Sublime Forum

**yellowbuck** · August 19, 2019, 8:05am

Yes they do great and bugs are always annoying.

**wbond** · August 19, 2019, 3:00pm

Alright, I would say this conversation has become unproductive.

Obviously different members of the community have differing opinions about what is an appropriate approach to communication and releases.

The part we don’t need to get into is the passive aggressive/aggressive behavior towards each other. I’m not going to address any of the back and forth so far, except to say that I would like the community generally to be respectful. Not related to this conversation, I’d also like it to be accessible by people of all ages, aka keep it PG-rated.

Please be aware that Jon and members of the engineering team (myself included) do frequent the forum. We do hear feedback and we do frequently talk about things brought up here and in Discord. Please don’t be afraid to leave feedback, even if it is critical, I just ask people to be respectful of each other in this process.

**josephtlyons** · August 24, 2019, 11:40pm

This comment may be a little OT, but it is related to all of this. I am also not very pleased with the lack of communication surrounding Sublime products. I never purchased or used ST more than a day or two, but I did purchase SM around 3 months ago (May). Since I’ve purchased it, I think it has had one update fixing some bugs, but other than that, I’ve not seen really any development on it.

Unfortunately, I’m no longer using Merge and am back to using GitHub Desktop. I couldn’t get past a few of the existing bugs. I never bothered to ask for my money back because I knew these bugs existed from when I was demoing the software and still decided to purchase, however, I never figured they would still exist 3 months later. Now, I’m starting to see a trend of things not being updated. Here is an annoying bug that was as reported in November of 2018.

I also wish they would ship more themes with the software for the price point. The examples of the dark UI of Merge on the website only show some of the diff colors used, but it fails to show some of the diff colors that are really hard to see for people with bad eyes. Others have complained about this too, but instead of the team offering some extra themes, we are told to make our own, which sort of sucks when you shell out 99 dollars for a Git client. But this is really beside the point…

The point is, having turnaround times this slow on software updates in 2019 is not really something I personally feel is acceptable. It seems every other text editor / Git client / developer tool is updated at least monthly these days. Since I purchased SM back in May:

GitHub Desktop has seen 8 updates
GitKraken has seen 7 updates
Fork has seen 4 updates

… just to name a few …

With the experience I’ve had with SM, I don’t really don’t think I’ll invest any more into Sublime’s products… and this is a shame because these are genuinely good products with good intentions, there just needs to be more developers added to the team to keep up with maintaining the software so that customers don’t feel cheated.

… or maybe I’m the only one who feels this way and I’m way out of line.

**jfcherng** · August 24, 2019, 4:31pm

I actually hate tiny bugs in ST which are not fixed for quite a long time such as 2 years since they have been reported. A recent one that I met is https://github.com/facelessuser/ColorHelper/issues/125. Of course I can workaround it, but it should be a “temporary solution” and ST team should fix that instead.

**ntenney** · August 30, 2019, 9:10pm

OK, I read that issue, and this is completely off-topic, but you have me curious. What is a phantom and why are you injecting them into object properties? I may be totally ignorant, but I have never heard that term before.

**jfcherng** · August 30, 2019, 9:24pm

Phantom is those orange boxes in the following screenshot. They can be other thing than a box looking but since they are inline, its space is limited so usually is designed to have a box looking. Phantoms can be under specific line as well which is usually used to show error message during building.

Phantoms also can be clickable for performing custom functionalities. In the above screenshot, the color box from ColorHelper allows you to adjust the color. The 3rd box is from my OpenUri which allows you to open the URI (usually URL) directly by clicking the phantom.

What is a phantom and why are you injecting them into object properties?

I am a little bit out of context. What does this mean?

**OdatNurd** · August 30, 2019, 9:32pm

A phantom is a small, embedded chunk of HTML inserted into a document either inline with text or on the line below it; they allow a subset of HTML called minihtml and are used for a variety of purposes.

The prime example would be inline error messages, which Sublime uses to visualize errors in your document at the point where the error occurs.

In the case of @jfcherng they’re in object properties to help visualize those properties (in this case to show you visually what the color associated with the property is showing). Other packages use them for other reasons; basically any time you want to annotate something in a document in a way that doesn’t physically modify the content of the file.

**nutjob2** · August 31, 2019, 5:30pm

This is what we should be agitating for. I understand new features and more fun to work on and help sell the product, but if the bugs are left to fester for years it alienates your existing users.

Maybe ST should release some of the source code without a license thus allowing people fix the bugs that annoy them but not allowing them to redistribute in any way. Food for thought perhaps, @wbond ?

**ferb** · September 1, 2019, 1:38am

Where download st4?

**facelessuser** · September 1, 2019, 2:04am

There is no ST 4. This is just a thread talking about the hypothetical ST 4 that doesn’t currently exist.

**ferb** · September 1, 2019, 2:07am

okay!!

**iamntz** · September 1, 2019, 11:49am

50 comments to play the open source card. A bit disapointed tbh, I was expecting this to be in top 10.

**ihodev** · September 1, 2019, 12:33pm

I think that @jps should skip 4 version or remove the version at all

**FichteFoll** · September 1, 2019, 2:26pm

Then they’d need to employ a legal team to deal with license infringements because these will happen. You also won’t be able to undelete any previously released source code, so this is a huge investment. Furthermore, administering a semi-open source base needs resources for reviewing contributions. It’s hard to say whether this would have a net-positive impact.

**nutjob2** · September 1, 2019, 3:25pm

Fair enough, it wasn’t exactly a carefully thought out, concrete proposal, but the general idea I think has some value.

For instance, arguably the best part of ST is its rendering engine and some other core elements. If you open source things around it (which are the home of the majority of bugs) you may increase the value of ST while lowering maintenance costs. Other editors adopting certain code can make it “standard” and create a broader ecosystem. So you keep your competitive advantage and farm out the other stuff that implements functionality that every editor has. This is a short step from the existing situation with user packages.

Just to be clear for those people who think I’m advocating open sourcing ST: I’m not, I’ve argued elsewhere that that is a stupid idea and ST should be commercial until it’s owner think otherwise. But a hybrid approach can work well for a small team like ST.

**nutjob2** · September 1, 2019, 3:31pm

My idea wasn’t “open source” but rather “source provided” like the Default package that you can find in ST right now: you have the source and you can modify it, but you have no rights to distribute it.

**wbond** · September 4, 2019, 3:44pm

In general I try to strike a balance of fixing paper cuts and new features. I often look at the most commented and “reacted” issues on the official issue tracker as a starting point and work from there.

In terms of the paper cuts, there are a few primary reasons more of those aren’t fixed more quickly:

Different paper cuts affect different users – if the paper cuts that affect you don’t get fixed, you notice them a lot more than those that do
Sometimes fixing a paper cut breaks backwards compatibility. For minor version releases, we generally work fairly hard to make sure we don’t break things for users.
Quite often paper cuts take significantly more work, proportionally, to fix that the effort used to work around them. A one or two line fix is pretty much never the extent of what needs to be done. There are pretty much always knock-on effects that require a bunch of testing or tweaks to other parts of the application or ecosystem. Many times I’ve gone to fix a minor issue and realized it would take two days or work and significant-enough changes that would likely cause bugs in another area.

In terms of releasing source code, I very much doubt that would do anything useful. Even when users have submitted bug fixes to code that is 100% available (the plugin loading Python) we’ve hit significant bugs as a result of patches provided. That is even after me giving it a sanity check and testing it locally.

Sublime Text is a fairly significant C++ codebase with the vast majority being in-house code and a GN-based cross-platform build system. To provide enough source code that it would be possible to fix bugs would likely require almost 100% of the source code be available, and then there is all of the work of trying to support (aka on-board) new developers. Beyond that, many bugs fixes require decisions about how the code and functionality should change, which definitely requires comparing against the product vision and direction.

**facelessuser** · September 4, 2019, 7:51pm

While I guess the paper cut line is attributed to me, and while there are a number of issues that I really wish would get fixed, I do want to say that Sublime is still, in my opinion, the best editor.

It was more a grumbling on my repo about some of the little things that add up. The intention wasn’t to stir up anything here, though I’m glad to see some insight into how the issue are handled. Thanks @wbond!

**wbond** · September 4, 2019, 8:06pm

No, it wasn’t specifically, just some info I thought would be helpful based on the specific ping by @nutjob2.

I very much enjoy fixing “paper cuts” since they add to the polish of the product, but they do tend to take a bunch of time, and sometimes there isn’t a reasonable fix.

Overall I think we’ve made some good progress over the past 4 years (wow time flies!), but there is always plenty more to do.

**gj1118** · September 5, 2019, 12:24am

There are few bugs/features that a lot of user have requested. Some of many bugs that many people have requested are

Ability to change sidebar location (right now its on the left hand side)
Ability to show a user icon on the tab bar
Internally LSP support (this is the reason of my post ) .

Sublime v4