Sublime Forum

Sublime Text 3 Roadmap

#1

Like a few other posters, I’m happy and relieved to see action in the world of Sublime Text. The new ST3 beta has some showcase features and should empower plugin developers to expand the featureset of the editor even further. The new Goto def / symbol features bring these useful IDE tools to Sublime across different languages and platforms: Nice. And as a programmer, I really appreciate the big work that’s gone on under the hood and recognise the benefits to ST in the long run.

But as a user, well, I’m a little underwhelmed at present. Why?

  1. Both the Ideas/FR forum here and sublime.userecho.com create a dialog with users and the latter in particular germinated some great ideas. So far, at least, such ideas seem to have been largely ignored.

  2. A number of bugs, annoyances and limitations have been posted by numerous users over time. It seems few of these have received attention. Somewhat ironically, in paying for a product, one can and should expect some form of basic support. So for instance, where Sublime Text is pitched as “a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose” it is reasonable to expect from purchase that a bug such as textwrap misbehaving with punctuation for plain text entry (fixed in ST3) should be addressed and released to paying ST2 customers. I don’t entirely accept the “try before buy” argument either, since such issues are not always apparent while you’re trying stuff out.

Reflecting over the history of ST2 (and I say this in hope) the author started a development cycle with a view to ongoing improvements and feature additions over time. Stable/final release signified, more or less, feature freeze; updates beyond this point were largely about fixing major or showstopper bugs. Ergo, we can expect more in ST3 before it goes final.

At the risk of suggesting the bleeding obvious, howabout a roadmap of planned features developments for ST3? It doesn’t need to be an essay, just an insight into the developer’s plans for broad areas of improvement to be addressed during the ST3 cycle. This addresses a lot of questions for potential buyers up-front, quells complaints and suppresses a great deal of “abandonware”-type noise.

For instance, my pet-wants as a user from Sublime are:

  1. No menu in distraction free mode under Linux
  2. Proper code-folding that uses .tmLanguage hints for foldpoints
  3. Macros that record everything, not just dumb keystrokes
  4. Virtual whitespace
  5. Proper block (and other) cursors, especially if (4) is implemented (Brief style behaviour)
  6. Sidebar API and related enhancements. Would facilitate the development of an intuitive FTP solution. SFTP is great, but I just want to be able to connect in and drill down my remote directories and remote edit files.

All of these have been discussed heavily on these forums and at userecho. Obviously the above list has items that range range in complexity but most competent developers can quickly establish the amount of work in a given problem domain, and I certainly don’t question the competence of the author! We don’t necessarily want an itemised list of specifics and weekly progress reports, but a summary of focus areas for ST3 as development progresses towards final so that potential buyers know what to expect.

Thoughts?

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#2

Good points all around, and just to say we are not being fair if you look at the st blog there is a post about st3 beta then one on the release of st2. Will this happen again, the author goes silent for 6 months then release a new version?

Anything done to improve communication would be awesome. Jon Skinner if you want some help I can gladly do it.

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#3

[quote=“qgates”]Like a few other posters, I’m happy and relieved to see action in the world of Sublime Text. The new ST3 beta has some showcase features and should empower plugin developers to do expand the featureset of the editor even further. The new Goto def / symbol features bring these useful IDE tools to Sublime across different languages and platforms: Nice. And as a programmer, I really appreciate the big work that’s gone on under the hood and recognise the benefits to ST in the long run.

But as a user, well, I’m a little underwhelmed at present. Why?

  1. Both the Ideas/FR forum here and sublime.userecho.com create a dialog with users and the latter in particular germinated some great ideas. So far, at least, such ideas seem to have been largely ignored.

  2. A number of bugs, annoyances and limitations have been posted by numerous users over time. It seems few of these have received attention. Somewhat ironically, in paying for a product, one can and should expect some form of basic support. So for instance, where Sublime Text is pitched as “a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose” it is reasonable to expect from purchase that a bug such as textwrap misbehaving with punctuation for plain text entry (fixed in ST3) should be addressed and released to paying ST2 customers. I don’t entirely accept the “try before buy” argument either, since such issues are not always apparent while you’re trying stuff out.

Reflecting over the history of ST2 (and I say this in hope) the author started a development cycle with a view to ongoing improvements and feature additions over time. Stable/final release signified, more or less, feature freeze; updates beyond this point were largely about fixing major or showstopper bugs. Ergo, we can expect more in ST3 before it goes final.

At the risk of suggesting the bleeding obvious, howabout a roadmap of planned features developments for ST3? It doesn’t need to be an essay, just an insight into the developer’s plans for broad areas of improvement to be addressed during the ST3 cycle. This addresses a lot of questions for potential buyers up-front, quells complaints and suppresses a great deal of “abandonware”-type noise.

For instance, my pet-wants as a user from Sublime are:

  1. No menu in distraction free mode under Linux
  2. Proper code-folding that uses .tmLanguage hints for foldpoints
  3. Macros that record everything, not just dumb keystrokes
  4. Virtual whitespace
  5. Proper block (and other) cursors, especially if (4) is implemented (Brief style behaviour)
  6. Sidebar API and related enhancements. Would facilitate the development of an intuitive FTP solution. SFTP is great, but I just want to be able to connect in and drill down my remote directories and remote edit files.

All of these have been discussed heavily on these forums and at userecho. Obviously the above list has items that range range in complexity but most competent developers can quickly establish the amount of work in a given problem domain, and I certainly don’t question the competence of the author! We don’t necessarily want an itemised list of specifics and weekly progress reports, but a summary of focus areas for ST3 as development progresses towards final so that potential buyers know what to expect.

Thoughts?[/quote]

++++
7. Tooltip API
8. Built in setting new tab mode (after current tab or last)
9. Built in feature of scroll multiple columns
10. improved projects manager

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#4

[quote=“qgates”]1. Both the Ideas/FR forum here and sublime.userecho.com create a dialog with users and the latter in particular germinated some great ideas. So far, at least, such ideas seem to have been largely ignored.

  1. A number of bugs, annoyances and limitations have been posted by numerous users over time. It seems few of these have received attention. Somewhat ironically, in paying for a product, one can and should expect some form of basic support. So for instance, where Sublime Text is pitched as “a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose” it is reasonable to expect from purchase that a bug such as textwrap misbehaving with punctuation for plain text entry (fixed in ST3) should be addressed and released to paying ST2 customers. I don’t entirely accept the “try before buy” argument either, since such issues are not always apparent while you’re trying stuff out.

At the risk of suggesting the bleeding obvious, howabout a roadmap of planned features developments for ST3? It doesn’t need to be an essay, just an insight into the developer’s plans for broad areas of improvement to be addressed during the ST3 cycle. This addresses a lot of questions for potential buyers up-front, quells complaints and suppresses a great deal of “abandonware”-type noise.

For instance, my pet-wants as a user from Sublime are:
2. Proper code-folding that uses .tmLanguage hints for foldpoints
4. Virtual whitespace
6. Sidebar API and related enhancements.[/quote]

Totally agree with 1. and 2. It almost seems like Jon was overwhelmed with the amount of discussions, feature requests, bugs etc. I mean, he has a forum to take care of, that userecho site with thousands of tickets, probably some emails, other important stuff and of course the code development itself. Not taking RL into account here. Maybe he just needs some people to take care of the community or the roadmap or something because as it is now I clearly have no idea where to address my concerns with the code base except the forum where it’s still a hit or likely miss. So, what I think of is an issue tracking system like userecho but better. Because firstly userecho does not hide already resolved tickets and secondly it does not have any grouping or labeling or tagging stuff. You divide tickets into “Bugs”, “Questions” and the like and that’s it. Maybe it does the job for collecting ideas and seeing how many people would appreciate that but nothing further. Hell, it even takes me a whole lot of time to keep myself up to date with the community’s discussions, how should Jon do that? I’d greatly welcome being able to help with this.

The roadmap has been somehow shadowed here but nothing was revealed.

The other 2. has been mentioned to be on the roadmap and certainly has a high amount of upvotes on userecho. I am sure that Jon is aware of the need of this.

  1. Virtual whitespacing was somehow implemented using the plugin API by some guy on userecho and it should be possible to completely do this from within a plugin, if the API behaves as I think it does.

  2. Sidebar things should be on the roadmap too, but I’m not sure where I read this.

[quote=“LONGMAN”]
7. Tooltip API
8. Built in setting new tab mode (after current tab or last)
9. Built in feature of scroll multiple columns
10. improved projects manager[/quote]

At first, please do not quote long posts if you do not refert to them.

Other than that, 7. is stated to be on the radar (iirc in the “Sublime Text 3 Beta” thread). 9. has been somehow implemented as a plugin (if you didn’t know that), otherwise useful when comparing stuff. I don’t get the other issues since you did not describe them enough.

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#5

[quote=“qgates”]
(rant deleted)

Thoughts?[/quote]

Jon’s a one-man shop. That’s why.

Want to affect change? Go build a non-shitty open source editor. If sublime is bought by Google, hopefully they’ll open source it so we all can add the goodies we want.

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#6

I honestly think there should be some formal way to report bug fixes and submit ideas for new features.

May we could crowd fund specific items on the roadmap and if there were enough interested people would be a great deal both for us and for Jon. I’d be glad to pay for features or specific bug fixes.

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#7

I can’t imagine Jon would relinquish his authority for some lousy $

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