Sublime Text 3 builds picking up steam again

http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev

by coldtea • 11 years ago

120 105 11 years ago

JonnieCache2• 11 years ago

I get `unable to apply patch` from the builtin updater. Happened for 3067 last week too. Some kind of permissions problem? I've never installed it in any kind of unusual way...

jbrooksuk5• 11 years ago

Are you on Windows? I did see a post about elevated privileges here: http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17470&p...

JonnieCache2• 11 years ago

On OSX 10.9.5

benbristow• 11 years ago

I don't really see much point in Sublime Text now that GitHub's Atom is a pretty much a one->one replica but free, open-source and has a rather nice package manager for plugins.

k__• 11 years ago

Well, Sublime Text is much fast er.

tombh• 11 years ago

Absolutely. My one and only complaint with Atom is that it eats up so much CPU. Just typing sends my usage over 50% :(

kansface4• 11 years ago

There is a point (mainly inertia and speed), but there won't be one for much longer. ST3 is a really great text editor, but it is only being developed by a single programmer.

pekk• 11 years ago

Adding more mothers to the production of one baby isn't necessarily going to speed up the process... I suspect that creating a text editor is not an embarrassingly parallel problem.

orbifold• 11 years ago

A text editor is made great by the plugins it has, I see no reason why a sufficiently dedicated crowd of people could'nt create better plugins in Python. The main developer has only to concentrate on a fast and easy to use text editing API so to speak.

tonyedgecombe• 11 years ago

Atom was very slow and cumbersome for me, nowhere near as polished as Sublime Text.

PlzSnow4• 11 years ago

Atom is far too slow, and eats battery life. This is because of the technical decision to render text in a web view.

The slowness is not a solvable problem. Therefore Atom will fail.

On a more positive note, I am so happy to see SublimeText re-activated. The previous builds worked fine for me, but it's always good to see progress.

emsy3• 11 years ago

I see this argument over and over but I've never heard why it's too slow. I enter a key, the text is immediately updated. Sure, starting the editor takes 3 seconds but that's about it. Not only that, but Atom gets a faster startup with every update. The only thing I found bothersome was the 2 MB filesize restriction.

13years2• 11 years ago

It seems to be mostly an Atom problem.

Brackets and Lighttable built on same technology are way faster.

stef25• 11 years ago

I had to ditch Sublime at work because it doesn't properly save files in to my Vagrant. Sometimes there's minutes long delays, used to drive me crazy. Something about atomic save, but whatever setting I try the problem remains.

So now I use Atom a work but I find it harder to customise according to my liking. It also cancels shut down of my machine every single time.

me551ah• 11 years ago

Atom has a 2 Mb file size limitation. Ridiculous.

pgz2• 11 years ago

I don't really like Atom because of the webkit usage, but I strongly agree that using a closed source text editor is a terrible idea for a programmer... when that editor stops being maintained all the time investment learning all it's time saving tricks is lost.

Luckily I've been burned really early in my programming career by TextMate to know better: all my tools must be OSS and cross-platform.

alandarev• 11 years ago

That is a great point. A year without a single beta build, and yet they have not explained to the consumers anything.

Just resumed, as if nothing has happened. That is a warning: you are at mercy of a small & private company, which does not seem to care much.

PlzSnow4• 11 years ago

I don't understand this line of thinking.

For me a closed-source text editor such as Sublime Text makes me much more productive than it's open-source equivelent. The accumulated productivity gains far outweigh the timecost to learn a new tool, if Sublime Text disappeared (a couple of days at most?).

Kaligule2• 11 years ago

Atom ist not free as in freedom, just free as in beer.

quonn2• 11 years ago

https://atom.io/faq says it's MIT licensed. So, free as in freedom.

asantos32• 11 years ago

The core was close-sourced initially but it's open-source now, they did this a long time ago though.

jafingi2• 11 years ago

It's great. SB3 beta has been completely stable for me the past year, so looking forward to testing the new builds.

swah3• 11 years ago

The plugin system dies for me regularly. I wish I didn't have to quit ST3 to fix that.

wbond3• 11 years ago

That sounds like a bum package, or a corrupted install. If you are using Package Control you can copy the Packages/User/ folder to a fresh install and install Package Control to try fixing it. PC will do a fresh reinstall of missing packages.

coldtea6• 11 years ago

I use like 15 plugins. None has died on me (OS X).

What exactly dies on you? I use the Linter (and several plugins for that), AutoPEP, GoSublime, etc.

jafingi2• 11 years ago

I have never had that issue, but I also only use a few plugins (Emmet, Blade Highlighter, SFTP, Gist etc.).

gendoikari2• 11 years ago

Too late for me. Atom replaces sublime in my workflow.

seanwilson2• 11 years ago

Same for me at the moment. I've heard a lot of complaints that it cannot open large files and it can be sluggish; I don't regularly need to open large files (I'd rather process large log files from a terminal for instance) and the performance is fine for me. I like that Atom is open source, plugins are written in JavaScript and the rate at which new plugins are coming out is impressive.

PlzSnow4• 11 years ago

I tried Atom for a week. The little half-second delays start to bite after a few days, and after a week you want to throw your computer out the window.

Think about it. It's 2015. My PC has 8 cores running at unimaginable speeds. It has 16 GB of memory. And my text editor couldn't open files over 2097152 bytes.

Am I living on a different planet from everyone else? How can people accept this as a normal situation?

sigzero• 11 years ago

Just tried opening a file larger than 2MB....nope. End of Atom tryout.

swah3• 11 years ago

Its like they didn't even read it? http://www.finseth.com/craft/

(I'm kidding, I understand the slowness is due to the webkit rendering...)

gendoikari2• 11 years ago

I'm using Atom to code. If you have a source file bigger than 2mb, trust me, the Atom limit is the last of your problems. :)

cheshire137• 11 years ago

I see no need to switch to Atom since Sublime is faster, has a more established plugin base, and can open large files. Sublime ain't broke, so why fix it?

teajay• 11 years ago

I've been a long time ST user, but when I out of curiosity started playing with Vim and slowly get used to it, I now prefer it over ST most of the time. But I'm glad that Sublime Text is alive again.

savanaly• 11 years ago

Same experience for me. I started using vim about one year ago, and I have been very happy with it. Having to take my fingers off the keyboard to move around a document or highlight things-- it's just unthinkable now. But I'm glad sublime is there, cross platform and easy to use, just in case I'm on some foreign machine and I don't have time to set up my vimrc and vim plugins. I also recommend Sublime to people who are just starting on programming in a language like Ruby or Javascript as it works just like Word out of the box.

rafaqueque• 11 years ago

I've used ST in the past, but due to slow release cycle, I switched to Vim. What really bugs me in ST is the fact that the guy doesn't have time to work, but still, it's not open source for the community to work together to achieve a decent release cycle.

yAnonymous• 11 years ago

ST in its current form is better than most other editors, so why would it need a faster release cycle?

Kaligule2• 11 years ago

The Plugin System could do with some polish, for example. Whenever one of my plugins broke it was a complete mess to remove the bad file.

dmacvicar2• 11 years ago

This.

It is not that the editor is in bad shape. The periods of of inactivity made me feel like the editor could be abandoned or discontinued. I went back to Emacs.

avinassh• 11 years ago

How inactivity affected it's performace? It was same. Did you started encountering many bugs? Or badly looking for some feature?

tragic• 11 years ago

It seems to me that ST would really benefit from being open-sourced, but I guess it depends on how much cash he's getting out of it, and whether he can afford to give that up.

I stick with ST because the plugin ecosystem is vibrant, it's hackable in a language I'd actually want to write, there's as much time-saving juice as Vim without me having to learn non-standard keyboard commands for the very basics (sorry, I like my arrow keys and Ctrl+x/c/v, and - god help me - my mouse), and it's not a sluggish, half-complete rip off of itself (cough Atom). I know enough Vim to get around a log or config file, but for serious work, Sublime and my brain are partners for life. (Unless Atom improves dramatically, anyway.)

I don't suffer from the slow development cycle, but I'm sure others do, depending on what it is they need.

toxican2• 11 years ago

Yeah it's great for me because the development cycle doesn't really faze me. I'm not really itching for anything new or for any bugs to be fixed. And if I do itch for something new, odds are there's a plugin for it.

integraton• 11 years ago

You can use arrow keys, Ctrl/Cmd+x/c/v, and your mouse in gvim and macvim just like any other editor.

reubenmorais• 11 years ago

due to slow release cycle, I switched to

I've read this argument multiple times and I just don't get it. Is it because you were waiting for a feature that hasn't been implemented? What's a decent release cycle? How does a indecent release cycle affect your daily usage of the text editor?

redacted• 11 years ago

My thinking is that some editors tend to be fashionable. I don't mean that negatively, just that their mindshare is transient until proven otherwise. They have a subset of users that are not massively invested in the platform, and will move to something that looks more interesting or more secure/active/etc.

If that subset is large enough such a migration can harm the ecosystem: less users, less developer mindshare in bugfixing or plugin development and so on. It can then work like a run on the banks where people get out before the problem gets worse, making the problem worse.

Interestingly, vim is often one of those editors: when TextMate was originally dying (pre open-sourcing) there seemed to be a new "why I'm switching to vim" or "how to set up rails dev in vim" post every day. I'd wager that a lot of people moved to vim as a result, then bounced off again.

tutuca• 11 years ago

Because there are many annoying small bugs that prevent the editor from being completely useful.

jameshart• 11 years ago

Sublime Text last released on July 8 2013; Vim's last release was on August 10 2013. So.... I guess I can see your point?

As for open sourcing it: if you have barely enough time to work on a codebase yourself, it seems unlikely that becoming the co-ordinator of an open source project is a reduction in the amount of effort you have to make. And poorly-run open source projects don't generally have a fast release cycle.

coldtea6• 11 years ago

I've used ST in the past, but due to slow release cycle, I switched to Vim.

You do know that there can be like decades between major Vim releases, right?

toxican2• 11 years ago

As someone who finally shelled out the money for it and a few paid plugins, I'm really glad to hear this!

tomkinstinch• 11 years ago

Which paid Sublime plugins do you use? It's always great to discover useful new tools, and seeing others pay money for them is a strong endorsement of utility!

jbish• 11 years ago

+1 I'd like to know what plugins people have found worth paying for.

daviross• 11 years ago

Most notably for myself: Sublime SFTP, SublimeGit, and Sublimerge.

I'd pay for Anaconda or SublimeLinter beyond donations in a heartbeat if it did have a paid option, as well.

http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp https://sublimegit.net/ http://www.sublimerge.com/

http://damnwidget.github.io/anaconda/ http://www.sublimelinter.com/en/latest/

dman2• 11 years ago

One thing that blows me away about Sublime is its grep performance on Windows. I am an emacs user but use Sublime on Windows since I havent been able to find a way to make emacs match the speed of a recursive grep search on Windows.

Another place where Sublime text is noticeably faster is in syntax highlighting large files.

zerr• 11 years ago

Interesting, do you grep for e.g. finding symbol references? i.e. doesn't emacs have a feature of finding symbols semantically?

dman2• 11 years ago

Often I am working with files that are not code.

jonstewart• 11 years ago

I'm a co-owner of a small software business, so in a very similar situation to the Sublime Text developer (with the exception that my product is much less successful). I went and looked at the linked-to list of builds. There's a bit of a gap from December 2013 to May 2014. But then there's a release every couple of months.

I know that in the past the builds have been fast and furious, but, honestly, I don't see any reason to have a new build more than every couple of months. More than that and it wastes my time; I suspect the ST developer has learned that more frequent builds waste his time as well.

Sublime Text is fast, powerful, intuitive, and--the killer feature for me--cross-platform. It's well worth the money to me now, regardless of its long-term future (in the long run, we're all dead). While development has been sporadic, at least it seems like the developer has not succumbed to the Moby Dick/Second System effect, so that's a plus. It would be great in the long run (i.e., when the developer tires of full-time work) if it were open source, but it's nigh-impossible to support oneself with open source applications, so it seems healthier now for it to be a proprietary app.

yoodenvranx• 11 years ago

The problem with Sublime in 2014 was not the number of releases but the fact that the developer more or less just disappeared for a year.

I am totally fine if he does not release something new for half a year, but at least he could've written a short blog post that he will take some time off. Even a short "Hey guys, I am still working on it but things are very slow right now" every 8 weeks would've been totally fine.

coldtea6• 11 years ago

I am totally fine if he does not release something new for half a year, but at least he could've written a short blog post that he will take some time off.

He did write a short post of that effect.

Even a short "Hey guys, I am still working on it but things are very slow right now" every 8 weeks would've been totally fine.

The TextMate guy posted frequent updates just like that -- and it got nowhere.

veidr2• 11 years ago

But the thing is with Sublime, these months-and-months-long gaps in the release cycle yield incredibly modest improvements.

The 8+ months between 3059 (2013-12-17) and 3065 (2014-08-29) yielded 1 significant (but Windows-only) feature, 8 very minor new features, and 4 bug fixes (including crash bugs).[1]

That's so much less than, say, Bare Bones does in an equivalent time frame with BBEdit[2], that it is laughable.

And, significantly, it is also much (much!) less than Textmate 2 does currently[3].

I think Sublime Text had its Textmate moment[4] sometime around ST2, and it shows. The dev gets rich[5] (congrats) and then — sure! — doesn't feel like working on a text editor for a few weeks, which become months and years.

Textmate solved that by going legit open source. It is hard to think that Sublime Text will be able to solve it without following suit. (But I suppose it's also possible that a year of waning sales might re-light the fire.)

Disclaimer[6]: I have paid for and still use Sublime Text, Textmate, and BBEdit, in addition to many other fine and not-so-fine text editing products.

[1] http://www.sublimetext.com/3

[2] http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/archived_notes.html

[3] https://github.com/textmate/textmate/blob/master/Application...

[4] http://blog.macromates.com/2006/year-in-review/

[5]: for values of rich approximating 'can buy a $1,000,000 house with cash, but still can't afford a private jet'

[6]: in the modern usage meaning 'tangential statement about my background that is not actually a disclaimer'

coldtea6• 11 years ago

That's so much less than, say, Bare Bones does in an equivalent time frame with BBEdit[2], that it is laughable.

And yet, BBEdit is nowhere near as capable a programming editor as ST2/3 + plugins is.

And, significantly, it is also much (much!) less than Textmate 2 does currently[3]

And yet, Textmate 2 is an immature software that doesn't improve much upon Textmate even.

kolev• 11 years ago

Picked up, but no match with Atom. I'm disappointed as I've invested over $200 in its ecosystem (including a paid license for it).

drapper• 11 years ago

Given the discussion here, it seems there's a clear need for a text-editor that's cross-platform, fast (like ST, unlike Atom), open-source (like Atom, unlike ST), very configurable (like Atom and ST), easily extensible (like Atom) and easy to use/grasp for an user accustomed to typical windows applications (like Atom and ST, unlike vim and emacs).

Seems to be something like this could be done using QScintilla. Qt would give it an excellent cross-platform support, Scintilla a good editor with a speed of C++, and the ease of development and extensibility would be possible thanks to either PyQt (Python) or QtQuick (JavaScript). Just a thought...

peatmoss2• 11 years ago

My feeling is that your point about vim and emacs applies more to vim than emacs. The caveat here is that I had ~15 years of vi/vim usage going on before switching to emacs ~5 years ago. I can plainly see where modal editing is foreign to new users from the start. However, I'm not sure emacs, which ships with "normal" keyboard shortcuts by default in most packagings, is the same. Emacs has a relatively smooth path from, "I'm going to use this like Notepad++" to "Emacs is my god / lover / email client now."

At least that's my impression, and perhaps the warped impression of someone incapable of recognizing weirdness.

roflchoppa• 11 years ago

Meh, I'm trying to just switch over to emacs, so far its been a blast, even with implementations of AC, speedbar,yasnippit, and other packages,i dont feel that ST is going to cut it for me anymore.... ill keep it installed still its a very beautiful application. :)

I'm starting to get called neckbeard at work for being a emacs advocate..... :\

dmacvicar2• 11 years ago

BTW nobody mentioned Limetext, which attempts to implement a SublimeText clone in golang (and other features like a terminal frontend).

http://limetext.org/

Sublime Text 3 builds picking up steam again

Related Stories