Comment by jonas21
6 months ago
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.
They literally stopped developing for about 5 years, it wasn't just about the team not keeping up
I don't think development actually stopped. ST3 was in a quiet public beta for a long time, but you can see builds of ST3 from 2013 to 2019: https://www.sublimetext.com/3.
Why would you stop developing for 5 years?
Maybe they just wanted to do something else. Sometimes people just don't want to grind on endlessly for theoretically more money when what they've got already is enough for them.
Probably to write sublime merge
If they were already having trouble keeping up, then perhaps taking years off and building Sublime Merge wasn't the right strategy.