Comment by dewey
4 days ago
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.