Sublime Text 3 Beta

[davejones]

davejones, I’m not sure what kind of an answer you want from jps? You want him to support st2 with updates for more than 2 years and not do any work on new versions? Have you tried the dev builds of st2 to see if they fix the issues you’ve had? Are you expecting a single man dev shop to personally email you to answer your questions? If the numbers of registered users are even a 10th of the estimates I’ve seen people throw around on the forums, he could spend his entire day doing that and never actually getting any dev work done. I’m not a moderator here, so I have absolutely no power, but I have no problem stepping up and saying that I think you’re out of line. You are welcome to do whatever you want with your own money, but I think it’s a little unkind of you to continue to come into these forums and rag on JPS and Sublime Text. You’ve expressed your opinion, aired your grievances. Continuing to clutter these threads with your negative attitude smacks of trollishness.

You want him to support st2 with updates for more than 2 years and not do any work on new versions?

He works on the new ST and he’s made bug fixes to it already. Would it be such a big deal to offer a new stable version every 2-3 months with some of those bug fixes? It’d take 3-4 hours per month.

Have you tried the dev builds of st2 to see if they fix the issues you’ve had?

Yes, they don’t fix any issue I keep running into.

I’m not a moderator here, so I have absolutely no power, but I have no problem stepping up and saying that I think you’re out of line.

That’s for the best.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a bunch of people jumping in and saying it’s unreasonable to expect to receive any kind of update or support and that I should just use ST3. As in don’t expect anything from the developer, just use the latest experimental and unstable stuff.
That worked wonders last year with an even less experimental version of ST.

Please don’t bother to reply. I’m not going to reply again. Thank you.

[jbjornson]

It’d take 3-4 hours per month.

I thought you said that jps hadn’t responded to you!? Great news that he emailed you to inform you how much effort it would take him to make regression changes to the deprecated ST2 code base.

All sarcasm aside, none of us has any idea what effort jps puts in or how difficult and time consuming any given change would be to make. I agree that his communication skills leave something to be desired, but, as you have admitted, the editor is absolutely amazing. Significant progress is being made on the new ST3 branch and I look forward to the enhancements that will come.

[ntenney]

Well, I never said that you can’t expect updates for something you’ve paid for. I have just felt that I did get support on ST2. I have seen bugs that I’ve reported get fixed in the dev builds. It is probably fair to say that some peoples issues have not been resolved. Not to excuse st2, but that’s true of just about any software on the market, and I don’t think that sublime is unique in that regard. I also never felt like the st3 licensing was a money grab. In fact, I think that JPS has done a lot to try to make it affordable to those who have already supported sublime. If it was a money grab, he’d let st2 licensee’s purchase a st3 license now. I fact, I wanted to buy an upgrade license as soon as I saw that st3 was announced, but there’s currently no way to purchase an upgrade license from st2 to st3. As of right now, JPS is actively keeping me from giving him money.

[sublimesjaak]

hi,

finally a builtin goto symbol/definition feature… codeintel was a nightmare to me and it finally made me make a step back to netbeans.

is there a way to test/trial ST3? or this a WIP? before spending 70$?

i loved ST2, if this was working as intended i wouldve already moved over…

[whololo]

Where do I submit ST3 eventual bugs?

super+alt+down doesnt work for me unless i copy the line from the default config and add it to the user config

{ “keys”: “super+alt+down”], “command”: “goto_definition” }

Could it be because there is an additional line with f12 in the default config?

[skuroda]

[quote=“whololo”]Where do I submit ST3 eventual bugs?

super+alt+down doesnt work for me unless i copy the line from the default config and add it to the user config

{ “keys”: “super+alt+down”], “command”: “goto_definition” }

Could it be because there is an additional line with f12 in the default config?[/quote]

In the console enter “sublime.log_commands(True)” to see what is actually running. Alternatively, try using the FindKeyConflicts plugin if you do not want to use the console. One of the commands will display all of the commands tied to a particular key.

[whololo]

[quote=“skuroda”]
In the console enter “sublime.log_commands(True)” to see what is actually running. Alternatively, try using the FindKeyConflicts plugin if you do not want to use the console. One of the commands will display all of the commands tied to a particular key.[/quote]

Thanks for helping me out with the sublime.log_commands(True) command, didnt know about it. It was a plugin clash. Removed the plugin which I didnt use anyway.

Thanks!

[hansifer]

2 years of continuous updates is a massive amount

Agreed. I sympathize with this point, but the problem is that I didn’t pay $60 for programmer output. I paid $60 with a reasonable expectation of an eventually stable product. Therein lies my disappointment.

To finalize ST2 and call it good given its abundance of bugs, quirks, and inconsistencies is a questionable thing to do, IMO. This editor has so much promise with really awesome features, but ST2 in its final form is simply half-baked. I find I am constantly fighting it to do basic things (eg, html code folding is broken; brace matching doesn’t always work; ctrl+d sometimes uses whole-word matching, sometimes not, regardless of whether my initial search was a whole-word search; opening a project opens a redundant ST window in addition to the project; sometimes a paste replaces selected text, sometimes it doesn’t; Word Wrap setting doesn’t stick; many more…). I CAN’T be the only person who’s had this experience. I’m sure these issues will eventually get ironed out and ST will be a properly baked product, but I have low confidence that I won’t have to pay for a few more upgrades until that’s the case.

EDIT: forgot to mention one of my biggest peeves: undoing or redoing an edit does not always jump to the location of the edit so that you can actually SEE what was undone/redone. It’s infuriating.

[adzenith]

ctrl+d sometimes uses whole-word matching, sometimes not, regardless of whether my initial search was a whole-word search

When I read this, it blew my mind:

Quick Add Next (Ctrl or cmd + d) behavior

Quick Add Next has different behaviours depending on if the selection is empty or not when you first press it: if the selection is empty (i.e., just a caret), then it will expand the selection to the word, and only select whole words. If the selection is not empty when first used (e.g., you've already selected the 'c' in the above example), then it'll search by substring.

Maybe it will blow yours too.

[natebeaty]

[quote=“adzenith”]

ctrl+d sometimes uses whole-word matching, sometimes not, regardless of whether my initial search was a whole-word search

When I read this, it blew my mind:

Quick Add Next (Ctrl or cmd + d) behavior

Quick Add Next has different behaviours depending on if the selection is empty or not when you first press it: if the selection is empty (i.e., just a caret), then it will expand the selection to the word, and only select whole words. If the selection is not empty when first used (e.g., you've already selected the 'c' in the above example), then it'll search by substring.

Maybe it will blow yours too.[/quote]

I stumbled upon that behavior randomly, and use it all the time now (most often for changing just part of a variable name that appears in multiple places).

[hansifer]

[quote=“adzenith”]

ctrl+d sometimes uses whole-word matching, sometimes not, regardless of whether my initial search was a whole-word search

When I read this, it blew my mind:

Quick Add Next (Ctrl or cmd + d) behavior

Quick Add Next has different behaviours depending on if the selection is empty or not when you first press it: if the selection is empty (i.e., just a caret), then it will expand the selection to the word, and only select whole words. If the selection is not empty when first used (e.g., you've already selected the 'c' in the above example), then it'll search by substring.

Maybe it will blow yours too.[/quote]

Wow, OK that’s pretty clever. Thanks for this adzenith. My bad for assuming it was a bug.

IMO it could be even smarter, though, by assuming whole-word matching if the current selection is a selected word… just seems to make more sense and additionally avoids the highlighted vs. matched confusion. The editor is just so brilliant in so many ways that perhaps this makes me overly critical when things fall short of perfection.

[joel.neely]

Running ST3 on OSX 10.8.3, using my (paid) ST2 license.

The sidebar does not refresh to stay synched with the current directory (e.g. when files are deleted or added from a terminal window or as a result of running code). I never had this problem in ST2.

I have experienced this with multiple versions of the ST3 beta. This morning I went through the following procedure:

• I removed all copies of STx;
• I removed all Sublime Text* directories under ~/Library/Application Support; then
• I pulled down and installed a clean copy of the beta (3021).

After the above, I still have the symptom. I can force a refresh of the sidebar via Projects > Refresh Folders, but that’s getting tedious, so wanted to report this as a bug, along with my attempts to resolve thus far. Any suggestions (or fixes ) welcome!

[meno]

i am really disappointed too. ST2 was released july 2012. it does not matter how long the beta was as it was a BETA. we did not pay for the beta, we did pay for a working product and continious updates. ST3 features nothing that justifies being a major version that needs to be payed for.

by the way. to value of ST2 did drop a lot when announcing ST3. All new plugins and extensions etc will need to be ST3 compatible which might cause ST2 to have a limited set of plugins etc.

[gstimpy]

I am not sure where all of you guys got the assumption that you were buying a support contract with your purchase price.

The EULA clearly statues: “NO WARRANTIES: SUBLIME HQ PTY LTD expressly disclaims any warranty for SUBLIME TEXT, which is provided ‘as is’ without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including but not limited to any warranties of merchantability, non-infringement, or fitness of a particular purpose.”

That seems pretty clear to me. You are buying the present value of the software, not the future value.

[adzenith]

IMO it could be even smarter, though, by assuming whole-word matching if the current selection is a selected word… just seems to make more sense and additionally avoids the highlighted vs. matched confusion. The editor is just so brilliant in so many ways that perhaps this makes me overly critical when things fall short of perfection.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

[FichteFoll]

ST3 features nothing that justifies being a major version that needs to be payed for.

Read this idea:

[quote=“wbond”]I am committed to porting all of my stuff to ST3. Moving to Python 3 and bundling a consistent version of Python for each OS is a big step forward. There were so many things I have had to monkey patch for urllib2, ftp, etc. It is my opinion the only clear way to do with was make a new major version.

It would be a total nightmare to have a ST2 release update from Python 2 to Python 3. Everything would break for everyone. The idea of letting a user choose Python 2 or 3 would likely be a giant support headache (if even practically possible) that would prevent Jon from continuing to evolve the editor that we all find so useful. Not only that, but it would make it that much more confusing for developers to write plugins.[/quote]

It actually does make sense to separate Python 3 and Python 2 plugins with a major version jumps, see also semver.org/. I won’t comment on the price increase and the payed upgrade though.

by the way. to value of ST2 did drop a lot when announcing ST3. All new plugins and extensions etc will need to be ST3 compatible which might cause ST2 to have a limited set of plugins etc.

Agreed. And if your plugin is not able to support both ST2 and ST3 with the same code it makes implementing new features a pain because you need to add it to both branches.

[facelessuser]

Agreed. And if your plugin is not able to support both ST2 and ST3 with the same code it makes implementing new features a pain because you need to add it to both branches.

I for one don’t plan on supporting ST2 and ST3. I plan on leaving a stable ST2 branch for old plugins and only continuing support for ST3 moving forward. Though I may allow **others **to backport stuff to the ST2 branch, I personally will not be. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect developers who are doing plugins for free to keep back porting and and adding new features to old branches forever, not to mention constantly ensuring that a plugin runs well on ST2, ST3, ST4, STX, etc. Some may want to, but I do not. ST2 has a wealth of packages, and so it will not be hurting. All new plugins I may or may not develop, are going to be only ST3 compatible moving forward. I don’t have time for multiple versions of an editor, I develop for what I am currently using.

[lewisl]

I suppose Sublime Pty doesn’t need to take any responsibility for plugins.

I suppose no plugin developer needs to support any specific version of the editor.

There is an asymmetry here. Sublime is paid software. Sublime depends on plugins for critical, missing functionality (your mileage may vary on what is critical or missing). When Sublime does a new version, plugins may break. In the current ST2 to ST3 transition, some of the breakage is due to trivial but annoying differences between Python 2 and 3 (e.g., all print statements break). But, here is the asymmetry: the plugin authors are not paid and their work is open source. Either Sublime Pty takes responsibility for plugins or shares revenue so that plugin developers participate in the revenue they support. If not, users and the plugin developer community will abandon Sublime. It’s a nice editor, but we can get our work done with other editors with some level of dissatisfaction, but we’d find a way.

Some practical alternatives here:

• Sublime Pty shares revenue with certain plugin authors.
• Sublime Pty becomes a contributor to key plugin efforts and fixes many bugs that are Sublime Text infrastructure related (eg, the enabling API for plugins, not the specific functionality of various plugins)
• Sublime Pty “buys” (not clear what the price should be) certain plugins and takes full responsibility for them, thereafter.
• Sublime Pty sponsors a virtual “conference” to discuss the issues with any plugin developers willing to participate. Goal: devise a plan for upgrading plugins for ST3 with some ideas for future support

With ST2, I tried a lot of plugins that seemed pretty nice. But, with so many broken in ST3 I decided to back off and see what really mattered:

• Package Manager: really essential. works w/ ST3 but very confusing to see what is going on with the 2 different ways plugins can now be packaged. Needs to be fixed and agreed upon by Sublime Pty and Will Bond (who really deserves a some ST revenue. Without the package manager there would be no real ST plugin community. It is a requirement.)
• BracketHighlighter: works w/ ST3; nice improvements over the built in bracket highlighting
• SublimeLinter: currently broken; I consider this essential. I think the developer is a bit miffed by the complaints, but legitimately has to work his paid job.
• SSH: would like to have, but it’s not essential. While it’s a pain to manage local/server syncing with other utilities, there are plenty of ways to do it.
• Git: seems superficially appealing to make it “integrated” but unless that integration is REALLY thorough it is just dangerous to use something incomplete. One of Git Bash, Git Gui, or Tortoise will do the job outside of Sublime. You can even use git.exe via a Windows command shell. There are many clients for OS/x. It is safer to really learn the critical git commands and use them yourself. Unless a project becomes a mess that needs rebasing and other cleaning up, it’s a very small repertoire of commands. Conclude: live without a Git plugin.
• indent and other source code formatting: can live without
• Python shell beyond the console: would be nice but can live without (obviously it is not as easy to integrate the make/run environments for many other languages). After all, ST is an editor, not an IDE. Multi-languge IDEs have many issues of their own. (Well, if you want Eclipse, you know where you can get it…)

Obviously, other people’s preferences are different. Likely, only a very few plugins are really essential. I haven’t tried the various SSH plugins with ST3. That is probably critical especially since every serious competing programming editor has it natively or offers a working, reliable plugin.

Linting across a variety of languages is also essential.

There are a diverse array of nice-to-have plugins that are different for different users (that’s why they are nice to have… …and not essential). A plugin community is a nice thing to have. But, the Sublime Pty developer(s?) need to take responsibility for the few critical plugins that provide features required for ST to be competitive. There are different ways to achieve this, above.

It would be nice to see Jon Skinner reply.

[lewisl]

The Python build environment very usable as a way to run Python scripts from within ST. Works great for unit tests.

[anandsunku]

SublimeText with c++ aware code completion will make the ultimate. i don’t know, looks like people of sublime got kind of tired developing the whole software maybe, yeah it happens as time goes people get tired to develop things .

but just in case sublime text is with code completion for c++, i think it becomes the only editor for everybody, nothing can beat sublime text for its speed, simplicity and a developer with sublime is more than a super hero.

low power consumption, not a sluggish gui like eclipse or a bloated gui like visual studio. i spent almost 3 weeks to get used to sublime in a passive way, but without intellisense now i feel little cheated.

everything requires a wait !!!, sublime please make it better for c++.