Sublime Forum

**k335845** · December 18, 2016, 10:02pm

Hi there,
Thanks for creating such a handy textEditor.
I’m about buying a license, just wonder if you know the date of releasing Sublime 4?
I’ve read that when I buy license for Sublime3 I wouldn’t get a free upgrade to Sublime4.
Kind regards
Mike

**math2001** · December 18, 2016, 10:05pm

Sublime text 3 isn’t out of beta (nearly though), so it’s going to be a bit hard for John to tell when ST4 is going to be released…

**OdatNurd** · December 19, 2016, 12:15am

Only the Jon and Will know for sure when (or if) Sublime version 4 will be launched, so anything we say in this thread is pure speculation unless someone can cite a credible source. I myself have only really followed Sublime since early April of this year, so I’m by no means an expert or long-standing user.

With that said, from the Sublime Text Blog, this timeline is available:

Sublime Text 2 was released on June 26, 2012
The first beta of Sublime Text 3 was released January 29, 2013, almost 7 months later, and was available to registered users only.
The first Public beta of Sublime Text 3 was released on June 28, 2013, about 6 months after that.
September 22, 2016 it is mentioned that “Sublime Text 3 is almost ready to graduate out of beta, and into a 3.0 version”

So, if history holds (and again we have no way of knowing if it will or not) even if version 3 was released tomorrow it could still be months or a year before a beta version of 4 is available, and even then it could be available only for registered users.

The Sales FAQ does mention that “Future major versions, such as Sublime Text 4, will be a paid upgrade” and “Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4” (emphasis mine).

So we can probably safely presume that we will have to pay something less than a full purchase price for the upgrade when it happens, since that’s usually how that works. Anecdotal evidence in the post that announced the first beta version for Sublime 3.0 appears to be that the upgrade price is less than half the price of a full new version.

My own advice would be that if you find Sublime Text 3 useful to you to the point that you’re actively thinking of buying a license, I wouldn’t let the potential possible release of an unannounced new version slow you down. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen months from now, and that’s months of time that you could have been happily using your license.

I realize that this advice isn’t for everyone, though, especially if the cost of the license is hard to swing. I hate posts like this that gloss over how not everyone can afford the tools that they want to.

All I can say is that for myself personally, I used the trial version of Sublime 3 for less than a week before buying a license and in the intervening months I have not regretted that decision once. If version 4 was available tomorrow and there was no upgrade and I had to pay full cost, I would gladly do so (after checking out the new version first, of course ;)).

**kingkeith** · December 19, 2016, 4:16am

in addition to @OdatNurd’s excellent response, the other thing to note is that, quite often, people that buy a product within a year of a major upgrade are able to upgrade for free anyway. Of course, it’s not clear if that will apply here or not though.

**k335845** · December 20, 2016, 7:09pm

@OdatNurd math2001 and kingkeith Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I’ve made the choice, since it’s the best text editor in the market and helped me a lot in my job.
Best wishes and a Marry Christmas to you all

**jankosevic** · December 21, 2016, 10:04am

Sublime Text 3 is good as it gets. I wonder what a future version 4 could offer? Is there a list of upcoming features?

**nblackburn** · December 22, 2016, 3:37pm

v3 isn’t even released yet so i would wait for that before hoping for a v4.

**dholshouser** · January 2, 2018, 4:24pm

Bump.
It’s been a year since the last post and Sublime Text 4 is still listed to require an upgrade fee.
The licensing FAQ says Sublime Text 4 will require an upgrade fee.

Users at my company are requesting licenses, but if 4 is expected in any reasonable schedule, then they should wait until then to purchase. If the sales page continues to advertise version 4, there needs to be some kind of schedule posted so we can appropriately coordinate purchases. If it is not expected anytime soon, let us know or say so in the sales FAQ.

Otherwise, it seems to me, potential customers will hold-off purchasing a license which will reduce your cash flow.
Please update the sales_faq with either a schedule or some other note to say it’s safe to purchase now and not hold-off any longer.

**wbond** · January 2, 2018, 5:10pm

We are currently working on Sublime Text 3.1, not 4.0. We have not begun work on 4.0 yet. The licensing FAQ references the (theoretical) 4.0 so that you understand that licenses are required for major version upgrades.

**frou** · January 3, 2018, 10:20pm

Integrated debugging UI with API to be pluggable for multiple languages

**tadeouy** · March 8, 2018, 6:44pm

Thanks for making this incredible tool!
To me it could be great to see an improved status bar format capabilities. Currently it’s difficult to parse important information when several plugins post data there.
Is there a feature request place?
Thanks!

**jahcardenas** · March 10, 2018, 9:51pm

Hello,

I code for oracle databases but when I discovered Sublime Text 3, I decided to code on it and then compile with sqlplus.

I would love to be able to compile my pl/sql code directly in Sublime Text!

Thank you a lot for such great job youve done guys!

**OdatNurd** · March 11, 2018, 3:49am

Isn’t sqlplus a command line tool that can send queries to the database directly? If so you should be able to create a simple build system that uses it to run your queries for you. I do the same thing all the time (though using SQL Server and not Oracle).

**ThomSmith** · March 11, 2018, 6:34am

I wrote one for Oracle using sqlplus, but there were weird race conditions in sqlplus. It worked the first time, but you couldn’t reliably maintain an interactive session. I didn’t feel like wrangling the necessary bureaucracy to file a bug report, so I posted on Oracle’s free-as-in-beer forums, where the problem was ignored.

**kylebebak** · January 5, 2019, 5:33pm

This thread seems to have morphed into “what we’d like to see in ST4”, so here goes.

I like writing ST plugins. ST3’s plugin API is amazing, and covers nearly every use case I’ve thrown at it.

Package Control is awesome, but it has some big limitations. One is that ST runs Python 3.3, because in the larger Python ecosystem Python 3.3 is basically dead.

The other is that plugin_host is a single Python environment, which makes sensible dependency management very difficult.

Currently, plugin developers have to maintain their own deps, either in their own repos or as vendored code. Different plugins can’t depend of different versions of a package. If you’re relying on Package Control to install deps, dependencies of dependencies aren’t supported.

If we could use requirements.txt and pip to manage plugin dependencies, the way VS Code lets each extension use its own package.json to manage its deps with npm, ST’s plugins could be a lot more powerful, and a lot easier to develop.

ST’s core functionality is super awesome and super performant. But writing plugins isn’t as great. IMO upgrading the Python version and improving Package Control dep handling are the most important changes for ST4.

**AmjadHD** · December 7, 2018, 8:04pm

actually, i think the embedded python should be updated more frequently, and not only for major versions so that ST can benefit from python porting mechanism, wich means less incomatibilities and better code.

Sublime 4, wonder when?