I’ve been trying out Sublime Text 4 for the past week or so. The speed, focus, and low resource utilization are fantastic. The speed and UI is probably better than any editor I’ve used, and it feels great.
In order for me personally to purchase a license, I think some extra polish on language features would be needed. I’m mostly looking for syntax highlighting, sensible code formatting, and maybe autocompletion in more languages would be appreciated. I work with a few that seem to rely on third party support from plugins- many of which have not been updated in some time.
As an example, I’ve been working with Dart lately, the main plugin for which seems to have been long abandoned and smaller alternatives are missing features. I tried an LSP plugin as a last resort, but bailed when I saw it needed manual configuration. I’ve gone through the song and dance of configuring LSP for Emacs & Vim in the past, but it was always buggy/quirky next to VS code which works more or less out of the box.
I started on updating a plugin I was using and adding light features that I was looking for, but it feels discouraging to be asked for a license while working on it. Maybe it’s worth considering offering non-commercial licenses to plugin contributors that fill in some of the gaps in functionality, if it isn’t worked on in-house? On the plus side, the updates to the API reference looks really good so no complaints there, I’ve enjoyed tinkering with it.
Overall, I’m definitely keeping my eye on the editor and hopeful to see it continue being updated and improved.