Wow, it’s hard to believe this discussion started way back in 2019! Now here it is 2021 and there still hasn’t been any public announcement about Sublime Text 4. I’ve been a Sublime Text license-holder for almost 10 years, but until a few weeks ago, when I stumbled across it completely by accident because I saw it mentioned in the comments of an open-source theme repo, I had no idea that ST 4 even existed.
I used the Sublime Text 2 Beta for a while in “free” mode, then purchased a license in May 2012 while it was still in beta. During the beta period there were regular updates, and I expected that to continue, but it unexpectedly reached official release just a few days later and has only received 2 minor bug-fix updates after that. When Sublime Text 3 was finally released, I wasn’t eligible for any upgrade discount because my ST 2 license was too old.
I stuck with ST 2 for quite a few years, but finally purchased a Sublime Text 3 license in April 2019 along with a license to Sublime Merge. In the year-and-a-half since, ST 3 has only received one minor bugfix update.
Now they’ve announced that ST 4 will be licensed based on the same 3-year maintenance period as Sublime Merge. I think it’s great that they are extending this to current ST 3 license holders, but it starts from the purchase date of your ST 3 license and 3 years in the Sublime Text world doesn’t get you much. It was over 4 years between the last bugfix update for ST 2 and the official release of ST 3, and it has now been almost 2 years since the last feature update to ST 3. If you purchased ST 3 when it was first released, or worse, during its 4.5 year beta period, your 3 years expired a long time ago. There is still no indication that ST 4 will be released anytime soon, and if it stays in beta for as long as ST 3 did then even my year-and-a-half-old license might not be enough to cover the ST 4 upgrade.
I understand that someone who just purchased a license would be extremely upset if a new version was released a week later and they had to pay to update, but they made a purchase decision based on the currently-available features just like the rest of us. So, it’s a little frustrating that the people who purchased licenses months or years ago are the ones that helped fund these extended development cycles, but are also the ones least likely to get any special consideration when an upgrade is finally released. If someone purchased ST 3 a year ago then they bought the exact same piece of software as someone who purchases it today, literally the same bits, with the same features and the same bugs and the same rights to use it for as long as they want. I don’t see how you could say that that person has already received more value-add over their original purchase than the recent buyer.
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. But saying Vim user base isn’t huge, is probably not completely fair, but there is no huge vim surge either. In my line of work, I don’t see a lot of people using vim, but there are some older people that have been using it for years, and a sprinkling of maybe younger people. Additionally, it depends on what we mean by uses vim. Do I use vim sometimes? Yes. Is it my primary editor? No. Sometimes I use it because it is convenient to do so.