come out of beta when Jon and Will decide it is ready. But there’s no reason not to commit now. You pay now you will still have access to the full version. I’m just waiting for upgrade pricing for ST2->ST3. But my ST2 key has worked throughout.

[jfcherng]

Sublime Text 3 “Beta” is stable enough in my opinion.

[bijan]

… I won’t speak for the powers that be. But ST3 is pretty solid. My guess is it will come out of beta when Jon and Will decide it is ready. But there’s no reason not to commit now. You pay now you will still have access to the full version. I’m just waiting for upgrade pricing for ST

https://www.sublimetext.com <= It’s not really beta any more. They just forgot to remove “Sublime Text 3 is currently in beta. The latest build is 3126.” from the download page. I guess it’s just there as an excuse to make changes whenever Jon wants.

[facelessuser]

It’s still beta. The official release will require an upgrade. That is why I still get away with using my old ST2 license on it. I’d argue that the beta builds are still pretty reliable though.

[braver]

I do get the feeling it’s close though, with the updated styling and everything. Stabilize it, update the website, and it might be ready to go.

[OdatNurd]

For what it’s worth, this blog post from back in 2011 says:

Traditionally, the Beta tag has been used on software to indicate
it’s feature complete, and is going through testing before the
final release. That’s not the case with the Sublime Text 2 Beta,
which is ready to use, but subject to change. New releases will be
coming out, and they’ll be adding new functionality and changing
how things work.

People use Sublime Text 2 every day to get real work done - if you
haven’t tried it yet, now is a great time.

Granted it’s talking about Sublime Text version 2 and not version 3, but given that the download page prominently talks about Sublime Text 3 and then says "Sublime Text 2 is also still available" you could take that to mean that the development practices probably remain the same.

At the very least, I consider myself a people (although opinions may vary ;)) and I’ve been using ST3 for 100% of my development work for the entire time I’ve been using it (both professional at my day job and my hobby work in my spare time), and it’s been rock solid for me.

[wbond]

When do you all expect SublimeText 3 to come out of beta? What’s the outlook for GA?

We don’t have a specific date, but a few things we want to accomplish in this dev cycle. Generally we don’t comment publicly on exactly what we are planning to work on. The priorities tend to change – sometimes based on complexity, impact on the users and what we think will contribute to a solid product. Sometimes we implement part of a feature and hold off on finishing it because something else needs to be implemented first for it to really work.

As others have mentioned, if you purchase a license now, it is a full Sublime Text 3 license.

[mwb1100]

The official release will require an upgrade.

If buy a license now (or already bought a license but after the ST3 beta began), you will not need to upgrade. At least that’s my understanding.

If you bought a license before the ST3 beta began then the ST2 license you have works for ST3 beta and dev builds, but you will need to upgrade after ST3 is ‘officially’ released. That upgrade will cost $30 ($11 for some few who bought shortly before the ST3 beta started).

See the following for details: https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/2013/02

[facelessuser]

Yes, my point is when the official release hits (and it is out of beta) “I” will need to buy an upgrade. I was not referring to people who bought one recently. I bought mine a good long while ago.

[jnials]

Yeah, that’s me too. I’m ready to pony up my $30 or so anytime.