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Sublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model. It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
by toastercat 1y ago
Sublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model.
It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
- dpkirchner 1y agoIt does, or did, use dark patterns when showing upgrade notices -- prompting you to upgrade to a version that you don't own yet, without telling you you don't own it, leaving you with an unlicensed version. I was happy to use 3 but that felt really off.
- toastercat 1y agoYeah, I wasn't happy about that. Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted. Although at least to me, Sublime Text 4 feels like a "finished" product.
- ben-schaaf 1y agoST developer here. We aren't happy that happened either, it was a big oversight in the ST4 release that made people like yourself lose trust in us. I'm sorry and will do my best to not have something like that happen again. > Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted. I'm curious what you don't like about this model? The most common complaint with regards to updates was the long waiting period between major versions, which we've now eliminated, and without changing the perpetual nature of our licenses.
- agos 1y agonot OP but I am not thrilled by "x months/years of updates" because you pay upfront for updates that you're not really sure that will happen. Will I get bug fixes? Will I get new features or at least significant improvements? Will the two person team work on the other project? I have had experience with quite a few projects switching to recurring billing, occasionally justifying it with "to support development of great new stuff" and then... just keeping the same rate of updates as before, resulting in a de facto steep upgrade. That said, three years of upgrades for 99$ is reasonable, even if there were only bugfixes
- ben-schaaf 1y ago> not OP but I am not thrilled by "x months/years of updates" because you pay upfront for updates that you're not really sure that will happen. Will I get bug fixes? Will I get new features or at least significant improvements? Will the two person team work on the other project? Thanks. I guess I'm just not really seeing how that is any different to what we did before? You'd buy a ST3 license with no knowledge of what improvements would be made to ST3.
- toastercat 1y agoIt's been a while since I used my ST3 license, but I remember my license affording me all updates for ST3. Maybe that model was unrealistic for ST4, but as others have echoed in this thread, major feature updates for ST4 are not common, so if you bought a license in May of 2022, your access to new features would have expired right before the new updates of the May 2025 release. Personally, I'm OK with using an old build so I don't mind that much about the limitation. Although if my 3 years elapses right before ST4 introduces first-class LSP support and an official Debugger, I may be very peeved. :)
- ben-schaaf 1y ago> It's been a while since I used my ST3 license, but I remember my license affording me all updates for ST3 That's correct, but it could be the day after you buy the license is when ST3 stops receiving any updates and we dedicate all work to ST4. With a ST4 license you're always getting 3 years of updates, ST3 it was anywhere from 3 to zero (not counting the beta period, ST3 only got 3 years of updates). > Although if my 3 years elapses right before ST4 introduces first-class LSP support and an official Debugger, I may be very peeved. :) I think we can all sympathize with some buyer's remorse. Unfortunately the line needs to be drawn somewhere. Maybe you can take solace in that we probably can't put multiple huge features in a single update, at least not a dev release. :)
- agos 1y agothe difference is subtle, and comes mainly from the fact that at the time the concept of Major Release still existed. You got everything in the current Major Release and every minor and patch update to it. If it took more than three years to release a new Major it was not a big problem, because you were still covered. The new model might leave you without bugfixes before a new major version is out.
- xigency 1y agoThis happened to me and I tried to recover the last licensed version I had used but mixed up my shortcuts or something and, after the 100th time I saw the nagware screen, I gave up and uninstalled and went with something simple and free: Notepad++.
- aranelsurion 1y agoThere was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021. I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?
- ares623 1y agoYeah Atom and then VSCode killed it. Turns out being able to use JS to extend your editor is quite valuable. Essentially every JS devs have their own Emacs without having to learn Emacs and Lisp
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rcleveng 1y agoI've been a registered user of ST for long long time, and I thought if anything hurt them in the marketplace, it was taking several years off from the end of 2013 until late 2017 with hardly anything being released that opened the door to Atom and other editors to catch up.
- pantalaimon 1y agoPlugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.
- dkarl 1y agoThe same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date? I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.) Eclipse had a robust architecture, but writing plugins for it was a dispiriting slog, even when I got paid for it (again, my experience, many years ago.)
- metaltyphoon 1y agoHow is Sublime faster?
- gleenn 1y agoZed works on Linux/Win/MacOS. I'm also frankly skeptical that ST feels that much faster, Zed is pretty darn fast, far faster than any Electron app.
- wisemang 1y agoST is not electron..
- Jataman606 1y agoZed only kinda works on Windows. As of today when you click to download windows version you can only sign up on beta program that I assume allows only select people to use that version.
- dewey 1y agoThey didn’t “solve” it, otherwise it would be a thriving editor that everyone would be using. In reality 70% of the people I see are using Cursor (Subscription), Vscode (Free) or some JetBrains products (Subscription). I only know of some people including myself that have ST for opening large files, where performance matters.
- timeon 1y agoWhy do you think that it is not thriving? Is the company struggling? Not everyone needs to use the thing to be thriving.
- dewey 1y agoI don't have any insights into how the company is doing, I'm just going by the sample set of people around me or things I read. I'm a fan of indie software and native apps but I know zero people in the past 10 years that switched to ST. I know plenty of people of people who switched to Vscode and all the other free or paid competitors. It's probably enough to sustain a small company, and not everyone has to strive for a monopoly. But I wouldn't call that thriving.
- testdelacc1 1y agoIt has users but the number of users is dwarfed by the big dogs like VS Code, Visual Studio and IntelliJ Idea - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular-technologies-new-collab-tools-prof https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular... (using 2024 because 2025 onwards is AI slop). People are 7x more likely to be using VS Code, which means that a niche tool is far more likely to have a VA Code plugin than an ST plugin. Other than that, if the 11% of people using it are happy then there’s no issue.
- jama211 1y agoThat’s true. It’s all relative.
- itake 1y agoI don't know anyone that still uses Sublime. I haven't seen a company recommend its engineers use it either. I used to be an avid user until VSCode came out.
- 8fingerlouie 1y agoST is also all but dead. They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions), and since the release of ST4 in 2021, there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025). All other releases have been bug fixes and "improvements". I get that developers need to make a living, but 4 years of fixing bugs in your products is probably not what I want to be paying for, at least not when that is the only thing I'm getting. Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart. I have used ST ever since the first version replaced TextMate for my use (TM2 spent something like a decade catching up to ST2), but I've since switched to Code and Zed (mostly Zed as of late, Code on windows until Zed is ready there). ST was great back when it was still an actively maintained product, but in recent years (ever since ST2) it has felt like it was mostly on the back burner and other editors have passed it in functionality. As for VC funding, it has done miracles for Code to have Microsoft sponsor it (and others). Code is currently the editor to beat for anything that doesn't involve opening large files.
- awill 1y agoIt does look like ST is lost here. They don't know where to go next. But I do like their Sublime Merge product. It's really good.
- kamaal 1y agoThat no major AI players even bother to announce a ST plugin/package is proof enough, its now just a tool to manage random text copy/paste snippets. vscode seems to have totally taken over dev mindshare these days.