Comment by keb_
4 days 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.
4 days 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.
There 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?
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.
It's the LSP plugin that finally drove me to leave ST4 for Zed. Language integration is table stakes for an editor now. The fact that ST support is behind a volunteer plugin instead of integrated directly in the editor just means it's never going to be as good as a editor that does have first class support. The ST devs need to actually improve the editor, but I haven't seen any material updates in years.
I think it's less that they sat on their laurels and more that a team of 2 had trouble keeping up with the dozens of well-paid folks working on VSCode. Which suggests that perhaps a shareware model did not work out so well for them.
5 replies →
Agreed, LSP has replaced Linter extensions and the TabNine LLM which is nice (and snappy). Even if some of the lsp servers are clunky to use.
even before VSCode Atom had started to eat their lunch
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.
I dislike "$x is dead" as much if not more as you do, and I'm sure it works fine as something doesn't need to be the most popular choice to be working.
With that being said, just a quick look at, for example Stack Overflow 2025 survey tells me it doesn't have the same mindshare it once had.
Eh.. I gave ST4 a go earlier this year and moved away from it due to plugins I wanted not being updated for years, and no longer working. That really feels on the cusp of being dead to me
There needs to be a critical mass of people using it for things that aren't core to stay updated
3 replies →
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.
The 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.)
5 replies →
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.
NB: Not all parts of VSCode are open source, especially not many popular extensions.
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.
For me, it was that the maintainer of a language plugin I used was, um, challenging to work with. I wanted to contribute to add some much-requested functionality and he talked to me like I was a toddler and warned me not to waste his time.
Well, OK then. Back to Emacs I went.
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.
I think it stopped taking off when they stopped developing on it for something like four years
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.
People refer to it as VSCode, but do people really use VSCode or VSCodium? I personally use VSCodium. I think that is the most de-telemetry'd version of it, I think?
1 reply →
and before that was TextMate.
vscode came along with a thriving extension ecosystem. That made up for any pitfalls really.
They 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.
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).
That makes sense. The rest of us left ST a long while ago, and the rest remain because they're happy with it and have been for a long time.
Why do you think that it is not thriving? Is the company struggling? Not everyone needs to use the thing to be thriving.
I 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.
I 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.
It 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... (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.
That’s true. It’s all relative.
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.
It 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.
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.
ST 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.
6 replies →
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++.
How is Sublime faster?
ST 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.
> 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.
> You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.
Or until some change in the underlying OS makes it no longer able to run. Not saying that happens frequently, but it does happen.
> 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.
New font pickers, settings dialogues and other "polish" is hardly what i'd call new features. I listed those as "improvements".
I'm not trying to start a fight, and i respect the work that has been done, but VS Code releases more features in a month that ST has released in the entire ST4 lifecycle, as does Zed. I understand the team is (a lot) smaller. My frustration is that when a new release comes out, it's mostly polish, and not fixing the real problems, such as lack of integration and plugins.
You may choose to brush it off as just an old fart rambling on the internet, but i'm not alone with this opinion, and i have ST licenses dating back to the original version, and i have chosen not to renew my ST4 license. When you start losing the "religious" users, maybe it's time to reevaluate ?
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.
That 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.
6 replies →
Zed 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.
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..