
SubEthaEdit 5 is now free and open source - schwuk
https://rant.monkeydom.de/posts/2018/11/28/see-is-back
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petercooper
Oh nice. I forgot SubEthaEdit existed but it was first text editor on macOS
before the TextMate hype in the early Rails days :-) While I support the right
to release commercial products, I think it's very noble to open source things
after a certain time, if only for the purpose of history and preservation.

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tlrobinson
BBEdit was probably the first editor for Mac OS X, though SubEthaEdit may have
been first one native to OS X.

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mrpippy
BBEdit dates back to 1992, and I believe Tex-Edit is even older. CodeWarrior
and BBEdit were both Carbonized for OS X very early (because developers needed
them for bringing up other apps). I don't remember SubEthaEdit coming out
until at least 10.2 (ISTR it had a different name for first release also)

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fitzroy
I remember being at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in the early
2000s. Lots of UNIX-loving people had just bought their first Mac laptops and
basically the whole room was taking notes in a single SubEthaEdit doc via
BonJour[1]. Some people were typing verbatim notes from panelists, others were
going back and fixing typos and spelling, still others were researching topics
that had been mentioned, contextualizing them, and adding links.

In the end we all had a clean, detailed, copyedited document. It was a pretty
amazing experience. I was sure I'd just witnessed the future of collaboration
for lectures and conferences[2].

[1]At the time, SubEthaEdit was called "Hydra" and BonJour was still
"Rendezvous". [2]I guess the actual future turned out to mostly be scrolling
though Twitter. c'est la vie.

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chappi42
Danke! -- MIT is a nice licence. Hope it works out well:

>>What are my hopes for the future?

    
    
      - Attract contributors to ensure a long term thriving ecosystem
    
      - The free availability both in and out of the App Store should reduce the barrier to entry to the collaborative use cases in education, pair programming, etc, leading to good bug reports and use cases that are worth investing some future development in
    
      - Support for more languages, modes and contributions thereof
    
      - Longevity of SubEthaEdit as a product<< (edited formatting, thanks davemp)

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davemp
\- Attract contributors to ensure a long term thriving ecosystem

\- The free availability both in and out of the App Store should reduce the
barrier to entry to the collaborative use cases in education, pair
programming, etc, leading to good bug reports and use cases that are worth
investing some future development in

\- Support for more languages, modes and contributions thereof

\- Longevity of SubEthaEdit as a product

———

Formatted for mobile users.

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simonw
I remember using SubEthaEdit at university for collaborative note taking in
lectures back in 2003ish and it was like absolute wizardry.

Really excited to see it open sourced. What a fascinating piece of software
history.

(Also: Carcassonne for iOS remains the best board game port I've ever played)

~~~
jtmcmc
yes I felt the exact same way in the same year

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buserror
I have a bought licence of subethaedit, from years and years ago. I still use
it, but I never upgraded since I had to re-buy a licence to do so!

Glad I waited. I still love the coloured changes for modified text in a
document (that stay on after saving!), it's really really handy when working
on a longish file to have quick visual clues when scrolling back/forth. I wish
more editors had that.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
yes, VS does this by default too and it's nice.

lots of editors have plugins (like git-gutter for sublime) that do this with
VCS integration: highlight lines that were modified since last commit. for me,
this is even better because it remains not just after saving the file but even
after closing the file/editor and re-opening it.

combined with a minimap like sublime's which also shows the gutter
annotations, i can navigate a many-thousand-line file with lightning speed.

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tosh
I still fondly remember when I first used SubEthaEdit.

Seeing collaborative editing working so seamlessly was just magical.

Language server protocol support would rock.

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brians
Oh, wow. Nothing in here that obviously wouldn’t work on iOS.

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jspash
I'm not meaning to take away anything from this announcement, which I think is
great. But what options are there for collaborative coding in Sublime? (I
don't use Atom)

Having tried Floobits, the experience was ok. But I do a lot of pairing online
with 0 day beginners, and need something as little setup as possible. ie. The
students are able to install Sublime and Packages. Having to sign up for
Floobits is just another step I'd like to avoid.

I suppose I'm looking for a service (paid or otherwise) that provides urls
which would relay the keystrokes between editors facilitated by a Sublime
package. Does anything like that exist?

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schwuk
Not the answer you're looking for, but have you tried Visual Studio Code with
VS Live Share ([https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-
vsliv...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-
vsliveshare.vsliveshare))? It works really well for pair/swarm programming.

~~~
brians
And the event-stream implementation will blow your mind.

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sandos
Are you referring to the backdoor or is it actually a mind-blowing
implementation?

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kenneth
Great story, and happy to see SubEthaEdit live on as open source software. Its
main collaboration use case is still relevant and unique today. I'm glad they
were at least able to get the technology integrated into Coda, and that they
were able to make a modest revenue from that.

Unfortunately, as a primary code editor, it was never for me as an avid user
of TextMate (and reluctant of Xcode) in the early days, before I finally
learnt vim and never looked back around 8 years ago or so.

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wink
This looked quite cool, 15 years ago. But if you never owned a mac.. too bad
:P

I mean, I've always been around a high density of Macs and later MBPs (from
~2008 on) but I've also never seen people really use it. I guess it's because
most coworkers in the office had the project's/company's standard IDE.

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rubyfan
I’ve always loved this product. I rarely used it for the live pairing ability
but loved its simplicity, highlighting and overall light feel as an editor.
Definitely time to revisit SubEthaEdit.

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cutler
Sorry folks but Ford Prefect was a couple of decades early on this one.

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ixtli
I'm so glad this editor has lasted this long. I haven't used it in years but
now that it's free im gonna replace the default system text editor with it.

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exabrial
SSAAS (SubEthaEdit5 Server As A Service) can now be a thing!

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codemusings
Brushed metal ... brushed metal everywhere.

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ixtli
its got a dark mode, if you have 10.14.+

