

Ask HN: What's up with Sublime Text? - tzaman

Hey, I&#x27;ve been using Github&#x27;s Atom for about two months now and I really, <i>really</i> tried to like it. I used it pretty much in the same manner as I did Sublime Text prior to testing Atom (Rails + Angular dev), enabled Vim mode, installed similar plugins, etc.<p>After a month, it pretty much boils down to one difference in my experience: Speed. Atom is significantly slower in everything, opening files, projects, to using plugins.<p>To get to the point, I&#x27;ve been checking if Sublime was updated recently, and to my amazement, it was! The question is why do you think it gets updates so infrequently (and far apart)? Is it lacking sales? Resources? Motivation?
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s9w
Sublime is more or less in the same state it was for a long time now. Closed
source and with a single developer that hardly qualifies as active. Combined
with a Forum of intense fanboys and some kind of "salesperson" \- both with no
connection to reality. There were two (?) recent updates, but not significant
and already there were talks about Sublime 4 being a thing. Version 3 was
already mainly a number change, as will 4 be with the obvious money grab. So
there's just hoping for a wonder to happen.

There's obviously something wrong with the dev, be it loss of motivation or
whatever could strike a single human being. That's pretty much expected and
the reason this Project needs to be open sourced or stand on more stable
foundation (more devs). They need to understand that a closed source editor
without active development is a death sentence. People are hesitant to use it
because of its unknown future, which hurts the userbase and the ecosystem
(packages etc).

Which is a shame, because Sublime could easily be the best editor IMO. Emacs
is primitive, as is Vim to a lesser extend. Atom, while interesting and with
potential, is unusably slow. Sublime is modern, blazingly fast, is reasonably
customizable, has intuitive controls and could be the unchallenged #1 if the
dev just got some sense

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farawayea
The thing Atom has going for it is not being developed as someone's hobby
project and being an open source project.

Sublime Text is still being developed by one guy. Sublime Text will cease to
exist if that dude stops developing it.

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rexpi0
Well, it's one developer for now, but back in July they mentioned that they
would expand the team of developers after 3.0 is released.
[http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16517](http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16517)

~~~
farawayea
It's been one developer for a very long time and the guy has been very
unprofessional with the way he was handling support and bug fixes for Sublime
Text 2.

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jere
>After a month, it pretty much boils down to one difference in my experience:
Speed. Atom is significantly slower in everything, opening files, projects, to
using plugins.

So then my question is why is Atom so much slower?

~~~
johncoltrane
nodejs backend, client/server architecture, runs in a webkit instance. Pretty
much what you'd expect from web guys writing a desktop application.

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jcanyc
HN please buy Sublime Text licenses if you're using the product. No excuses,
they are way more than fair about offering out a usable honesty based trial.

