In 2002 the investors behind Blender launched the "Free Blender" campaign. They asked for 100,000 EUR as a one-time fee for open sourcing it. At the time the project was dying as a proprietary product. The investors got the money and today Blender is a healthy open source project.
I would love to see something similar with Sublime Text. The author seems uninterested in continuing with its development while many users want to see it moving forward. I believe it can raise much more money than Blender at the time.
As near as I can tell, they would qualify as a creator, the signup process is fast and easy, and with Sublime's massive user community, it would probably give them a nice little revenue stream on the side. Patreon seems like a good way to extract money on a regular basis from people who actively want to give it to you. One of the webcomics I follow daily, Questionable Content, is currently pulling down $9,000+/month from Patreon support alone: http://www.patreon.com/jephjacques (HUGE as webcomic revenue usually goes).
I'd pledge like $10/month just to get regular monthly software updates. Hell, I'd pay $5/month just for regular monthly blog updates on he's been working on, and there'd be absolutely zero downside to his writing a blog update once a month.
The guy releases a new version almost every month. He doesn't talk much, but keeps chugging along, fixing bugs and releasing incremental functionality every month or two.
True, it is still beta. But so what? ST3 has been incredibly stable since the first version, and all beta versions are a free upgrade to all ST2 licensed users till it is out of beta.
Plus, if you're really missing any functionality, just go ahead and develop a plugin. It's easy, and you don't need to open source the entire editor for that.
I think we should give the author a break. He built one of the best editors out there, and I really hope he can make a living out of this product, in whatever way he can.
Stalled? It just had an update.
It's also in the 3rd version, under development, which came just a couple of months after the 2nd version had been released. He could just have released ST2 and keep it at that version for 3-4 years.
Instead he immediately started development ST3, which had frenetic development in the first months, and has been completely stable for a year or more (I know, I use it everyday, along with several plugins).
And in the forum he even mentioned ST4 base libs he is preparing a month or so ago.
Huh. Do you think there will be an ST4 beta/dev release before there's an ST3 stable release? I wonder if the developer has just decided to label all his releases beta from now on?
If this is true, why are the releases still labelled 'dev' releases?
How is anyone supposed to know that it's actually a stable release they should be using? Research it on HN comment threads?
Dev builds are alpha-quality and generally unsuitable for everyday use. The current build will change permissions on any file you save.[2]
1. http://www.sublimetext.com/3
2. http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16696&s...
Which I assume, will be released in 6 to 36 months. Yay!
Developing a great editor such as ST is a task big teams would have a hard time pulling off, let alone a single developer who is, BTW, running all aspects of the company.
So, sit back and shut up, ST2 works great, ST3 works great. You don't need an update every day just for the sake of being updated.
touch hello.txt; chmod 777 hello.txt; subl hello.txt; add something and save ; 777 still.
I can't register at their forums as it requires a keyword which you can only get by emailing keyword@sublimetext.com - I've tried three times and each time I've been ignored. I've also tried email the other ST employee, but been ignored also.
Very frustrating when I've paid for a licence.
edit: before anyone gives me shit for doing this it isn't exactly a big secret, it is a pretty poor way of 'securing' the forum. Just stick a captcha on it for gods sake.
I agree - it's the shittest, most user-unfriendly method of securing something against spam I've ever encountered.
"scroll_speed": 0
I have it in my user preferences (on Debian Sid) and it works well for me.
Have you emailed sales@sublimetext.com?
ST could never see another update and would remain a competitive editor for daily use due to its plugin ecosystem.
Improved quote auto pairing logic
Selected group is now stored in the session
Fixed a crash triggered by Goto Anything cloning views
Windows: Added command line helper, subl.exe
OSX: Added 'New Window' entry to dock menu
Posix: Using correct permissions for newly created files and folders
Are most people using ST3 anyway, despite the releases being labelled dev builds? Are they in fact pretty stable? Are most widely used plugins updated for ST3 (and maybe no longer supported for ST2?)
Should I just go ahead and switch ST3 "dev"?
All multiple years of 'dev' releases gets you is confusion, if this is what most people are using and most plugin developers are targetting, i wish the developer would just call it a release.
Dev builds:
http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev
'Stable' builds
IT's nothing new - sublime text 2 (at least on OS X) had the "subl" command so you could launch an edit session from the cli.. I assumed the rest had the same.
It's certainly not a new feature or anything to celebrate.
It's also useful if you want to open the editor aimed at a file in the current directory without re-navigating there in the gui.
But far more often I've been beaten from the:
1) "Yeah, core devs moved on now, and nobody cares to maintain this OSS software".
2) "Yeah, core devs decided to rewrite everything from scratch and change APIs and ABIs".
Money and existing customers depending on you and you depending on them provides a good motive to not do (1) and to avoid (2).
Also a lot of no-OSS software, especially of the desktop variety, is unpolished and un-finished, usually a moving target, so (1 -- the owners moving on and nobody picking it up) is more damaging for its user compared to some proprietary software being abandoned which he can still use for ages as is.
For example Microsoft is legendary for avoiding (2) at almost all costs, to the point were 20 year old Windows 98 programs still run as is on a modern OS. Heck, people still use VB6 which was superceded like 13 years ago... If you pick a software with a good following, chances are they will continue to support it.
Sublime feels more lightweight and faster.
It has sensible defaults, and there is not much need to configure stuff.
It has a really "standard" interface (e.g. Tabs, Ctrl+PageUp/PageDn to switch between them, Ctrl+XCV for Clipboard, on Mac it uses the corresponding modifier keys instead). Emacs is rather idiosyncratic, to put it mildly.
It is prettier, and it's easier to install pretty themes (although not perfect yet), and while that may sound petty, it is important if you stare at it the whole day. I found you can make emacs look nice, but there was always some things that annoyed me.
Most importantly, antialiased fonts didn't work on some platforms (I'm sure you can make it work everywhere with some effort though). With sublime, you get native looking, readable fonts on every platform.
You have extensibility, but not so much that you can easily break the editor. The LISP environment in emacs is not beneficial for me, but rather a source of problems. Though, I would like a tiny bit more configurability in sublime - mainly the ability to place icons in the sidebar.
Last but not least, it has the killer feature of multiple selections (Ctrl+D). This allows you to do many cool editing maneuvers that you would use special emacs commands, key combos, regexes etc. (or in vi: movement combinations), but with just one simple key combo + cursor keys + shift, and most important, interactively. You don't have to think "I want to select this and that, but not that" before you press the buttons, you can "just do it".
Of course, emacs can do some things sublime can't. Extreme extensibility is one, but that's not important to me. More important is that it can run in a terminal (e.g. over ssh). It also has the ability to use different fonts and to embed images in its editor (useful for LaTeX).
It's not that there is anything emacs can't do that sublime can. Sublime is just more pleasant to use in my opinion.
----
IMHO there is no justification nowadays for most apps to not work instantaneously, given how fast computers are. If you have to initialize stuff, do it at install time, not at startup time. I want to click the button and have the gui immediately there. Interestingly, emacs pioneered this. IIRC, it has a function to dump its memory to disc, and to just load the memory image at startup.
When you start to use emacs everything will be wrong, the few shortcuts you know such as ctrl-c/v/x/z/f will do strange things, scrolling won't move text smoothly like other programs but will jump several lines always keeping first line exactly aligned, so you feel lost all the time. When you select something and scroll emacs will destroy the selection and keep cursor in viewport (i am still not sure if this is a feature, or just a glaring bug that no one cares to fix).
Now you try sublime and it is beautiful! It comes with beautiful theme, beautiful chrome-like tabs (they even scroll!), fantastic smooth scrolling, pretty minimap that helps you see whole document at once, built in fuzzy search, and easily configurable plugins.
Why would you even try learning emacs where you constantly feel lost, instead of sublime which makes you feel powerful?
> I don't see anything this editor does that emacs can't do.
in short it's not only important to do something, but do it with style;)
It reminds me of a quote from the great Marvin Minsky: “A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.”
Not being tied into a BS-pseudo-Lisp runtime is an essential for me. And not having been designed with 1990 display technology in mind too.
