What's happening

[aparajita]

As someone who has spent a lot of time writing and maintaing open source projects, I can say unequivocally that open sourcing ST will not magically help. Open source software only succeeds on a large scale when there is consistent funding behind it. Why? Because someone has to pay for the time it takes even to review pull requests, deal with bug reports, etc. And without some kind of funding, that someone ends up being the repo maintainers. Ask yourself how long you would be willing to put in 5-10 hours per week for free.

Even if the code base is open sourced, how many qualified C++ programmers are there out there in the ST community who are willing to spend lots of their free time over an extended period of time to work on ST? And you would need people who know the native toolkits of OS X, Linux and Windows. This is not a trivial thing that is being proposed. After an initial spurt of enthusiasm, ST is just as likely to be abandoned or progress at a slow pace as open source.

[hansifer]

Agree 100% with aparajita.

People get religious about open vs closed source yet tend to have very little understanding of the real costs and benefits of either approach. Ultimately, with projects like this the dev is the only person qualified to make the call.

[mlepage]

So what is the current state? Is there something holding up v3? Is there a roadblock or malaise? It’s summer 2014, when will v3 be out? By xmas? In 2015?

[macjohnmcc]

[quote=“jps”]Hello,

Due in no small part to this, I’ve been putting very sporadic hours into Sublime Text. At this stage, I’m not sure what it’s future is. The two paths are to either get over the hump, and get it done with the new UI, or to officially stop development work, and release the code as is as open source.

Jon[/quote]

While I’m sure that many would welcome the project as open source that we really feel a lot better with something official even if we have to wait. Look at how well TextMate has done since it went open source. (hint: not well) The developer went through a similar problem with development and couldn’t get over the hump to release a new version everybody was waiting so patiently for. Perhaps instead of going completely open source you could move some of the functionality out of the main project into some kind of plugin system and then let others contribute to those external components while you focus on the core functionality.

I can imagine that this is a rather complicated project and that maintaining it yourself is a big challenge.

Sublime has saved me countless hours during the past months and it would be ashame if it were to wither and die.

Thank you for the product and I hope you will find the motivation to get over the hump and find joy in the development.

[GrantSP]

While I am not an open-source zealot, more of a open-source novice (using the religious meaning that is), if the Sublime Text project is now under a malaise there is no reason to not open source it.

The arguments above are valid, the time involved to oversee the code pull requests would be a big ask, but is it any more than trying to maintain the project yourself?
Let some other coders in but maintain the last say in what goes into it.

About the whole open-source argument, there is a sort of middle ground that could be taken. There is already a huge number of coders that have developed plugins, and not received any monetary gain for their efforts. Would they not be more than likely to give help to the codebase if necessary? Jon would still maintain the rights but not have as much strain upon him and IF coders wanted to help they could, with no constraints placed on anyone to meet any perceived goals. How could it be anymore slower than it is now?

Also on a lighter note, it isn’t the summer of 2014, it is the winter here in Australia, land of SublimeText.

[wbond]

Please read the thread in full and note all of the dates. Someone resurrected this thread from 2009 that was written before Sublime Text X (later Sublime Text 2) was even announced.

The most recent update from Sublime HQ Pty is at ST still alive?. As it says, feel free to contact sales@sublimetext.com for any related questions.

[excalibur1976]

For me ST 3 already works really fine.

[ntenney]

[quote=“koink”]

For me ST 3 already works really fine.

I think that misses the point of the concerns people raise about lack of development and communication. It’s about the time invested in workflow/writing plugins for a potentially dead end.[/quote]

No, it gets exactly to the heart of that point. I use Sublime every single day for hours every day. For me, it has already paid for itself multiple times over. I am getting my moneys worth and then some with Sublime EXACTLY as it is today, without any additional features or a future road map. If Jon never released another version of Sublime, I’d be sad, but it wouldn’t stop me from getting value from Sublime in the future. If Sublime fits into your work flow now, why worry about when the next release will come out? If it doesn’t then you should probably keep looking for something that will.

[pete340]

[quote=“ntenney”]

For me ST 3 already works really fine.

I think that misses the point of the concerns people raise about lack of development and communication. It’s about the time invested in workflow/writing plugins for a potentially dead end.

No, it gets exactly to the heart of that point. I use Sublime every single day for hours every day. For me, it has already paid for itself multiple times over. I am getting my moneys worth and then some with Sublime EXACTLY as it is today, without any additional features or a future road map. If Jon never released another version of Sublime, I’d be sad, but it wouldn’t stop me from getting value from Sublime in the future. If Sublime fits into your work flow now, why worry about when the next release will come out? If it doesn’t then you should probably keep looking for something that will.[/quote]

The logic is that it’s better to suffer the pain of switching now than risk the possibility of that pain in the future. Go figure…

[fburleigh]

So each time this discussion recurs we get good restatements of the two or three points of view you could have about this. In general, I’ve held to the view that current ST3 bits work well for me, so I use them. I do notice the disinterest of the company that continues to take money for the software, but opt not to fret much, since the malaise doesn’t have an operational cost.

Until today.

I’ve been doing more work with Ruby, and I wanted an REPL to exec code from the editor. wuub’s SublimeREPL might do that. Trouble is, it doesn’t quite work in my environment – throws “issues.” It’s not really right to bug the author, who clearly tells us not to expect new work on his extensions until Sublime HQ clarifies ST’s future.

I also use some paid extensions. And notice that they, too, are not advancing. They work now, but the time will come when the environment they assume changes. I fear they won’t have much incentive to adjust.

Extensibility is one of the editor’s great characteristics. But without stable and active core bits, the ecosystem surrounding that core will surely degrade.

[macula]

I very much hope actually that the bloke is not seriously ill, or in some other similar kind of acute distress, because this is the only event that could perhaps justify such a deafening and longstanding silence. And if, alas, this dreadful scenario were to be true, I would be the first to be regretful for expressing my exasperation on this forum.

It is difficult to imagine such a disappearance to be the result of indifference, mere indecisiveness, or strategy…

[mrogur]

In my opinion ST is dead. There is a lot of months from last release. I bought ST3 for 70$ last year march i suppose. I started even write IdeTools plugin for transform text editor to fully functional IDE. I hope Jon is alive and SublimeText story will continue to the happy end,

[ntenney]

The discussion is about new users… get a clue, a’it?

No need to get testy.

I was talking about new users. Once the software is purchased, if it works for what it was originally purchased for, then whether or not there is future development on the software is beside the point. Look at George R.R. Martin. He still writes on a wordstar word processor. He hasn’t updated to a newer one because he’s used to wordstar, and it fits his workflow. It doesn’t matter that word has far more features than wordstar, or that wordstar doesn’t even exist as a company any more. At the point where he bought wordstar, companies didn’t tell users crap about update schedules, or future development. That didn’t matter in his purchase. Wordstar did what he wanted it to do RIGHT THEN. So, my comment about purchasing if it meets your workflow now applies to new users, or to users that have used Sublime for years. If it’s not meeting your needs, move on to something else, but don’t base your purchase on what some software says it will deliver 6 months from now. If you do, you’ll be screwed when they decide feature X is too much effort and it gets dropped. When I buy software, I buy it on the premise that it meets my needs now, not in some future release.

[Xandrix]

I just purchased the software today. I didn’t have to, but I did. I bought it because it work well and I like the key combos and plugins (among other things).

Ultimately, it does sadden me to come into the forums and find out the developer has been MIA for a while. But I tend to not care as the software is already pretty solid for my needs (which are coding efficiently…).

What the developer(s) have created is pretty nice as it is. Hopefully they return and the community doesn’t die off.

[randy3k]

I was thinking to switch to atom…but it is way slow to be my daily editor. I really hope that Sublime will continue developing in my heart. There is no good replacement for Sublime (so far).

[henkbb]

I was talking about new users. Once the software is purchased, if it works for what it was originally purchased for, then whether or not there is future development on the software is beside the point. Look at George R.R. Martin. He still writes on a wordstar word processor. He hasn’t updated to a newer one because he’s used to wordstar, and it fits his workflow. It doesn’t matter that word has far more features than wordstar, or that wordstar doesn’t even exist as a company any more. At the point where he bought wordstar, companies didn’t tell users crap about update schedules, or future development. That didn’t matter in his purchase. Wordstar did what he wanted it to do RIGHT THEN. So, my comment about purchasing if it meets your workflow now applies to new users, or to users that have used Sublime for years. If it’s not meeting your needs, move on to something else, but don’t base your purchase on what some software says it will deliver 6 months from now. If you do, you’ll be screwed when they decide feature X is too much effort and it gets dropped. When I buy software, I buy it on the premise that it meets my needs now, not in some future release.

That’s exactly how i feel, 1+ for that.

Looks like “koink” is someone involved with another editor (ATOM) who can’t stand Sublime is still the number one choice despite it’s low development pace.
I tried Atom and a lot others and they don’t even come close.
The last one i tried was Brackets and allthough it looks nice, it’s really really buggy.
They keep coming up with updates ( so in that respect it’s not dead) but it’s still buggy as hell.
Sublime, on the contrary, is a friend i can rely on and it does everything i need and fast.
There’s nothing, i can think of, i would like it to do which it can’t do right now especially with the large plugin base it has.

As said before: for me no editor comes close to Sublime and that should be the ONLY reason to switch to another editor… that it’s simply better.
That being said the whining about the “lack of output in terms of features and info” is nothing more than a troll’s game, which will only have the opposite effect.

[iamntz]

- Support a better plugin lang than python

This argument is wrong. Any language is better than another in some ways.
Python (and Ruby as well) have the advantage of being super easy for users that are totally new to that language (e.g. i was able to write some quick plugins whenever i needed one without fidling too much with the language per se, but with the API and i all my python experience was „yeah, i know there is a programming language called that way”).

However, some interesting reads:
sublimetext.com/blog/article … n-language
sublimetext.com/blog/article … ith-python

[iamntz]

Right, but as you may notice, the plugin language choice was made in a world that didn’t had Chrome, V8 or coffeescript.

I guess would be hard to switch at this moment…

Btw, indent it is NOT fixed nor decided by others. You simply need to keep it constant. That’s all.

[mrogur]

Is there any chance to hear something from Jon?

[oldwarhorse]

… time to invest time in an editor with a future.

So, does that mean you’ll STFU now and just go away?