Sublime Text 3 dev build 3128 released
sublimetext.com
sublimetext.com
Of course, it's up to the author himself to choose how he communicates, most likely the current method is working out just fine for him :). And the editor works very well, and the updates eventually return. Just saying that some occasional communication regarding the future of the project, or the current development model ("I spend half the year perpetually wasted in Ibiza, radio silence expected"), would be nice!
We don't, however, make blog posts or tweets saying "we're still working on the next build." However, whenever anyone asks on the forum (twitter, etc) I'll be happy to tell you we are still working on the next build! :-)
Yeah, it's the blog posts/tweets stuff that might be needed.
Because most devs don't bother checking the forums (much less irc).
In fact, and this is 100% true, I just spoke to a guy in the next office asked him enthusiastically "did you get the new ST update?", and he looked at me quizzically: apparently he still uses ST2 (which has bought 2 years ago or so) and didn't even know there was a ST3 out at all.
(which motivated me to post this thread on HN)
It is however "major" in features.
I used ST2 for years after everyone else was using ST3, before I realized that ST3 was basically what everyone else is using -- which I mostly only realized as more and more packages were available only for ST3 and not ST2.
I have no idea why the author still calls ST3 beta, but I am curious.
I also understand that time spent convincing people all over the internet that you're still working on the next build may be better spent... well, working on the next build :)! What I had in mind was more along the lines of "what's happening to Sublime Text in the long term", though that may not even be relevant.
Why not? I think it would definitely be in ST's best interest to be more engaged with the community. It's only natural for users to worry that ST will go the way of TM, and nipping those concerns in the bud seems to make eminent business sense.
I don't even really see the problem with the demand for new updates. If ST3 stopped now, it's still got an awesome set of plugins and it will remain an awesome editor.
I had one issue with a recent release, that was answered quickly via the Github and dealt with in a day or so. So I can verify that @wbond is true with what he says.
With ST we see slow but constant development, personally I don't care if the author is not a Twitter addict.
I think Chrome and Firefox has the right idea, with updates every 6 weeks.
Most commercial desktop software, and even web services like Gmail, go on for years on end without an update.
Browsers are always adding crap (like Firefox's nth cosmetic update), they should be stabler too. Once every 6 months or so at worst.
Yes, and I'm saying that's too long. I don't like waiting months or years for fixes or new features.
I also stated that this is my personal opinion. Not sure why people are downvoting.
Sublime seems to have a well-defined aim and to be resistant to feature creep. It's doing a good job of meeting that aim, so I'm happy with it only changing as needed to keep up with like, high DPI monitor support or other things that would actually make it unusable.
The approach, in my mind, has had mixed success, but has been a net positive overall. The biggest weakness is that it can be hard to maintain large architectural changes on a branch, which means there's still pressure to ship them in some form. (Though ideally with a configuration option to disable them by default.) Most things aren't like that, though, and for changes with a more controlled scope the six week cadence works very well.
I imagine the introduction of something like "Sublime Text distros" in package control, which would provide ST users something akin to the different Eclipse flavors (or the various .vimrc settings available online) could be quite useful. While the package control setup is already pretty straightforward, it is still rather confusing for new users that they have to manually install such a 'basic' feature (and Atom, for example, is much more polished in that regard).
If that confuses you, why bother trying to code at all?
I also consider the existence of http://docs.sublimetext.info a bad sign. The way I perceive this: At some point, an enthusiastic user was so fed up with the sub-par documentation that they decided to take matters into their own hands, and create a better documentation. But instead of working with the community, the Sublime project people/person just... did nothing? Was there any communication? I don't know. Why not provide the documentation on github and accept PRs? The Sublime project should push for docs.sublimetext.info to be merged into the official documentation.
Same with https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues. Why is the bug tracker "community run"? What does that even mean, considering the "community" can't fix any bugs? I absolutely cannot understand why the author of the software doesn't seem to participate at all in the bug tracker. Here's a quote from https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/594 (from 2014, so I don't know whether it is still true) > Unfortunately, the only thing I can say is it'll get fixed if Jon Skinner sees it as a big enough priority. Our intent in creating this unofficial Issues page was to have a curated place where known issues can be collected together and triaged, and he can use it as he sees fit to fix bugs in upcoming releases. Without a more direct feedback mechanism, this is the best we can do, at the moment.
What I'd also like to see is a road map for the future with regular (2-4 weeks) status updates.
Is there a lot that you think ST still needs? As long as bugs are fixed, I'm happy with the functionality of the software today. The software feels done to me.
IMHO, Sublime Text should fight feature creep.
Sounds like you want to reward PR over progress and development work. Writing PR and responding to the same questions over and over sucks time away from actual work.
If your point was that they don't respond to questions or are hard to reach, it would make more sense to me, but they seem very responsive.
The trend in software is definitely towards a lot of tooting one's own horn over substance. I don't think that's a good thing that we should be rewarding.
I'm exactly the opposite. I consider the license as compensation for work already done, I operate under the assumption that the vendor will have made enough to not care to work on it further.
Also packages are well separated from the Sublime releases so even in the case that there isn't another update, the ecosystem is still active. That said, I do wish the internal Python for plugins would receive a version bump though.
I've already bought my ST2 and ST3 licences and honestly just looking for a way to pay more if it would ensure continuity.
There's an official docs site as well now that's actually pretty good. I haven't referenced the unofficial docs in some time.
> The following pages contain the official documentation for Sublime Text 3. The Sublime Text Unofficial Documentation is an excellent supplementary resource, with a huge amount of information not covered in the official documentation.
I just exported a text file that looked like this:
Col1 title|Col2 title|Col3 title|...
1||asdf|...
Col1 title: 1
Col2 title:
Col3 title: asdf
...
But... am I the only person who wants a minimal editor like Sublime, plus an inline debugger? Debugging where you edit code is one of those super-features that I really don't understand why people prefer not to have it.
Ideally it would be something generic and lightweight, with the ability to extend via plugins. The debugging plugins I've used so far just don't cut it though - if I can't click on a line number to add a breakpoint, it isn't good enough.
I've never used vscode, but this makes me wonder how small a file has to be for vscode to manipulate it quickly.
The link to this SO question was purple when I Googled this just now: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/908575/how-to-edit-multi-...
In retrospect, I do remember also messing around with disabling syntax highlighting and splitting the file up into more manageable chunks that I loaded into separate buffers.
For my purposes, I was trying to delete certain portions of the dump - so vim was the perfect tool to do something like "delete everything from line 850 to the next time this regex is matched", with a minimum of scrolling around and rendering things unnecessarily. iirc, Sublime just locked up and refused to scroll.
I wonder if I could have used Vintage to do what I wanted in Sublime?
You "can" open one-off files from the command line. It's just way slower than other methods if you're just doing a quick change, and you'd go mad waiting for the file to open.
I never experienced this, which type of files ?
Now if only I can get it to stop automatically closing quotes during comments and ruining my english contractions:
// it' => // it''
Any way around that? :(
Unfortunately, that also turns off all bracket matching.
Do you mean if you select (preview) a file from the tree browser on the left, the file appears, but if you select another one, it goes away ?
Use this setting/preferrence:
"workbench.editor.enablePreviewFromQuickOpen": false,
I'll take having to remember what I'm trying to type, look it up etc, and have autocomplete mostly work, vs. my editor wigging out in a large project for a really small change.
Also, absolutely love the integrated terminal and the git integration, though better merge/rebase would be nice.
If clicking isn't a hard requirement, I think there is something to be said for command line debuggers with well done interfaces.
I spend a lot of my time in Python at the moment which doesn't usually require a debugger because of its restricted control flow, but every so often I find myself in need and I always gravitate to PUDB (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/pudb.html). And I haven't found it wanting -- yet.
I like editing text in it, everything is so smooth and well looking, and it doesn't feel bloated. And I just hate all those Electron based editors, no matter how much incrementally they get better from month to month, they never even came close to Sublime's swiftness and polish. I tried VSCode last month, for few hours and uninstalled.
And people are often relaying on metrics and public opinion of usage of certain tool. Look, on latest StackOverflow Dev Survey Notepad++ was way ahead of everyone, it tells you something.
However, I'm not sure how well maintained it is. I fear all the time that the author, jps, has quit, but then every few months he has a development sprint and releases a new version.
I'd rather have it permanently called "beta" but a minor update every month, than one version declared finished, with rare or no updates afterwards.
wbond is the author of Package Control for ST and I think he lurks here sometime.
Textmate is still in development and has a good few releases a year. Last commit was a month ago but I think Allan likes to work a few months then have a few off.
I actually even use its fuzzy search to search my harddrive sometimes. Because I haven't found an easy app for Linux that works like Search Everything on Windows.
In that vein though, see also Synapse: https://launchpad.net/synapse-project
I disagree. The name is the developer's way of telling you whether the software should be considered ready for general use. As long as it's called "beta", I'm not going to second guess the developer's judgement; I'll wait until the release version of ST3 before upgrading from ST2.
I still have a licence and want to support the excellent work. There's a ton of features in VSC that were inspired from sublime. Minimap being one.
Speed is a major feature.
And battery/memory efficiency is too.
And, on principle, I'd pay to NOT have to use an Electron app.
That said, I've used VSCode from time to time.
I don't want Sublime to be IDE, I have programable environment called Emacs for that. Integrating everything into editor is cool, to the point where you ask yourself "why am I doing all this?" and erase everything and just start writing code, not code for the editor. Again, this is my _personal_ experience, so take everything with grain of salt. I know your case is different, but I think you can see the reasoning behind my words.
I prefer Sublime over VSCode, Atom, etc. but at the end of the day VSCode is free and still very good. Perhaps not quite as fast as Sublime but it also offers other features out of the box which Sublime doesn't so there is a trade off. Is Sublime "better" than VSCode to justify $70? That is something that can only be answered on a case by case basis I think.
Sublime Text has been feature complete (for my liking) for a lot of years now. The only thing I wish it had is an integrated debugger but it's not a deal breaker for me.
I've tried to jump ship to open source alternatives (atom and vscode) but they feel sluggish to me. Most people will be happy with their performance but I've been spoiled by Sublime Text and the slightest delay feels sluggish to me.
There was a time when that was the case, but for quite a while now we've been seeing frequent releases.
The way I think about it is: How many hours of time does Sublime save me per year relative to another editor. Even just 1 hour makes it worth it.
That's crazy. My computer was waiting with a license for ST3 when I arrived at my first day of work at my job. Everyone's is, and if you prefer Atom or VSCode, they don't care if you switch.
Yeah this is how it always goes. The 'almost as good but totally free' alternative almost always wins in the long run. Even when the cost isn't an issue it's just inconvenient to buy anything in most companies. Most people don't have expense accounts, company credit cards or simply don't want to deal with the hassle of paying out of pocket and getting reimbursed.
So I have to use Kate for non-Latin text. But it still miles better than VSCode/Atom.
I use a US keyboard now so I had forgotten :)
It's still a great application in spite of this bug, but it is annoying when it happens.
It's a testament to the quality of the app that the gripes are so minor.
The only time I've ever experienced something like you're describing, it was due to some bad math in a 3rd party theme.
Thankfully it was fixed very quickly in 3128, and my experience with ST dev and beta builds is much the same as you, that's it's been very stable in general.
Why did they choose to base their editor on Electron, of all things, especially considering the existing results of Atom (horrible) is beyond me.
In addition 1M+ plugins, open-source, cross-platform etc will keep cool kids not just happy but they will also aggressively challenge whoever is using old but efficient software products.
Electron is essentially Node grafted to Chromium... There are a few things that could be done, but would depend on a lot of upstream cooperation to do so.
By giving performant lower level access to render, may be VSC can move some of the perf sensitive code directly to compiled optimized binaries.
Sort of like what node native libraries do.
Sublime does some pretty great dark magic. I was impressed to see vscode approach similar speeds to sublime in search. I believe there is plenty that can be done to make rendering fast, reduce memory consumption and make it a bit light weight. But it would require access to metal APIs
Also, as an Electron app, there is a node element, so compiled components are already an option.
Yet VSC is like a polished machine with so much weight behind, it's almost a wonder ST3 can stand up to it. That's why I'd like the 3.0 release to be official.
(Fwiw I used Textpad for over 15 years before finding ST. Compared to Eclipse etc that was another speed demon).
VSC is very much prepared for cross-platform .NET Core development. ST3 is more generally prepared for a lot of other languages and project types. If you're on Windows using a .NET language, Visual Studio should supersede VSC in almost every way though, and ST works better as your lightweight text editor.
And now, a moment of silence for those poor Notepad++ fans. :)
When I start doing coding and text manipulation again, it looks like it will be Sublime I purchase.
One of the default settings is to trim excess whitespaces.
But there's almost certainly a ST extension for your particular taste.
I usually have ST and vim open at the same time myself.
It's a bit unfair to compare a well-backed enterprise team to a small one (with 2-3 devs?), but it sure does make for an awesome user experience for developers.
Would be curious to know what "fans" are you talking about.
70$ is nothing for a good tool.
... and then some people wonder why a company can not afford to make marketing etc ...
All LaTeX editors pale in comparison to Sublime + LatexTools Plugin + git. Each tool in this stack is designed to do one thing and they do it perfectly.
(I love LaTex, but it is still one of the most frustrating pieces of software ever conceived.)
Frankly, I don't care that the dev isn't very loud on the internet, and a new build every 6 months seems perfectly fine. And if it stops being developed, it's a standalone app, it will be many years before it bit-rots. I will be using it for years whatever happens.
But if it were open source, people would know that if it ever got dropped it other people could keep it going longer.
I'm really only concerned with it bit-rotting though. New features? Who cares? It does everything I want it to and I was already using third party syntax definitions to keep up with language changes, it's not like it matters if Sublime doesn't change much. It looks like they'll have high DPI support complete soon if not already, so once that's done I'm really struggling to think what else I want out of it. Not that I have a high DPI monitor, but if we're thinking about things that might make it unusable in the future if it gets dropped.
Anyone knows what this means in practice? What rendering is used instead and does this mean Consolas/Courier have a disadvantage or an advantage?
Is there any way to donate to SublimeText? We already have licenses at work, but would like to donate $10 or so to show support.
I donate 1% of my revenue to open-source, by the way.
$70 too much.
$50 = ok price.
SublimeText no open source. If SublimeText open source, me agree pay $70 for my 2nd and 3rd employee, because open-source = greater good.
I reckon paying for open-source could be the other thing that doesn't make sense to you (although you didn't explain much). I reckon it's surprising, but it's entirely ok to charge for open-source and/or add an "Enter your activation key here" locker. You just have to know that your customers can remove the keylock and redistribute your software; but most businesses won't, because they're happy paying for someone's work, and they want support. The GPL even has a full page on this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
So I might add:
$70 for open-source is ok.
$50 for closed source is ok.
edit: manual download is very slow. Maybe things are just a bit bogged down at the moment.
But I'm happy for the update!
I think it's much better than the previous one, but I've always replaced the icon for that with this anyway: https://dribbble.com/shots/1836652-Final-Round-Sublime-Icon
I think I'll leave the new one in place for a while and see whether it grows on me.
I wonder how that delicate shadow holds up at small sizes and in monochrome.
It never crashes on me, but maybe I am just not an edge case user of it.
Whenever version 3 is released for purchase, I do not anticipate having any problems getting my employer to pay for a license and I don't mind paying out of pocket if necessary.
I hold out hope for it happening one day though!
I tried the new beta: it kinda breaks fonts in old themes (I use spacegray) but the new Adaptive theme looks pretty (I wish I could reduce tab bar height, though).
Also enjoyed switching UI and syntax themes via palette.
Overall looks great but for now I'll stick to ST3 stable release.
My #1 feature request is Sidebar API, you know, for version control integration.
Usually paying for something helps it not to die, like limetext, for example.
For my work, I'd rather pay for something I rely on to increase the likelihood of it staying alive and keeping up with the work I need to do.
It's amazing how people still don't want to pay for software.
Now you're going to ask: How is it possible to support the four freedoms and still charge for the software?
And my answer is: I have no idea, and I don't care. It's not my job to come up with a business model for you, I'm just stating my requirements.
I don't think it's that big of a deal for a text editor, though.
One thing is if you're a designer and all your files are PSDs and you're locked in with Photoshop, but if Sublime Text dies you still have lots of other editors that will open your plain text files: Atom, Eclipse, etc.
You can always help pay to keep an open source project running. The same thing is a lot more difficult with closed source software once its been abandoned.
1, 2, 3. The violation of Freedom 3 is somewhat ameliorated by the plugin feature.
> Sublime Text 3 dev builds are currently available to registered users only.
Edit: Looked around a bit and it's fairly simple to add it to Atom.
I've still to encounter a bug in sublime. Can't quite say the same about atom. Both great editors though.
Why did you move away from sublime to atom? What was the nail in the coffin that made you move away?
That changelog is massive (!!!) but I am very disappointed in the fact that support for font ligatures (Fira Code) continues to get pushed out – https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/support-font-ligatures/17654
I also appreciate the improved markdown syntax highlighting. This was bugging me slightly.
I like the new icon and I think the shadow could be a bit more pronounced and the grey corners a bit less pointy.
Sublime Text is one of my favourite computer programs ever.
Any chance at a RasPi build? I happen to use these things professionally, and Sublime would complete the picture for me.
And yes, a license that costs more than the computer is fine.