This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it.
The difference in staffing is the main reason I worry. I use Sublime Text far more than Atom, but the trend is unmistakable: Atom is improving faster than Sublime. The most recent stable release of Sublime Text is from 30 months ago. Atom was announced 22 months ago, and v1.0 was released 9 months ago. In those same 22 months, there have been zero updates to Sublime Text 2 and only four updates to Sublime Text 3 beta. That's some abysmally slow development. If these trends continue, there's simply no way that Sublime Text can stay in the lead.
The plugin ecology for Atom is also great. Sublime has an extremely limited API; I remember trying to implement a simple autocomplete-based window switcher, back in the day, and had to give up because was no way to programmatically switch to a new window.
With Atom, packages can manipulate the editor. For example, the Atom linter shows errors on the line where it occurs. It can do this because packages are allowed to hijack the editor's rendering, something Sublime packages can't do. (The only thing you can do in Sublime is to mark areas for colorization, and there are some things you can do with the gutter.)
There's also a neat package that turns Git's textual conflict markers into live markers [1] allowing you pick which side to use. It also displays a list of pending project-wide conflicts while you're working — also not something Sublime plugins can do.
The Markdown Preview package is also very nice [2]. It displays a preview window inside Atom. Not possible with Sublime's API.
With Atom, I can have the sidebar colorized based on Git status, for example (it's a built-in package), and the icons can be themed [2]. Sublime plugins can't modify the file sidebar other than add context menus.
In short, Sublime really needs to up its API game in order to compete with Atom.
Full disclosure: I'm the CEO & co-founder of Floobits, which makes pair programming plugins for lots of editors.
I completely agree with you about the plugin APIs. Writing a collaborative editing plugin for Sublime Text was a slog. Not only were we limited by the plugin API, but we ran into show-stopper bugs.[1] SSL didn't work on some platforms.[2] ST2 shipped with a broken select() module broke on Windows. In contrast, Atom provided almost everything we wanted. And while we ran into more bugs, they were annoyances, not show-stoppers.[3]
> For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong
Let's also not forget:
o Brackets (which I do prefer over ST for Javascript and CSS),
o Visual Studio Code
o EditPlus (not so great with plug ins, but it's such a solid editor that this was my favourite for years before ST)
o Notepad++ (very popular text editor)
o Kate (KDE)
o Emacs (which has long since also had a GUI)
o Plus lots of environment specific editors and micro-IDE's such as:
. Aracnophilia (I used to swear by this in the 90s),
. Bluefish,
. LiteIDE,
...and so on.
I'm no doubt missing off dozens of popular editors, but bar VSC, all of the above have been around for longer than Atom has and many have been around even longer than ST. So it's been a crowded market for quite some time. Which often leaves me wondering why people make such noise about Atom when it always feels somewhat immature compared to any of the above (or at least has done for me whenever I've pulled an ArchLinux AUR package for Atom)
As a side note, it's a pity HN doesn't support an easier method for posting bullet points.
I also think that the "no competition" point is overblown, but Sublime was still quite unique. It is very general purpose, not focused on any particular domain like Brackets, multiplatform, and with a great plugin ecosystem. It was a swiss-knife editor, that you could throw at anything and was always great.
I don't use it any more, but a few years ago I did everything, from writing a paper in latex to webdev to C, in Sublime. It was by far the king to my toolbelt.
* Brackets was only good for web (wasn't it?)
* Visual Studio Code is newer than Atom
* Notepad++ is, I think, quite outdated, and windows only
* I like Kate, but not so much out of KDE, that is very niche compared to Windows, OSX, and the wider Linux world
* Emacs (and Vim!) are hard to learn and slowly dying off[1]
* Other specific editors are... specific, and thus not direct competition to ST
[1] Might be my perception. I hope they'll never really die; I use both (Emacs+Evil and GVim), and learned in the last 2 years, but I'm the only one I know.
I've been a die hard Emacs/Vi(m) user for over a decade, and my colleagues impressions went from "What's your config like?" to "Ah yeah, I'd like to learn that for quick edits but never made the switch" to "Still using that?" to "Emacs? What the hell is that?"
It's never been easier to get into those as today, with multiple community driven starter kits and package managers available for both Vim and Emacs. Yet people don't seem to want to put in the effort.
So today I'm labelled among my peers as the Emacs nerd, as if I'm some kind of elitist software archaeologist even though I'm mostly minding my own business without evangelizing and I'm as happy to use the IDE of choice as anyone else in the team.
I don't disagree with you per se, but I do think you're exaggerating things a little with regards to just how unique Sublime Text is. I've spent a lot of time switching between text editors (more time than I really should - but sometimes procrastination trumps productivity) and here are some of my thoughts on the points you've raised:
> Brackets was only good for web (wasn't it?)
That's certainly where it excels at, but there are plugins for other languages (eg I did write Go code in Brackets, albeit only for a brief period).
> Notepad++ is, I think, quite outdated
It's not the prettiest editor in the world, but it's a little unfair calling it "outdated" when it releases updates more frequent than Sublime Text does.
> Emacs (and Vim!) are hard to learn and slowly dying off
They're no harder to learn than any other IDE. But it's definitely fair to say that there's a steeper initial curve than something that's largely point-and-click; and that they're not as trendy nor pretty so most users (understandably) aren't interested in familiarising themselves with the basics.
> Other specific editors are... specific, and thus not direct competition to ST
That's not entirely fair as a lot of peoples ST use will be for specific things.
In fact I often find myself using about half a dozen different general purpose text editors for specific things: vi for when I need to edit root owned files; Kate for general config files / text files; ST for Go; Brackets for JS and CSS; Notepad++ for editing Windows scripts; and POSIX tools (echo, tee, sed, awk, grep, etc) for automation in editing text documents.
For me, ST could easily be replaced by any of the other editors I use or some of the specific ones (eg LiteIDE). I pretty much only use ST for Go because of habit and I'm sure in 6 months time I'd have gotten bored and switched again.
My point is that not everyones usage for ST to be as diverse as you suggest. So Sublime Text is still having to compete with other tailored editors as well as the general purpose ones.
> windows only ... KDE, that is very niche compared to Windows, OSX
I don't think that many people switch between Windows, OS X and Linux enough that they need a single cross-platform editor. For most people, an editor that "just works" on their preferred platform is all they need. So in that regard, Kate and Notepad++ are just as viable competitors to Sublime Text as Atom is; albeit the former two are only competitors on specific platforms.
I think it would be interesting to see statistics on the typical usage of any specific text editor (Atom, ST, whatever) as well as market penetration as most surveys I've seen only log which editor is preferred and don't account for users of multiple editors nor what those editors are used for.
It's quite possible that my usage patterns are the smallest of minorities, but it's the only datapoint I have at my disposal. :)
You shouldn't judge the progress on Sublime Text based on when the last "stable version" was released. They seem to be way too perfectionistic in deeming version 3 stable - the developer versions have all been more stable for me than any version of Atom ever has been. The Sublime Text 3 betas are production ready.
It's true that the development progress has been really slow/halted this last year, but it seems to have gotten back on track in the last month.
That's the reason why I consider sublime text to be superior to atom. I heard some people complain about few bugs, ie sublime not working on some linux distribution. Nothing happened to me.
Yeah. I've experienced way more problems with Atom than I ever have with Sublime (as a user). Crazy performance issues and crashes on literally every platform I've installed it on (including Windows and OSX).
I agree with the parent in the sense that with Atom's resources and more extensible, modern design they will eventually have a superior product - but right now I keep finding reasons not to use it.
For me, speed is the reason I'm still using ST3 instead of switching to Atom 'like everyone else' .. Sublime simply is nice and fast. (One more thing: large file support is just better..)
Don't discount the benefit of a few men, trying to build a business. Doing dedicated work for Open Source is amazing, and very honourable. However, as the ATOM team grows, so does the overhead, the documentation requirements, and group thought. Sublime going lean and closed source might make things more competitive then you think.
Except for the whole fact that they are incredibly slow. Sublime has had major issues with consistent releases and complete silence from the owner with regards to updates.
Shame to hear that, I had hoped things had improved a lot. I tried it early on, then tried to open something like a 100M file and it threw an error about loading "large files".
Visual Studio Code is based on JavaScript too and it's very fast. They even both use Electron, the JS-desktop-app core that the Atom guys open sourced separately.
I'm not even talking about large files -- I'm only talking about normal interactions on small (1-10KB) files. Moving the cursor around in the text field, especially when my language plugin is in some mode that has some dialog up on the screen. Find and replace. Switching between open files. All of these operations often (but not always) demonstrate noticeable lag between keyboard input and screen output in VS Code (and Atom, of course).
If your goal is to making a living writing a text editor, you can't do that with Atom. As long as Sublime remains a good choice for professionals, I'm sure they'll do fine.
Maybe development speed and release frequency aren't the best ways to measure the quality of software? Sublime Text is a solid product that has done well despite a slow release schedule.
Agree, up until Atom came out, Sublime had a virtual monopoly in the text editor space but now Atom has much more momentum and more importantly support from many thought leaders in the industry.
Atom is the third in a succession of hipster text editors. It'll be interesting to see if it ever gets performant enough to use primarily and if its open nature enables it to perch on the roost a bit longer.
The day we can have a discussion on text editors without someone trying to slip in a little dig like that... well, it's a day that's not coming anytime soon.
To me, Sublime Text was never made to last long. First of all, its not open source. Are Emacs and Vim closed source? No. Why are they still around? Because in addition to being great (Sublime Text is great too don't get me wrong), they are open source. That means people can adapt them to new computers, to new architectures.
Good news I love Sublime it's so fast and slick - I haven't used Atom because consensus seems to be that it's not as fast with multiple large files open.
Why is everyone obsessed about open source, yes nice to have but at the end of the day this is just a (very sharp) tool - what's your priority tinkering with your tools or getting the job done? 70$ is peanuts, speed and productivity gains way outweigh this.
ST is multi-talented, brilliant for SQL, runs huge Postgres queries directly and lightning fast with full feed back ( error messages line numbers etc) even multi million row result sets don't phase it , any other editor would just gind to a spluttering halt.
For me, the issue with Atom and speed has nothing to do with large files. It's that even with small files, it's often just slightly unresponsive--not that it freezes or anything like that, just that lots of things take a fraction of a second longer than they should, which becomes very annoying in the long run. In my opinion, this really shouldn't have to be a problem today... on the other hand, it seems like a lot of people just aren't bothered by this kind of thing.
Exactly, in so many simple situations I press a key and there's a > 200ms delay. It gets tiring very fast and I want instant responsiveness on most actions. Sublime delivers.
Example: selecting and writing with multiple cursors.
That's right! But open source doesn't always necessarily means better software. Atom for sure ain't better than Sublime in terms of speed at this point of time.
I agree - I'm building a huge application on Postgres because of it has amazing capability and yes because it's Open Source.
Doing the same on ms sql server or oracle in my case would be madness - because of their insane per core licensing costs for enterprise features which I need.
However for my tools, I'm not bothered so long as a reasonable price or free MIT - in fact I'd rather pay for a commercial license than use a risky GPL license.
I do feel sorry for Architects (my wife) though, they have to pay outrageous prices for design tools, literally thousands yet developers who earn far more than architects, bleat about trivial amounts such as $70 for ST.
> However for my tools, I'm not bothered so long as a reasonable price or free MIT - in fact I'd rather pay for a commercial license than use a risky GPL license
Why do you consider GPL tools risky? I'm guessing you're using GNU utils constantly? :)
> I do feel sorry for Architects (my wife) though, they have to pay outrageous prices for design tools, literally thousands yet developers who earn far more than architects, bleat about trivial amounts such as $70 for ST.
Architects probably don't have other options. Free development tools abound.
This is very nice to see. Just last week Sublime started releasing new dev builds after close to a year of silence. Sublime is my favorite text editor and it seemed like it was going to drift off into obscurity but this will definitely inject new life into it. Sublime didn't just make a hire, they hired the guy responsible for an arguably large part of sublime's success.
I don't think money was an issue. Wes Bos gave some numbers on his Sublime Text learning course and extrapolated that the Sublime team had made a few million easily for what was a one developer operation.
He based his numbers on assuming that the people that paid for his course to learn sublime would only be a fraction of those that paid to actually use sublime, so I think that sounds reasonable.
Aside from an occasional dialog, there's pretty much zero cost to never paying for Sublime. (I'm a licensed user, but when I put it on other machines I use, I usually don't enter my license key, and I almost never notice)
The fact that those search options are available is fantastic.
I find phpBB-type forums almost completely unusable. Pagination made for 1998; large, intrusive signatures; confusing timestamps (person's last location and login time more prominent than the timestamp of the comment), etc.
Sublime Text user here, who switched to Atom a year ago and never looked back. Never had any of the issues others described having with Atom such as slowness, etc. What I love about Atom is that it's under active, fast-paced development, that it's super-easy to customize (first thing was to increase the font-size of the left-hand folder pane), and the available plugins are fantastic. It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript, rather than Python with ST.
Furthermore, as others commented, the plugins have much more reach into the editor and can do a lot more.
> It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript...
I've heard this said before, I've had the opposite experience. ST offers a small api and it was easy for me to make something work with a single .py file.
I gave up trying the same thing in Atom; the api is larger and lower-level. Admission: I don't know coffeescript.
ST of course isn't nearly as flexible, there are many things you just can't do.
It's not about the limits of the language but the limits of the ST API itself. However, given Will Bond's background, this might just change for the better now that he's officially working for ST, so this is good news for all ST users obviously.
Just chiming in to say that this agrees with my experience completely. I also shifted from Sublime to Atom about 18 months ago, and have no regrets. Atom improves at a steady clip, and the package ecosystem is great. Despite the sniffy negativity here on HN, I've never had trouble with Atom performance or stability. I do still use Vim on the console for some things, and that will probably never change, but Atom is has become my "daily driver" code editor.
I do kind of wonder if nearly all of the people using Atom are primarily web developers, and are already familiar with JavaScript and Atom's environment.
This and the fact that they just released a new version is very good news!
I've tried several other editors over the last 2 years or so, but I keep coming back to Sublime. I love many things about Atom, but janky scrolling on a 2 year old MacBook Pro is just unacceptable.
Another big advantage that isn't mentioned a lot is that Sublime is a lot lighter on CPU. Just for all the folks that are developing on battery power.
The title is somewhat like a garden path sentence [1], when I started reading this I thought it was a question about the future of a package manager called Bond. The title case doesn't make it any easier.
Very amazing news! I loved sublime text and kept holding onto it while everyone else was switching.
At some point I got really frustrated with the plugin API. Stuff like only 1 thing can write into the gutter at a time and that relative line numbers is close to impossible to implement (the package that exists is garbage) is just ridiculous.
That was the moment when I switched to atom and ported my sublimious plugin to atom (proton). I've since been using atom and am quite happy with it but now and then look back at the ST3 days and the incredible performance that ST3 offers.
I hope with Will on board, development will finally pick up again. ST3 needs excited developers that want to push it further and Will seems like that kind of person. I'd love to grab my old license out of the cellar and give it another spin.
As others mention, these are amazing news. The last months were void of communication from Jon and the forums were in a constant state of spam+complains, so hopefully this (and the recent updates) signals something is changing :)
..and you can also have a different set of files/folders ignored than those in .gitignore, AND it's customizable per project with Project Manager. Huge plus for me too!
i really like Sublime. i've used it personally and professionally for years. but it's also the only piece of software that i use, the source code of which i don't have access to. i definitely would prefer something i can hack on for my own pleasure and profit, and my appreciation for FLOSS software has only grown and grown throughout my career.
how's atom doing these days? can Sublime HQ really compete in the long run?
Fairly well, IMO. The editor itself has caught up with Sublime for at least everything I care about, the community is very active, and they release updates pretty regularly.
Unfortunately, although performance has gotten noticeably better, it's still way behind Sublime. Opening a new editor window takes about three seconds on my MacBook Air, vs. less than a second for Sublime. I find myself opening new windows pretty often as part of my workflow, so I really, really hope they can cut that down. Also, Atom still struggles with large (>2MB) files, but I don't work with those often enough for it to be a big deal.
I'm curious if any one remembers SlickEdit. Circa 2000 I had an internship and SlickEdit was the Sublime Text at that time.
SlickEdit for some reason went into complete obscurity though and I can't recall why. I'm not saying this will happen to Sublime (as I'm not even sure what happend to Slick) but I do wonder if it will as TextMate seems to be going down the path of long term obscurity.
The difference in staffing is the main reason I worry. I use Sublime Text far more than Atom, but the trend is unmistakable: Atom is improving faster than Sublime. The most recent stable release of Sublime Text is from 30 months ago. Atom was announced 22 months ago, and v1.0 was released 9 months ago. In those same 22 months, there have been zero updates to Sublime Text 2 and only four updates to Sublime Text 3 beta. That's some abysmally slow development. If these trends continue, there's simply no way that Sublime Text can stay in the lead.