Comment by mccoyb

I'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.

Yeah, as others already mentioned, I think they sat on their laurels for a bit too long and let VSCode overtake it.

For what it's worth, I went from ST3 -> VSCode -> ST4, and have been happy since. I've found that I prefer my text editor with minimal extensions, and with Sublime Text's LSP Plugin, I'm pretty content. The performance and customizable UI make it more worth it to me than VSCode.

I don't get this Sublime is dead nonsense. It's still being updated and works great. It's been my editor of choice for years and I happily pay for my license. I'd probably pay more if they asked me, it's tremendous value for money in my opinion.

Yeah 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

Plugins 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.

VSCode copied most of the good features of ST and it is free and open source. Just that is enough to overtake it.

I still use it, it is maintained and it is very good and fast, and that it didn't try to reinvent itself is a good thing for me. But it is not a full IDE (not Jetbrains), it didn't jump on the AI bandwagon (not Cursor), and it is not free (not VSCode), so it is not surprising that it lost some market share. But it is not dead.

good question. I think the community fell off and many plugins were left unmaintained. I was using it for over a decade up until recently. ST4 had so many plugin issues and it stopped being worth manually fixing.

Yes, VSCode killed it, because VSCode was free. Which is kind of sad because ST2 is actually noticeably faster than VSCode. Someone mentioned Atom, but that was never really a contender, not many people used it.

Personally at that time (circa 2013 I think) I wasn't using it because it lacked integrated features like debugger or good autocomplete. I was using a specific editor, but one editor per language (java = eclipse, C++ = QTCreator, C = geany). I feel like there wasn't a true "one size fits all" editor (except maybe Vim, but it felt so... unfriendly?). Also, I'm not sure it was available on Linux (don't quote me on that)

I love ST and don't get why it stopped taking off. VSCode is way too heavyweight for just editing text and TextEdit is more like WordPad on Windows than Notepad.

Anecdotally a lot of people I know went from Sublime to Atom to VSCode. I think it mostly was about scale of community and momentum of updates.

Basically yes, vscode was free, almost as fast and had more features, like out of the box intellisense.

and before that was TextMate.

vscode came along with a thriving extension ecosystem. That made up for any pitfalls really.

I'm using Sublime Text. I feel that most people using ST are happy with it and been happy with it for a long time, you don't see many posts about it cause most of the userbase does not make using Sublime Text into part of their digital persona like many users of other editors (not speaking as if doing this is a bad thing, but you'll see fans of other editors being a lot more vocal).

Why do you think that it is not thriving? Is the company struggling? Not everyone needs to use the thing to be thriving.

I mean that they solved the funding model that pays the bills of their employees, not that they solved becoming the most widely used text editor in the world.

Yeah, 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.

This 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++.

> They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions)

Licenses are perpetual. It is not a subscription. Don't like the work we've done? You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.

> there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025)

August 2024 we added kinetic scroll and xdg-activation support for Wayland; we also added the ability to configure image extensions and allow dynamically switching between the hex-editor and image view.

November 2023 we added native font dialog support for switching fonts.

August 2023 we added webp and proper support for running as administrator on all platforms.

November 2022 we added syntax-based code folding and operating system recent file integration

December 2021 we added GB18030 support.

I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.

You can read the full changelogs here: https://www.sublimetext.com/download

> Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.

We do stable releases infrequently, because they're stable. If you want more frequent releases you can switch to the development releases. You can see from the build number how many builds we've done of ST4 since the release: it's around 150.

Please don’t conflate limited updates with subscriptions. The problems with subscriptions are that the company can take away your own files, the company can take away your software, the lifetime cost is extremely high, and the company can unilaterally change the deal or stop offering one. None of this applies to limited updates offers like Sublime Text’s. You pay once and keep it forever. The three year limit is on the time into the future for which the company continues to add to what you’re keeping forever. Of course this isn’t unlimited, it’s pay once for the program, not pay once for the lifetime servitude of everybody who works on it.

It 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.

Zed 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.

ST is not electron..

And Zeds multiplayer features might make it so your workplace mandates Zed if you're unlucky and Zed succeeds with their plan.

Zed is fully open source. Fork it. The code is pretty nice, too, easy to understand.

if you haven't checked neovim out, the Lua based config is really nice and easy to grok these days. 10x better than classic vimscript!

You can try Helix editor, it is super underrated editor. I always wanted to go down the vim/nvim path but just couldn't stick to it, especially with nvim. Helix configuration is straightforward have some pretty nice built-ins and it is the fastest/snappiest editor I have used so far.

Nothing against emacs, but check out NeoVIM. If you like Emacs, you might like NeoVIM and its powerful extensibility features.

Eventually you will need a text editor with your emacs :)

I hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).

We're working on it! :)

You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).

Unless they have very unusual terms on their funding, it isn't really entirely in their control in the long term. Hopefully they find a way to make their investors whole that doesn't suck for everyone else, but if not, well, I at least appreciate that the editor is truly open source, since at least it offers a contingency plan in the worst cases.

If I'm wrong I'd love to know, but I think that we need to start talking about what funding really implies more honestly. It's traditionally met with unabashed enthusiasm and congratulations, which I totally understand, but it's a mutual exchange, not an award or a grant. I absolutely believe that everyone wants to make good on their promises, but promises made to users are not legally binding, and the track record for upholding those has not been great. Plus, as a user, I want to pay for software, but nothing feels worse than paying, then watching enshittification unfold anyways... When this happens, the investors should send you a nice postcard thanking you for paying back some of their money.

Can $20/mo sustain a text editor company with a massive multimillion dollar valuation? Well, we'll see. Good luck Zed Industries, we're all counting on you.

you don't have to choose. paid things get enshittified just as easily as free things

For 2038 I predict Epochalypse and since there will only be vibe coders by then, good luck to y'all.

Sure but does it mean that every business needs to be unicorn?

[dead]

I haven't seen any negativity only push back. Rust became too hyped. I don't think Rust has a visibility problem right now. Everyone who cares enough already knows about it.

Also, it doesn't have to be rust, it could be C# or Zig or Lua or whatever

Whilst rust is a big part of this it is not the core of their innovation. Pushing everything to the GPU is.

Stating that everyone else is building on Electron belies your lack of exposure to any editors other than vscode \ atom spin offs.

Realistically all the editors including those based on Electron could easily shift to leveraging the GPU more and that would be big leap forward for performance.

They have some house cleaning to do in their leadership before I am willing to use a product they back.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

Point was they didn't have Zed in their portfolio until this announcement.

This quote slaps!