Sublime Text has been my standby for years, nearly a decade actually, I have paid a couple of times. It's a fantastic piece of software for the price. 6 months ago I opened Sublime, let it update, updated packages, and nearly all the context menu options that the SideBarEnhancements added were just gone. I tracked it down to a commit labeled simply "simplify package" [1].

At the time there wasn't a discussion happening regarding how to restore the lost menu items. Just a useless commit nuking things I relied on every day. I suddenly felt very.... violated? Distrustful? I know that titoBouzout owes me nothing, SideBarEnhancements is free after all, but I was reminded of the constant issues NPM has with maintaining a chain of trust. This is my core toolset, how I make my living, and I have no tolerance for things just vanishing without a reason.

So I've switched to Zed. Overall it's nice. It's as responsive as Sublime was, the "feel" is there. It has decent-enough key mapping and an out-of-the-box Sublime mode, so I haven't spent too much time figuring out how to incant my favorite shortcuts. It has a much, much better Terminal, and the Copilot integration is very nice. I've had no complaints.

I still have Sublime installed, but I stripped out most of the plugins and use it as a vanilla text editor. I continue to use Sublime Merge on a daily basis (literally just for point & click commit building).

I guess my moral is, extendable ecosystems are amazing, but just because you paid for the core software does not mean free add-ons will be, or remain, as high quality as the core software, or even continue to exist.

1 - https://github.com/titoBouzout/SideBarEnhancements/commit/d6...