I feel that the comments here are too negative, which ST2/3 does not deserve. ST is still a supreme editor and using/paying for ST is not a bad thing. Wasn't it ST which introduced the cool look&feel and features which Atom and VSCode now adopted? I love the ST ctrl+d select (even if it existed before).
PLUS: ST still has a super quick loading time which makes it a great addition to emacs/vi in some use cases.
As a quibble, I would say that Visual Studio Code is unique in its own right, and not for any of its code editing features (which is comparatively lacking). It's a simple editor with a killer code insight feature. I have a feeling other editors will have difficulty replicating this feature.
I think the title of this should be updated, as it is not correct. The sublime text homepage has been displaying builds for sublime text 3 since mid February[0]
This is correct, Sublime Text hasn't officially hit "3.0", but the current builds of Sublime Text 3 have been the reccomended versions to use for quite a while now, hence why the front page points to 3 rather than 2.
When 3.0 is out, there will be a blog post about it.
Ok, we'll use your phrase as the title. If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. (Though that may have to wait overnight...)
The current title ("Sublime Text 3 is still in beta") sounds like an attack to me, implying slow development. I'd suggest "Sublime Text 3 marked as recommended build (Feb 2016)", or something like that. More wordy, but more accurate.
I certainly didn't intend any negative connotations to that sentence, but I agree in the context of the title it does give undue emphasis to 'still'. FWIW I use ST3 beta every day and it is an excellent text editor. I have no qualms about the development rate.
I think something like your title or even along the lines of 'Sublime Text 3 released [false alarm]' would work.
Wow, great pickup. I've been using my SublimeText install from 2015 and receiving RC updates; last time I installed it I had to go to the beta page to do so, etc.
When I hit the ST front page today (after having reset my Windows 10 install due to issues going from RC1 to RC2 of dotNetCore) and saw the direct download link to ST3 I got the impression that it must just have been released - I got rather excited, not having seen any posts on HN to the effect (I searched).
Unable to edit the post now; I feel incredibly silly, and sorry to have created false expectations by posting the submission using that title. My apologies to Jon Skinner; I love his work.
I think ST3 really missed the boat. I used to love using Sublime Text 2 (occasionally I still do because it is fast), but I moved on when development stagnated and Jon seemingly disappeared off of the face of the planet, stopped responding to support requests and the like. There is no disputing ST is a great editor, but it has fallen behind in the face of Atom, Webstorm and Visual Studio Code (two of which are free).
I disagree. I had tried out Atom for a little bit (after the v1 general release) and more than once I lost my entire workspace. Either through a computer crash, Atom crash, or something else. Maybe I didn't configure something right, maybe I didn't. Quite frankly I don't care, I think that always properly persisting all unsaved work should be a default. Sublime always persisted all of my workspaces and open tabs perfectly. Everytime where I would lose unsaved data, Sublime would prompt me. After losing my stuff like twice in Atom, I switched back. The new features and everything are great, but I prefer not losing my random unsaved code snippets.
I think the perception comes from people who aren't on the Dev release channel. When I saw you list 14 releases in 2016 alone (!?), I wondered where on earth you made up that number... until I realized that's the Dev channel. On the Stable channel, the releases have been:
I'm mostly okay with the occasional releases. Once a year feels a little infrequent though? One of the IDEs I use has a quarterly bugfix release schedule.
To be honest, I'm less concerned about new features, and more that there will be paid upgrades so the developers keep maintaining the software. I'd probably expect a new major version every 2 or 3 years, with a discounted upgrade price... that would still only work out to $10-$20/year for Sublime Text, which is crazy cheap. I already budget about $100/year just for annual Parallels Desktop upgrades.
What do Atom and Visual Studio Code offer that Sublime Text doesn't?
I have tried both within the last year and wasn't able to find any significant advantages (except for VS Code's excellent TypeScript experience), but they both ran slower and used more memory. Perhaps I should have used Nuclide?
(Not asking about Webstorm because I've used the IntelliJ family of IDEs and understand their advantages)
It would greatly suprise me if either Atom of VSCode shut up tomorrow. They couldn't entirely shut up, as they are both entirely open source projects.
The Sublime Text website could just close tomorrow if one person got badly hurt / lost interest, and then the executable could not work on Mac OS X 10.11.6 for some reason, and it is done.
I've had too many pieces of software go that way to get another one which is so fundamentally important to me (text editor).
That plugins are written in javascript (larger developer base) and allows more customization of Atom (more open plugin api) also yields more niche plugins.
To be honest I use Atom mostly for writing Markdown. I am a paid subscriber for Webstorm, but I have found that I am using it a bit less lately and have been using Visual Studio Code a lot more, partially because I use TypeScript, love the intellisense and overall the editor is super fast and stable. Atom definitely has some slowness issues they need to overcome and ironically Visual Studio Code is based on Atom, but it is a great editor and there are a heap of plugins out there for it.
In terms of memory usage, Sublime would arguably win the fight (at least it feels that way). I think ST is also lacking in the plugin department these days as well, but I could be wrong about that. The interface of both Atom and VSCode is arguably better as well and maybe things have changed, but the ST3 betas have been pretty buggy in my experience as well. The native Git integration is also pretty great as well (especially in VSCode).
Sublime also lacks a native package manager of which VSCode and Atom have, but there is a third party package manager which works well, so it's a moot point.
It's a small thing, but I really love how Atom highlights the files that have changed in the tree view out of the box. Haven't figured out how to do that in Atom...
Yes. When you open a directory that is a git repository, the files in the sidebar will have different color if they're modified, new, etc. When viewing actual files, edited/new/deletes lines will also have markers in the gutter.
They are free and development is much more active. Community is also getting stronger, as they are both open source. This means that plugins are always up to date.
Also if you have tried Atom at some point, try it again, they made it much better and faster. Only thing I miss is how incredibly fast Sublime Text is.
in ST3 beta, one issue i faced was large files that changed frequently, like a log file. ST3 would neither keep the uncharged version, nor just append changes, but load the entire file from scratch and show me loading bar every time the file changed.
Notepad++ handled that surprisingly well. pretty much the only time i had to use another text editor besides ST
How large are you talking? I had similar issues early on with Atom, but I don't have them anymore (same project). Also, it would only hang for about a second when initially opening the file, later on it would work smoothly.
I'm using ST because I want to use the same editor for my code and data, and I rather frequently get 100mb-1gb textual data files, logs, tabular data in plaintext or json, etc - not big enough to require special tools to process (I mean, they're a small fraction of my RAM), so a text editor should allow to eyeball them and do some basic processing - edit a particular line, do interactive global regexp replacements to e.g. adjust the columns in a million-line file, etc.
I haven't tried Atom, but the Hydrogen plugin looks very interesting. How does it react to, say, being asked to do syntax highlight on a 100mb json?
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Sure, maybe you're not going to have a need to open an assembly dump of your browser very often, but plenty of projects have multi-megabyte text/data files that need to be opened now and then.
One of programs I develop uses a dictionary that when unzipped is ~8Mb. Sometimes I need to open that up in an editor and it's nice not to have to fire up a different editor to do that.
In fact this is one of the first things I do when trying out a new editor - see how well it can handle files > 1Mb in size.
Maybe if you're only working on small projects with small files this isn't such a concern, but there are plenty of people who have legitimate concerns if an editor can't open large files (and 1Mb isn't even large).
VS Code is great, Atom too but I wish it was less buggy. Regarding ST, I used to feel the same but lately I have seen more releases and it seems that development is now moving again. Also, I'm really struggling to find any aspect where ST "lags behind", I pretty much seem to get all the same goodies that I get in Atom and VS Code.
VS Code seems much snappier than Atom, as someone who uses both. And the Rust extension is much better. Switching between the different key-bindings is a pain though - I wish VS Code used ST bindings, but I'm guessing they went for consistency with VS?
Are you hitting a different CDN box to me? In Australia, the text under the download box on the front page says "Sublime Text 3, Build 3114, 64 bit". Screenshot is still of v2.
The about Sublime Text box on the installed editor says "Stable Channel, Build 3114".
And this is important because existing Sublime Text licenses are only valid for the beta. When 3 exits beta then everyone will have to buy the upgrade.
Not true. They have been selling Sublime Text 3 licenses for a while.
"A license is valid for Sublime Text 3, and includes all point updates, as well as access to prior versions (e.g., Sublime Text 2). Future major versions, such as Sublime Text 4, will be a paid upgrade."
I'm not sure what all the missed-the-race type comments are all about – what does this even mean?
ST3 is a solid editor with what I consider a very healthy plugin eco system. I don't think there's a single feature I've missed that so many seem to think are crucial to any reasonable development (web or otherwise) and its speed and accuracy is what keeps me as a customer. (Multi-file search and replace is a breeze, even in huge files.)
I forget to mention the fact that ST has saved my ass more than once by always keeping buffers persisted. This alone paid the price of admission several times over in not having to redo work when I've been a klutz.
in comparison both vscode and atom have crap statufulness, in my case they both crash every half hour and when you reopen them everything is gone, atom right now (1.7.3/4) has a bug that makes the editor crash some times when you save files, electron is all fun for customization but damn if it is unstable. Sublime been rocksolid no crash and 100% stateful.
I can't speak for the others because I have no experience, but definitely echo your Sublime experience. Even when it has crashed, and the only times I can recall have been on Windows, it's always kept state so not once have I lost work. This feature alone, as I mentioned, is worth the price of admission. It's a life saver.
I went to download Sublime Text after refreshing my Windows 10 build, and noticed on the main page that 3 is now released. Build is 3114, dated May 12 2016 - this seems to now have been chosen as the RTM version.
There's been a flurry of updates lately and I'm very pleased to see that Jon Skinner has been able to reach this milestone, after some slower periods.
It's such a fantastic editor, one I've used for years; my previous was Textpad. I'll pay for the upgrade myself as soon as the site is updated with upgrade pricing, assuming that this will be an option.
Maybe I'm biased but it seems like Sublime lost its huge margin in the "editor race". Occasionally I try to use Sublime, but the plugins are always lacking. For my needs, VSCode is already better with better plugins (C, Go, Python), and I'm more productive with it although it lacks some features in the editor itself. And it doesn't feel slower even though it's written in JS. Plus it's open source.
I hope the Sublime author will release it as open source, at least in some IntelliJ style freemium model. That might give it back the boost it needs.
Jetbrains seem to be making quite a lot of money from the IDEA series. Shill, really? I have nothing against Sublime charging money, the only reason I'm not buying it is that it's not a good enough editor (for me!).
What I'm saying is that if he opens at least some of Sublime it might help make it a better editor and advance faster with the help of a community. It certainly beats Sublime becoming irrelevant and dying eventually, which I really hope it won't. I'd really prefer using sublime, but I'm simply using the best tool (BTW Sublime is still a better editor, no plugins installed on either). Open source is a plus for me, not a must.
ST becoming open-source is one thing, making it freemium another. I was talking about the latter.
Does freemium really work at all for anyone? Gets you new users quickly but then 1 in 10,000 converts. This works for established companies as they can weather the freeloaders with piles of cash from other parts of the business. Or in the case of VC-backed companies, from the money fountain (better not ask Spotify about that though).
I just can't see how a small company depending on a single product would benefit from this model.
For IDEs there's a clear path here - for a company, even a small startup, <$100 per developer is really no biggie, even if no private person would pay that. I used to pay for PyCharm (via my employer) when I worked mainly in Python because I needed the extra features.
BTW Sublime are more or less Freemium right now, even worse - you don't HAVE to pay, you just get those annoying messages. It's practically a donation model right now.
Why does VSCode need a 'Pricacy Statement' (Help menu) which explains how Microsoft shares personal data? I get that it was written by MS, but why would I want a code editor that calls home? Or better ask does it send user/system data back to MS?
this cfg entry:
// Enable usage data and errors to be sent to Microsoft.
it's a bit unclear but in the context of the whole document, it seems like they mean web pages and searches on their website, which is both legit and trivial. What worries me a bit is the fact that it's unclear.
It has an excellent one developed by MS people, and a few indie ones, which I used up until a couple of weeks ago, when the MS plugin started working properly on Linux. You'll need to install the dotnet cli stuff, but they provide official packages for Linux as well, so it wasn't an issue.
I don't see any updated builds or blog post about this. Is it just because the homepage now links to ST3 instead? Because it's been that way for some time now, and the download label still says it's a beta.
Am I missing the real release? Could be a CDN issue?
No, there's nothing new. Someone posted the link to Sublime Text homepage and many people upvoted it when seeing the title, without first verifying the link pointed to an actual release. So it ended up getting a lot of upvotes.
The homepage links to ST3 as the default version to download, as it has for a few weeks/months now, that's not new. ST3 is still described as beta. The last release was on May 12.
Why are modern text editors so slow? Here's an editor that I use from 1996 opening up a 1GB file of randomly generated bytes (dd if=/dev/urandom of=random_bytes.txt bs=64M count=16): http://i.imgur.com/BVln6Y2.gif -- it opens instantly and I can scrub to any point in the file with no delay. I've yet to find a modern editor that beats my 1996 one.
Modern editors are much more that file browsers. They do static analysis, syntax colouring, linting and many more things (depending on what plugins you have installed). I still like to open a plain vim and just focus on the task at hand without the magic, but that's just not how most web developers work these days.
But there's not really a good reason why these features can not be processed in the background, e.g. in separate threads. Personally I don't care much about the 1GB file scenario, but I've mentioned before how "booting" AROS (AmigaOS reimplementation) hosted under Linux, straight into an Amiga editor like FrexxEd (which does have syntax highlighting for example) is faster than starting Emacs on my home machine.
More importantly, a lot of this functionality is down to simply not thinking about consequences. E.g. try starting a typical Emacs installation on a box that has a network but where the DNS setup is broken, and enjoy waiting for DNS lookups to time out before it starts... (I'm sure there's an easy fix; I'll admit to being lazy and not having looked for how to prevent it and rather "just" fix my DNS when it's happened)
All to often "nice to have" functionality ends up in the critical path of startup rather than lazily initialize in the background.
ST3 has been stable for a long long time. It's great that they finally flipped the switch and replace ST2 with it. This also forces developers to finally adapt the new API and Python3.
Just too bad this came too late. I got frustrated with the plugin API long ago and no-brainer features like multiple elements in the gutter (which is needed for example for relative line numbers) have still not been implemented.
When ST3 development seemed to have frozen completely, a lot of plugin developers have moved on to other platforms like atom or vscode. Even with this release, ST3 needs something bigger to bring people and plugin devs back to the platform.
Once my ST2 license stops working for ST3 I will open the editor a lot less than I currently do but will monitor the changelog for long wanted features.
It´s featured on the front page and it´s the same build number but the download page /3 which is generally an indication that Sublime 3 is the active current version still calls Sublime Text 3 a beta. Slightly confused now, /2 which is the page for Sublime Text 2 says: Sublime Text 3 is currently in beta, and contains many improvements over Sublime Text 2. and links to Sublime Text 3. This seems confusing but My guess is it´s still in beta as per the information but perhaps deemed stable enough that you can use it. I will probably wait until a news post have been made declaring Sublime Text 3 as 1.0 release. While I continue to use a mixture of Sublime Text and Atom.
I've never used any of those new editors (ST, Atom, VS Code, ...). Can anyone compare them to the more classic ultraedit? Or said differently: Why would I chose ST3 over one of the classic editors?
Atom and VS Code use the same basic underlying technology and are JavaScript under the hood. With both you can actually open up a chrome like web inspector to help you write and debug plugins. These editors are Open Source and funded by companies whose main source of income is not the editor, but have money (GitHub and Microsoft).
Sublime Text is an editor that brought a lot of new ideas that many editors now adopt (multiple cursors, minimap). It's written in native platform code + python 3. It is closed source and written by a small group of people. Their company only sells Sublime Text.
Personally I prefer intellij. I do use VS Code for text/non project editing but out of ST, VS Code and Atom I think ST is the better editor, it's future is just isn't certain but it's widely used and has a great eco system.
I've used gedit, but I'm not familiar with multi-cursor implementation in it. I suppose I've always seen the multi-cursor implementation in Sublime Text as top-notch with other editors struggling to implement anything like it. Intellij finally has pretty decent multi-cursor support but it's still a little bit behind ST's. For example, in IntelliJ the ease of applying multiple cursors seems to involve more work than in ST. In VS Code multiple cursors isn't nearly well implemented as ST or even IntelliJ.
If it was just the editing I could use any coding editor and be fine.
The reason I ended up paying the subscription for WebStorm (after also trying out Atom) was
a) The inspections
b) The type support.
To explain b), I annotate my JS code with and JSDoc and Closure inline-comment type annotations. WebStorm uses that to check if the types match - I get much of the TypeSript functionality for free without using TypeSript. I also used @typedef (JSDoc tag) heavily to define my own types. And auto-completion suggestions base don the types.
I used to be okay without types, but after having a more complex project (note: large !== complex, simple UI stuff that I had done previously was a much larger code base and I never felt I needed the help of "static types") I found it was good to use them.
Why not Atom: It looked great and probably is a great editor, but it didn't give me even close to the functionality of WebStorm. Also, when I had a problem the only response I got was "we are waiting for your pull request", meaning "fix it yourself". Why I understand that unpaid people are not eager fixing my problems I have enough of work without having to contribute to each of the products I'm using - so I prefer paying the people at JetBrains to take my bug reports and fix them (which they do - and I've filed a lot of reports before the "2016" release, so much that they gave me two years worth of subscription for free for being a good beta-tester).
Another advantage of the IntelliJ products is that it's basically the same IDE-platform for all kinds of languages. I'm learning Scala now (the Coursera course on Scala by Scala's author is back!) - another IntelliJ IDE (and that one even is free, the free Java IDE plus Scala plugin), for example.
I think it's fair enough to say that people should be using beta/dev builds, I've been using Sublime 3 for years (before switching to Atom a year ago) and there were just a handful of broken builds.
That said, as much as I like the quality of the app, I wouldn't hold my breath for version 4.
VSCode still lacks the ability to have multiple root-level folders in one "project". This is the only deal-breaker I still have that's keeping me from moving away from ST3.
I think Atom has some semblance of multiple roots, but it was a hack when I last checked.
With Atom addons can also do a great deal of UI customization too, due to the fact that it is built on the web stack. You pay for it in performance though...
Well, in Atom you can replace any of the javascript Atom comes with with your own customizations, same in Emacs with elisp, where does the difference lie? (I'm a emacs/evil user).
Emacs is written almost exclusively in elisp, and every elisp function can be changed at any time. Much of Emacs' core lies wide open in the global namespace, and is thus easy to change from any level.
As far as I understand, Atom has quite a bit of code that is not openly accessible, be it because it is part of a Node.js, transpiled from something else, buried in closures, or simply too deep in the hierarchy to be easily reachable from the plugin level. Sure, you could change it if you set your mind to it and maybe patched a few files here and there, but it's certainly not as easy as in Emacs.
I understand you're joking, but this is important. It's $70. I know that's a lot to some people, but if you're selling your time as a developer it's probably quite a lot less than 1/2 a day at your usual rate. For a tool that will save you many days a year (and increase your bottomline as much), that's really cheap. If you were a designer and needed Adobe's tools you'd be paying much every month.
If you're using Sublime professionally you can afford it. You're choosing not to. That's fine because there are some great free alternatives to use instead, but you have no reason to complain.
I think that is a bad idea in general to offer regional pricing. In fact by asking the same price you are fostering that people and business in poorer regions have more reasons to be brave and raise their rates accordingly, which helps with equality in the long term.
Actually all the companies that offer regional pricing do that with the hope that their overall revenue will be higher that if they don't. It is a short term decision that does not have anything to do with humanity.
That said, Sublime Text implements regional pricing with nagware. A larger percentage of devs in poorer countries will be in trial mode, happy that they do not have to pay or use a pirate version.
Do it with an honour system and leave it up to the customers. Should probably work given that you can keep using an unpaid version forever (at least in ST2 you can).
In theory, and by law, you're paying to use the editor.
But Sublime Text lets you "evaluate" it as long as you want, so by buying a license, you're not actually paying for the editor, you're paying for not having UNREGISTERED in the title and for not having window pop-up once in a while.
Even though that's probably wrong from ethical perspective, that's not worh 70 USD to many people, especially when they live in a place where average wage is under 5 USD/hour like Eastern Europe or Russia, not eve talking about India or someplace like that.
We don't know that he's a professional developer. He could be a student (or in a million other situations). I know that when I was 12 years old trying to learn C on my own, spending $70 on an editor would have been unthinkable.
Absolutely, but the answer to that problem shouldn't really be to use it unlicensed, even if it's 'only' nagware rather than a trial. There are many free alternatives that do the same job very well.
exactly!
I've bought SublimeText couple years ago, when the value after currency conversion was 4x higher than for someone who earns in dollars - still it was the best investments in dev tool ever!
1. Open source serves developers, and I'm a developer (as all the Sublime Text users, I guess).
2. I don't mean "change the syntax color", I mean, change every single pixel of its UI.
3. it's not free, it means that IT'S NOT FREE, you can just evaluate it, and then you MUST buy it. If you are using it for anything more than evaluating, you are violating its license.
4. seems fair, I don't really like python, and I think that JS based editors are much easier to hack and to develop plugins for.
PLUS: ST still has a super quick loading time which makes it a great addition to emacs/vi in some use cases.