A fun thought, Apple could acquire Sublime to compete with Visual Studio Code. It's native the way Apple loves native. It's already the favorite tool of developers all over the world.
• Apple has cross-platform apps, e.g. iTunes. Yes, iTunes on Windows is horrible—but only because it is effectively a userland driver stack for old iPods and such, and this prevents them from rewriting it to follow modern architecture. A plain old "app" wouldn't suffer from this problem.
• It's clear from what's been happening to Visual Studio that all IDEs are increasingly expected to be cross-platform. XCode probably would be by now if it wasn't so bound to building Cocoa apps. Handing Apple an editor that's already cross-platform, I don't think they'd drop the capability.
If Apple cared about a text editor, it would have bought TextMate years ago before that community migrated to Sublime (and some members of then migrated to Atom).
Mac users have also been big on using BBEdit for a long, long time.
I do like Atom, but experience the same complaints everybody else does there. Still a great project.
Just was curious if there was some hidden gem not yet seen.
I wonder if that would be a worthwhile undertaking -- a new native (even if its mac-only) robust editor...
It does one thing that most other OS X editors don't: it displays TextMate themes in the colour space they were originally designed in.
It seems that there's the 3 big native editors, sublime the "native" editor, then the electron apps.
I'm visualizing a niche: something with all of the benefits of the electron gang, sublime, and the native performance and stability. I'm sure it's a bit of a project.
I don't think it is. It's a very un-OS-X app with its own completely alien-looking and ugly UI (and rendering and god knows what else). It's also not much of an IDE (unlike VS Code which has IDE goals and ambitions).
It's a decent, snappy, Python-extensible cross-platform editor. It's native mostly just in the 'runs native code' sense and likely of no interest to Apple at all.
To your point about being "not much of an IDE": Sublime doesn't try to be an IDE. It's a text editor, which approaches a fundamentally different facet of writing code. Plugins with Package Control also make it easy to get more IDE-like features -- do you think that they're not discoverable enough, maybe? How could it be improved?
I'm not talking about the colours and icons - just that it doesn't use native UI and what UI elements are implemented are quite clunky. It's very much not 'native the way Apple likes native'. It doesn't try to be an IDE so there wouldn't be much point in Apple buying it to 'compete with VS Code'.
do you think that they're not discoverable enough, maybe? How could it be improved?
Mostly, I think the Sublime developers don't consider this much of a priority and are ok with it being a clunkfest. Given that it's a small team making a living selling a niche cross-platform tool at a mere $70 a license, this is hardly unreasonable. But pretty or intuitive it ain't.
Compare this to the extension/theme management or preferences UI in VS Code. It's also very much 'non-native' but usability is clearly something the developers are concerned about.
That's about as native as 'M-x foo[Tab]' in Emacs is native.