I love Sublime Text. It's one of my favorite pieces of software. I have it running 100% of the time on every machine I work on.
It's where I write all of my personal notes, blog posts, and it's where I wrote both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters".
At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that's been Visual C++, Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and most recently VS Code.
That doesn't mean to me that I want Sublime to turn into an IDE. I like that it's lighterweight than that. It's the perfect sweet spot for me of rich enough to handle piles of notes and documents and small scale code editing, but not so huge and cumbersome that it gets in my way.
Funnily, my approach is somehow opposite. I run Emacs with all bells and whistles to write whatever language. With LSPs, you are now not married to a language-specific IDE. As a developer, I just start Emacs in server mode and never shut it down.
Then I use emacsclient to edit all kinds of files. It loads instantly, handles any reasonable files, can access remote files when needed, and has all the tools I want handy.
OTOH the IDE features do not clutter anything: I have no tabs, no toolbars, no file trees — not until I ask for them.
It looks like the comment is posted to a wrong thread.
(FTR, the setup above is used for practical, mostly commercial programming; I've left academia without even finishing my post-grad study, decades ago.)
I use sublime in exactly the same way. I've written hundreds of blog post on it. I use it for light data manipulation and other file editing. For writing, I like how I can move text up/down like code when I want to move around items in my outline. I showed a writer friend of mine this and it blew his mind (he doesn't know anything about text editors).
For data manipulation, I like multi-line cursors. Sure, I have expensive IDEs that can do this too, but sublime is great for non-technical people and it's very affordable and lightweight as you mentioned.
My other friend spends a lot of time in spreadsheets, and he was trying to import a bunch of tabular data one time and it didn't quite work due to the source formatting. I showed him how to pull it into sublime, quickly add some commas and remove some junk data on every line to get it in shape for importing into Excel. He loved it!
Well said. I work in networking, and I use Sublime for editing router configurations before updating them/applying them etc.
I love that it's fast and performant and isn't chock-full of IDE features.
I've been a vim user for almost all my life, but a workmate showed me him editing configs using Sublime and he was so fast and quick (especially multiple pointers) - plus we use git a lot (sublime merge) so I tried it and was very impressed.
I still use vim a lot, but I simply love Sublime Text (and Merge) as well.
> At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that's been Visual C++, Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and most recently VS Code.
This is what I do too, some IDEs are just well-suited for one language or stack over others. That said, I wish languages and IDEs and editors would share ideas more often. I actually don't hate XCode except for the performance, but I prefer the git interface of VSCode, and I prefer the ability to dangle commas and easily format JS/TS consistently (although the tools somehow used to be easier to set up) in VSCode. (absolutely hate prettier)
Same! I love that it is so snappy and fast, and don't choke on larger files. I use it for all of my non-programming note taking. I also hope it don't turn into a IDE.
SublimeText is where I go to take some notes I want to write unformatted, or with some markdown.
It's where I go to paste some blob of JSON or logs from a random command that I want to parse out into something more readable than my terminal gave me.
It's where I write a random snippet of code to help someone who's asking me a question, or a bash script for a one-off job.
It's not my IDE and I don't want it to replace my IDE, just like I don't want my leatherman tool or swiss army knife to replace my power drill or pliers.
I've been a big fan of VS Code but the latest updates have shown Microsoft simply can't shake their addiction to bloating software with unnecessary features, so likely back to Sublime Text I go.
I've been running vscodium for a couple of years now, and they rip out the MS specific stuff so no ChatGPT and so forth. I haven't noticed any slowdowns.
Out of curiosity, what is it about an IDE that you find useful...? I'm probably just a heathen, but I've always done the build/run steps on the command line, and Sublime has LSP for all the syntax & semantics goodies other than that -- like for Python, I've got Ruff (syntax), Jedi (semantics), and CoPilot (autocomplete) running happily, with what I feel is an impressive amount of configurability.
Are people just working on more complex software than I am so you need the build steps hidden behind a UX, or am I missing some killer IDE feature that I don't even know about?
EDIT: It probably helps that I'm a vim die-hard and couldn't imagine clicking on something to rebuild the program! And Sublime's Vim support is better than any real vim program I've ever used, much less the half-hearted versions available in the IDEs I've tried. Maybe that's the main disconnect, and y'all just prefer having dropdown menus?
IDEs can have just as powerful keyboard shortcuts. IdeaVIM within Jetbrains is probably the most feature complete vim emulation?
What sets IDEs apart from trying to convert an editor to an IDE with a bunch of plugins is:
- somebody somewhere is hopefully sitting down with a cohesive vision of tying these tools together, instead of an assemblage of plugins each with their own visions. I would very much prefer to use their vision (a la macos/windows/Ubuntu) vs trying to configure each plugin to my own (arch/Gentoo). It could be an age thing, but at this point I really don't have the enthusiasm to become an expert at 12 different config file syntaxes and read the docs for all the options for each plugin i would need to tweak.
- an IDE is all encompassing in certain ways that is amazing. For example, Jetbrains is not only a fantastic code editor/refactoring swiss knife, it also has excellent git integration, and can leverage the same code navigation capabilities within diffs and PRs. It will autostash in branch specific stashes, and I can visually browse and diff these. I can attach to databases and get full SQL query and view capabilities, so it isn't just about general purpose programming languages.
- it can be hard to explain to people who haven't used a language specific IDE, how much further along its refactoring capabilities are compared to any LSP. Note that this applies much more to Java/C# than to something like python, both because of static typing and decades of investment.
- as an example of integration, say you add a new function in a file. Not only does Jetbrains highlight the modified file in the Git commit panel, but the structure panel will actually color that function differently and so on.
- due to widespread use of Jetbrains in certain communities, people will build valuable plugins to relatively niche things. So Jetbrains has excellent CMake support and decent Bazel support.
- I like the keyboard, but I also like and acknowledge that the mouse is much better at certain things. For interactive reading, I like I can right click on a commit and say "rebase from here" instead of looking up, copying and posting the red into my git rebase -i command. Conflict resolution, line by line inclusion etc. is also easier with a mouse.
I am very competent at the command line, but beyond a certain project size, IDEs just make sense to me.
You didn't mention debugging (breakpoints, step through, inspecting variable values at runtime). If you are writing code and aren't doing these things, you probably should be!
Some of us have jobs and do this professionally, not as a hobby. That’s why we use an IDE. Vim is a fun toy where you can hack together a poor man’s IDE but I grew out of that phase a long time ago.
In some cases we are forced to use a specific IDE. Not optional.
Not sure if you are facetious or not, but here's why I use an IDE.
Many years ago I saw an advertisement about some cooking tool. This old East Asian grandma, ninja grandma looking, was doing some prep work for some dish. She stops, looks in disgust at the tool she was using and says "this is meant to bring joy, but this is not bringing any joy". She then switched to the "better" tool and all was good with the universe and much joy for everyone.
This is why I use the tools I use, because they bring me joy. There is an argument to be made that I use some of my tools because they bring me less sadness, but oh well.
I use vscode because it brings me joy, nevermind that I use less than 10% of its capabilities (eyeballing). I compile, run tests, use source control in Windows Terminal, because Windows Terminal brings me more joy than the vscode terminal.
I use a cage on my photo camera because it brings me joy. I use a Peak Design sling because it brings me joy. I use my Lowepro sling bag, that I got as a bonus after buying a cheapish tripod, because it brings me joy. The next version of my bag, size wise, it's a proper backpack, now I'm planning to get one and see how the joy levels are.
You use whatever you use because that brings you joy. You can try and rationalize this in any way you want, at the end of the day, the amount of joy is the only real reason you use what you use. Whatever we use doesn't make us better or worse, it makes us human.
I assume they mean they build their projects by typing in the terminal commands directly, not that they have vim rigged up to build stuff via keyboard shortcut. I don't think most people use their IDEs like a text editor with a built-in terminal.
100% ditto for me. It's the interface for my external brain. The file search and global search are exactly what I need, and the multi-cursor editing, etc. are fantastic.
I always have my IDE up on one monitor and Sublime on the other.
Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.
For starters, I love the licensing, as it is very fair: I bought a personal license and I can take it to as many machines as I have (I do use many different computers). And you can buy it one time, no silly monthly subscription fees.
As a result, Sublime ist the only commercial (locally installed) software I still use, and it is always open.
There are situations, where I use macros, regex substitutions, or browsing the file system (using the keyboard only for speed) when I prefer to use my other editor, Emacs.
I recently played with Zed, which looks cute, but I immediately lost an important file, so back I was in the Sublime buffer. (Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything.)
I tend to have many Windows open (several dozens), some of them for several years, others for five minutes. The only two features I would like are:
- search across all open files and
- a list of edit buffers that is itself an editable buffer that you can walk around using cursor key and select a file by hitting RETURN like Emacs has it.
Generally, I prefer that I doesn't become a feature overloaded big monster of a program that can do everything (that's Emacs already, but I like both, I just want them to stay different).
Although for longer-term programming of bigger projects I prefer IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or PyCharm CE, in recent time, I had to write mostly small programs, and both Emacs or Sublime fit that bill (no need for language servers for me for two screens full of a Python script as I also teach that stuff).
It's not a one-time purchase if you consider updates.
> Personal licenses are a once off purchase, and come with 3 years of updates. After 3 years, an upgrade will be required to receive further updates.[0]
Tbh I think this is fair, but it surprises me every 3 years when I have to pay up again xD
I actually like when I get the note that I need to pay for the upgrade. It's a good reminder that I still find Sublime valuable (so much that I use almost daily), and that I got 3-4 years of free upgrades for a fair price (vs. subscription models like 1Password, or version-specific rip-offs, like VMware Workstation).
It's one of my favorite piece of software. Obsidian being another one.
Sublime’s behaviour isn’t an autosave, it just never loses text in a window. You can upgrade the entire OS, start Sublime and your windows and text will be waiting for you, regardless of saved or unsaved state. I’ve got five-year-old scratchpad windows open that I’ve never saved.
I do this with Notepad++ and honestly I have mixed feelings about it. It's so convenient but I feel weird about constantly pasting semi-important notes and snippets into this unnamed, unsaved, unsynced doc that just sits there always open on my desktop.
Basically I just feel guilty that I'm not using a "proper" note taking application when so many of them exist.
I use notepad++ in the same way without guilt, I also have a paper notebook where I write things in the same random chaos. In the past I had at a time a LG monitor that had really large bezels and I used to glue post its to it all the time as my "temporary" notes.
Most of note taking applications I tried attempt to convince all my text is important and must be stored and if possible classified and that's just not how my relationship with physical notes is.
I resonate a lot with this. Like most of what goes into that system really is pretty disposable, but it would be nice if a note-taking app could just quietly swallow anything I didn't look at for a few days, while still making it available as an "also, this?" entry in full text search. Or maybe for a kind of context-aware search/browsing, if it were possible to do a query like "show me everything I added or altered around the same time I was working with keywords x and y".
I used to use a clipboard manager. It had two functionalities:
- The ability to scroll or search my clipboard history
- The ability to pin/favorite individual entries, which would then show up in the pinned/favorited tab
That thing was practically my extra brain before the database corrupted itself... (that threw me so off that I don't even remember anymore most of the time from back when I had it.)
That was not my experience with sublime because it'd just spontaneously lose a session along with all unsaved data. Some other people would have similar problems too (just look up 'sublime lost session', and apparently people are still having these kinds of problems with them complaining even quite recently).
I think you need to create a project file and then it stores things there.
For a long time I would get paranoid about accepting Mac updates which would require a reboot because then I'd lose my undo history and then I discovered that this is all I would need to do.
I work in AI so we typically work over SSH on machines with big GPUs. Most of my colleagues use VSCode because it has a very good Remote Development extension.
I actually have heard that working over a remote connection can be a pain. From what I've seen from other Sublime users is that they will usually just mount a drive and then edit off that. There are also a couple of SSH plugins that can be used. In the past, I've just downloaded the files I've needed and then used rsync or scp. Not slick, but it works.
Same experience. My local machine at $Job is so slow and locked down that spinning up a VM in the cloud + VSCode remote plugin is the only way I can develop now. I would not have switched if I could edit the remote filesystem without syncing. I've worked on a ton of projects with the paid SFTP plugin but it was too painful in this case.
The only reason I moved away from subl is that I got access to a big ass machine and I needed to work remotely. The performance of VS code here is so good that often times I forget that the code and terminal is not my local machine.
This would be my top feature request. In addition to being great to have generally, there are increasingly environments where this is essentially a requirement and local copies are often verboten so you can't just use rsync/ssh.
In principle I agree, in practice I haven't found an OS based filesystem mount that works as reliably as vscode. In particular, I mean the connection is relatively robust, reconnects automatically most of the time after an outage and editing is totally asynchronous, i.e. there's no noticeable pause after saving before continuing editing and no lag (other than what's induced by the electron) when editing.
Can't this be solved using a remote file system these days?
I haven't done it in years since with every customer from the last few years the only official way to get to prod is a CI-pipeline, but I think I remember using sfpt or ssh-based file systems even a decade back?
You can use a remote FS but it is nowhere close to the experience VSCode gives you. For instance, running code will run it locally, not on the remote machine.
I've used it for 15 years and ST is still the first thing I install on a new PC.
All thoughts, meeting notes, journals, blog post drafts... everything is jotted down in ST first. I even went as far as writing my own to-do list syntax highlighter[1] which is the main reason ST is always open, at home and at work, even though I mostly use VSCode and IntelliJ for coding nowadays.
I also use sublime for managing todo and IDE for coding as my work repo uses custom tooling for build and autocomplete which only supports Visual Studio.
I use PlainTasks [0] which is very similar to your plugin but also has a few keyboard shortcuts to toggle the item state.
Using this with a watered down GTD setup has really brought a lot of peace in both my personal and professional life.
Love the simplicity of your to to-do list syntax highlighter in comparison to todo.txt. That's more how my brain works, as simple as possible. Especially your take on the due date vs. date when you plan to do it.
Will definitely try it out.
Why does sublime do code navigation in such a clunky way? Such as "go to definition". Control click does not work, instead you need to press the far away F12 key. It then opens up a new tab instead of an inline dropdown. Apparently that tab isn't normal text, it's clickable text. it contains usages as well as definitions so you need to manually scan and decipher the results. When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)
The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.
Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.
Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?
Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.
> It then opens up a new tab instead of an inline dropdown. Apparently that tab isn't normal text, it's clickable text.
If you're talking about the built-in goto-definition then it's definitely not a tab, it's a popup similar to goto-anything and the command palette. You can type to filter, use the arrow keys, press enter, ctrl+enter for side-by-side, etc.
If you want to use the mouse you can hover over the symbol and get a list of definitions and references.
> it contains usages as well as definitions
That sounds like you've got a syntax that isn't classifying its symbols correctly. I vaguely remember Microsoft's Typescript package doing this. All the built-in syntaxes properly classify definitions so you won't have references show up in that list. It's possibly simply removing a package will fix this for you.
> When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)
Not scrolling to the definition is odd, it's working fine for me. I agree we could highlight the definition better; by default the line is highlighted though. You can enable line highlighting if that's too subtle.
> The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.
We don't currently have a terminal, but the Terminus plugin is fairly popular if that's what you're looking for.
> Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.
We generally don't integrate that tightly with build systems; doing so effectively requires a plugin per external build system. Though I don't know if you'd actually want to have all targets listed for Make, since virtually everything is a target (and apparently this wasn't possible until --print-targets was added last year).
> Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?
If you have the build system set to "Automatic", then ST will automatically pick which ones to make available. For Make it'll check for a Makefile for instance. You can then use Build With… to select the one you want to use. If you've manually picked a different build system then that's what ST will use.
> Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.
The behavior you want it to have sounds like how I remember it being, but that's clearly not the case; I'll have to look into that, thanks.
Thank you for responding. I was wrong about some of these in hind sight.
Today when I tried goto-definition, it worked as expected. I'm not sure why it didn't before. This was for a C project. I do have various Package Control packages installed:
And you were right, I had set my build process manually. I'm sorry for slandering.
What I meant by "terminal" is the output monitoring pane. Whenever I build "C - single file" or "Python - single file", a pane with <textarea> behavior appears in the bottom, showing the program output. But if said program is interactive, there's no way to send it any input. Nor to stop the program. Building it again leads to a new instance of the program being spawned, but the old one stays running.
It's rare for an app dev (of such a popular tool) to go out of their way to respond to a random forum user. Even rarer is to address every point on their list with patience and consideration.
You must be a remarkable person and I wish you nothing but success.
Is there any chance we'd see a Sublime Debug? Loved Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. The main thing I'm missing in my life is a really good and fast cross platform UI for a LOT of debugger backends. (I tend to works with a lot of programming languages, and CLI debuggers are really clunky to use).
ST user who is on it still mostly just by inertia (learning tools is my least favorite part of the job) but really not getting the features I want/need from it. This'll help!
Cool, but git integration in the editor was also cool until SublimeHQ decided to spin out a dedicated client for it.
The only debugger I'm happy with right now (in terms of performance/features) is RemedyBG, but it's windows only and compiled languages only. In general, I mostly live with painfully slow debugging in VSCode.
I would really love to see RemedyBG's dedicated debugging UI/UX approach refined by some group like SublimeHQ. A group who knows how to turn the UX up to 11.
> Cool, but git integration in the editor was also cool until SublimeHQ decided to spin out a dedicated client for it.
Is it completely removed from Sublime Text?
I love merge, but the simplest controls like stage/unstage/commit/indicate file status seem kind of essential.
Having said that, Merge is far and away the best git UI I've used. It has saved my bacon a few times. I'm not terrible with git in the terminal (I use it there 98% of the time), but sometimes... I really don't want to be doing things without a decent visual representation of the mess and chaos, and intuitive access to the tools available. I get why they wanted to create Merge.
Thanks for Sublime Text! It's been my daily driver for over 15 years :). 10 of those developing Rust, and making heavy use of the Rust Analyzer/LSP plugin infra.
I also want to thank you for having such a reasonable licensing model, I'm launching my own desktop app in the next week or so, and I plan to have a very similar model to Sublime (free to use with nags, license is good for any personal usage, inclusive of updates for X period of time).
The most important thing for me as I am using ST since ca. 2009. I am retro programming fan and ST is the only editor that still allows me to conveniently work on windowses across 98 to 7. I am not using the most recent version, heck I haven't upgraded it for few years now, but I hope the compatibility still remains.
I've been using Sublime Text since version 2, so probably close to 15 years, and I love it! It's my go to editor for code (mostly front end web dev but I've used it for C# as well, when VS won't get out of the way) as well as all of my writing (using Markdown). I've published 5 tabletop RPGs and related supplements (with another on the way) all written using Sublime plus so many lines of notes and blog posts. It's a dream to work with!
I've paid for my licence but is there a tip jar anywhere?
I've been a Sublime Text user for ten years, bought it and Sublime Merge multiple times. A year ago, I permanently moved to VSCode because of three things:
1. Solid coding AI integration with frequent improvements. Sublime Text at best gives you an option to plug an LSP with modest capabilities. It's behind the times.
2. Small community, infrequent extension updates.
3. Limited UI capabilities. Extensions have to contort hard to fit into available extension points.
Yeah I have accessibility/distraction issues with all the flair and animations and small text in vs code.
I know all text editors need some degree of config to be comfortable but sublime is nearly immediately usable. Vs code is the only thing I need to configure to remove flair and features vs extend them.
That's basically my experience. I've switched from ruby to golang a while ago and developing in sublime text was become a pure pain, while vscode provided a lot of plugins to solve basic needs. Then i switched back to ruby and discovered that vscode also have superior ruby support.
I still love sublime text, but there is no way i'm going back to it.
1. There are several plugins that allow AI integration
2. There is an active community on https://discord.sublimetext.io
3. From what I can perceive based on Sublime HQ's responses, it's main focus for Sublime Text is simplicity and to be a text editor. You can notice this if you look at the banner text in the website; it says "Text Editing, Done Right". And while it is mainly used for code and most of its users are developers, it tries not to be. However, it does provide people the ability to extend it however they please.
Overall, Sublime Text is indeed not as fully featured as VSCode because it is not supposed to.
I don't use it much for programming, since I mostly use IntelliJ for that.
Where Sublime shines for me is opening large files, and opening pretty much any file. So many times MacOS wants me to open a json file in Xcode, or a txt file in TextEdit, when all i want to do is open it in Sublime! And I know that i can open files that are multiple GB without issues, just takes a few seconds :P
And the Ctrl-D shortcut and multi-cursor in general is so neat. I know other editors have it too now, but when I showed my wife how useful it was for simple tasks like formatting a list of emails...she ended up making her company buy her a license and teaching others how to use it.
Just in case you or another reader doens't know (you probably do), it is very easy to configure MacOS to by default open .txt or .json (or whatever) files in the app of your choice, such as ST. I have ST opening .txt and .json, yeah.
Perhaps Sublime Text could run some annual anonymous survey?
It could both be an indicator of what the community is doing, and who your users are, and also a way to promote some new features people might have missed (like the survey "state of CSS").
I enjoy both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge almost everyday, thank you very much for making them!
Some annoyances, though:
- the way plugins are displayed inside ST while browsing for them is limited. Other editors usually provide a much better UI. The web version of package control is required in the end.
- Ctrl-P does not the same thing in ST and SM, and it always tricks me. I wished they would be more aligned by default, but that ship has sailed I guess. I should rebind them.
- SM UI can be slow / be unresponsive for a while like when a tool has run and 20k files were created but not part of git ignore yet. It makes deleting them quite difficult from the UI.
- I wish SM would allow me to pick up patch files from the diff UI and import them from there more easily.
- I wish Mac OS dictation would be more native in SM, and allow me to change language like in other Mac OS apps.
I'm genuinely interested in seeing what you kind of envision for Sublime Text, its evolved nicely, and arguably I would say that it inspired some of today's top editors like VS Code and even Atom, I definitely felt like those took strong inspiration from ST.
Piling up to the grateful comments, I've been using Sublime Text for years and still love it. It has never quite done it as an IDE for me as I'm used to more fully fledged ones like IntelliJ, however it is an amazing scratch pad and text manipulation tool. I pretty much have it permanently open.
This post made me realise I had never bought a license, it is now done. Thank you for it being fair, by the way.
On the odd chance that you read this and feel like replying, I have always been in awe of Sublime Text's UI. Can you elaborate a bit on how it works? There was a short comment by Jon Skinner that it is custom and written on top of a cross-platform portability layer, but I mean, I'd love to hear some more details.
I’ve been a happy user customer for subl and smerge since launch even when a student.
I really really appreciate how few regressions, amazing low latency and always refining everything. And I’ve def had positive interactions with everyone who is working on the sublime sublime software since it’s been out. So like 10-15 years ish I’m going to guess without looking stuff up
Are there are plans to improve Search UI and make sidebar more capable. I really like the way VSCode’s search interface where results are listed on sidebar and clicking an item opens the file in the editor.
Regardless of the above experience, Sublime Text is still my daily driver since 2012. Nothing has come close to it.
there is a "Find in Files" feature. It will show you a new tab with results where you can use key binds to navigate (next, previous, open line of result)
You can see the feature under "Find > Find in Files"
You can see the "navigation" under "Find > Find Results"
As someone who also loves ST, please do not do this. Stay far away from bringing in something like that. If someone really wants this it seems much better suited for a plugin, which anyone can make.
Long time Sublime customer here: Please, please do not add any LLM integrations. One of the main reasons I love Sublime is that I can just focus on writing code, without 100 distracting things popping in and popping out. Also, that I support a business with my money that does not spend resources on the LLM hype.
The resistance developers have to LLMs considering how much they're 10xing myself and many other devs I know is just sad to see. Anytime new disruptive technology comes in there's always an old guard that doesn't adapt in time.
In this thread you're seeing survivorship bias. We're discussing an editor that doesn't support AI.
AI is Rashomon. It's just an association engine of immense scope. We're not talking to an alien intelligence; we're talking to ourselves. It's an existential mirror, and each person's experience will vary. Some people can control the dance of the campfire flames. Some people just aren't cut out to be shamans.
Evolution is always making failed experiments, as a hedge against catastrophic ecosystem change. I'm convinced that neurodivergents are better suited to becoming AI Centaurs, in the sense Gary Kasparov promoted after he came to terms with his chess loss to IBM's Big Blue.
I made my career by computerizing a branch of mathematics that did not want to cooperate. Now in retirement, I see AI as the key to achieving my dreams before my father's dementia arrives. It has radically transformed my past month.
My preferred language is Lean 4, and AI has as hard a time coding in it as people. This morning's retooling has been distilling the Lean 4 website down to fit well within a 200K token context window. I prefer AI chat at arms length so I make the mistakes not it, but with enough editor integration that we can both see what we're doing.
I loved Sublime Text when I used it. And AI coding doesn't primarily accelerate one's original spec, it encourages tool scopes one might never have dared attempt. So writing a Sublime Text plugin that interfaces with an Anthropic API key is something any of us could probably knock off.
I am in the exact opposite boat - AI is significantly improving my programming flow and having to use VSCode (well, VSCodium in my case) rather than something lightweight like Sublime is suboptimal - I would love a good plugin for LLM integration ala Cody and frankly that's the only way I could see myself as a paying customer.
I'm in the best boat, I don't want to use LLM but I think ST having hooks to allow people to make such plugins (if those don't already exist) would be a fine thing. Luckily, that boat has loads of space and you're all invited :P
It isn't on Package Control yet as I just submitted the PR.
I made this as I love Sublime Text as a text editor and do not want to pollute it with AI garbage. However, there are times where I want to quickly open the same file in Cursor to hash out some their agents. Workflow is:
- lovely text editing in Sublime
- encounter something I would like AI assistance for
- quickly pop open the thing in Cursor and do the AI stuff
- hop back to Sublime to continue my lovely editing
Thank a lot for sublime, this software is incredible, especially the consistent keyboard handling across all UI, all others editors messes up on this one !
I've things I'd like to see with sublime:
- I'd like to have all menu entries accessible from command palette.
- I dont use files tabs (always hidden). I'd like to have a special mode that only tracks saved/unsaved status on files, no opened status, or something like auto close on file switch. I've just no use for the opened status, I'm not even sure why it exists besides being a relic of the past (good old) times where "goto file" did not exist.
- I like sublime to be aware of git branches changes, eg having heuristic for auto closing or revert saved files are not present in FS after branch switch. The feature is partially here with the reload suggestion. (this partially overlaps the no-open status)
- Goto default file listing should be last opened file present on fs, and then alnum sorted listing
I suspect there are roadblocks for these suggestions, sorry if I overlooked obvious issues.
Thank you so much for the tool you've built, and for being so generous in how you license it. Sublime is always installed on my machine, Sublime Merge is great too :)
Was a sublime user through version 2 and 3, which were always champions of performance, but while I installed and used 4 for a bit it never quite became part of my workflow.
I think part of it was because it sat between using neovim vs. using vscode, and if I had to reach out for vscode I probably wanted to use remote code editing, code intelligence or AI integration which a default sublime setup wasn't quite offering, and the plugin game seemed stale. Maybe there were also some Wayland issues, don't remember.
Maybe I'll try again and see what you have been up to. Using a proprietary text editor in ${current_year} feels a bit weird though.
Support for syntaxes (and/or debuggers) are mostly provided by the community. Creating a syntax for your language shouldn't be that hard afaik. Just head over to https://discord.sublimetext.io to talk to the active community
Big fan of the tool. Sublime was one of the few editors that could even open the massive logs one project was generating. The recovery is so good, I've realized I had dozens of tabs unsaved for years until IT updated machines.
One question: is there going to be another 3.x release? The popup takes you to a 4.x release, which is great if you are on 4.x. If it hit EOL, it makes it easy for us to force the update. Right now, it is in a bit of a weird in between.
ST3 won't be receiving any bugfixes or new features, so it's effectively EOL. Anyone's of course free to use ST3 or 2 or 1 if they don't wish to upgrade, we still make those available on our website.
Hi, I just renewed my sublime text and merge licenses after starting in 2021. Thank you for sticking to simple product excellence and not following trends. Thanks for focusing on the editor for human users and not pushing some service based enterprise licensing system or ai tooling where the company aspires to 1000x.
It’s a great product and my most used PC software.
Sublime user for many many years now. I've tried VSCode many times, never liked it. I use Cursor a bit now but still prefer Sublime. Thank you for building it!
One tiny thing, that I haven't investigated at all... And doesn't seem to be a common thing to worry about... If I have a file with an asterisk in it, then Sublime [0] seems to have issues displaying the file name.
Please fix the bug if possible with Sublime Merge where the UI just becomes completely unresponsive... it always happens due to using it on a workspace and its so annoying to force close and reopen it every day! I love sublime merge otherwise!
I think a big hit for ST's popularity - next to the rise of Atom and VS Code - was its upgrade from version 3 to 4; are you considering to do that again or, if funds are required, do a different way to raise money?
With the new licensing model we no longer need to hold back changes and do major releases. Avoiding the big pause in updates was partly why it was changed.
I don't use ST as my daily driver any more but I still use it for fast editing of large files occasionally. I am daily driving Merge though. Any other Sublime apps in the works?
Have you also considered offering ST and SM as a bundle price with a discount? I'd be interested just because of my lopsided use of the two apps.
Bought Sublime a decade ago, bought the new version last year, still love it.
If we're doing feature requests: a "recently closed windows" alongside the "recently closed files" would be amazing, for when I misclick and close a window containing a bunch of open files and a folder or two :)
Hi! I was a Sublime Text fan throughout University, and I would have loved to continue using it. Unfortunately for me Sublime lacks too many necessities, and that forced me off Sublime and onto the much slower VSCode.
I really wish Sublime would develop a more solid plugin system and have some sane built-ins such as a terminal.
I get where you're coming from and generally agree. The trouble is that the integrated tools are all pretty bad, in my experience. If I can use DataGrip instead of some VS Code extension called "Database Client", I'm going to use DataGrip. I will often even prefer pgsql for many tasks. A mediocre tool might save time here and there because it's convenient, but I find their broader impact is poorer work done in worse ways.
Of course, this is all opinion in a very subjective context. Some people do best-in-class work with terrible tools.
Datagrip, of course, is just the integrated database editor of intellij packaged without the rest of intellij, so it's not a rule that integrated tools are always bad
But Sublime isn't an IDE, it's just a text editor. The line is blurry (especially with how VS Code is used these days) but I have ST running next to IntelliJ all day, they serve different roles.
You don't like quickly accessing the terminal? The biggest draw for me is that VSCode can easily attaches to terminal processes, so I can launch a debugging session with custom arguments with a simple "CTRL+~" and a "npm run foo".
After I initially switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text, I used Terminus [1], which I used to swear by. But then I made an effort to strip back the amount of plugins I used, and just bound a hotkey to focus my default terminal (Konsole on KDE), and I don't really miss the integrated terminal anymore.
I paid for a license for Sublime, but then I was forced to upgrade a while ago, and my license no longer works with the new version. Is there a solution to this?
* GPU rendering
* Apple & Linux arm64 support
* Tab multi-select
* context-aware auto-complete
* TypeScript, TSX and JSX syntax support
* Much more powerful syntax engine
* Adding python 3.8 for plugins
Some personal standouts not listed are:
* Syntax-aware code folding
* Mixed-indentation highlighting ("draw_white_space" setting)
* Kinetic scrolling on Linux
* Preserved undo history
* Change-aware white-space trimming
* Asynchronous file saving
* Find result highlighting in the scroll bar
* Find-in-files filtering by gitignore
Not a question, but by God I hope Sublime makes enough money to justify continuing to do business, because if you can't both make something you love and get paid a good chunk of change for one of the best quality editors in the industry, then it would make me very sad.
I'm happy with the most of the features, bought v2, 3 & 4 over the last 13 years, but it lacks debugger, so for Rusti, I have to use VS Code -- which is awful, but there's no better alternative. I'd pay for a special plugin that will work faster than VS Code.
Semantic highlighting! The LSP thing I mean [1]. It's the one thing which I thought was just an aesthetic nicety but actually makes a huge difference. In C++ for example:
- Color virtual calls differently from direct calls to tell them at a glance
- Class members in a different color than regular variables
- Arguments in a different color than locals, in a different color than statics
- Consts in red, mutable variables in orange
makes a huge difference in effortlessly reading the code.
It's not supported in Sublime (though you can hack a kludge to make a basic version of it work).
I’d happily pay again if you come up with remote editing like VSCode has. It’s the killer feature. You can forbid me from using any of its extensions and turn off syntax highlighting, but as long as I can connect somewhere over SSH and still have the latency of local editing, I’d be using it.
That said, it seems like in 2025 AD the LSP client should come baked in and integrated, with configurations for how to start individual LSP servers possibly shipping on the side. I liked how the whole Go shebang was accessible in Zed in one click, same in VSCode.
That all said, I still use Sublime Text whenever I can.
- build system that understand colors.. out of the box..
- revamped project system so i don't have to store extra files in my root directory, there is a plugin for it, but this should be working out of the box imo
- drag&drop panels to create layout with the mouse
- tabs in output/temporary panels
- UI API for status panel, side panel and in the views
- a proper built-in terminal, i know there is Terminus, but color support is lacking, tabs support is lacking, doesn't work well with tmux, overall it's very janky (wrt to scrolling)
- sticky scrolling (the thing that pins the scope name)
or
- the thingy that says where in the code we are, i forgot how it's called: [MyStruct > my_function]
I'd be willing to pay extra for a proper terminal for ST
Not really a question, but please do not deprecate mini_auto_complete! It is one of the most useful (despite being hidden/undocumented) features of ST to me.
Thank you for well crafted and performant software! I'm oscillating often between Helix/Zed/Sublime but I'm probably never going to drop Sublime Text even if I would have to obtain new licenses for next versions.
So glad to see this. I have been down a long road of text editors:
- Sublime
- Vim
- Emacs
- Atom
- VSCode
- Jetbrains IDE
- Neovim
- Zed
- Cursor
And these aren’t just little flings. I’ve spent months if not years in most of these editors. However, at the end of the day I always come back to one: Sublime.
It is a beautiful piece of software. It feels like writing with one’s “good pen and good paper”, that high quality stationary sort of thing. It is just me and the code. There is something that just feels different or even tactile about Sublime. That actually leads me to ask as this is outside of my expertise: why does Sublime feel more tactile/real than other editors? When I look at the code in other editors it feels like I’m looking at a projector on a wall. When I look at the code in Sublime it feels like I’m looking at something painted on the wall. Anybody else have the same experience? What’s the psychological/software reason for that?
> That actually leads me to ask as this is outside of my expertise: why does Sublime feel more tactile/real than other editors?
Performance is a big part of that.
Even a few millisecond delay changes the user experience from "I am physically interacting with an object" to "I am requesting this service do a thing on my behalf". Sublime is consistently fast enough to feel like the former. Most other IDEs feel like the latter.
(Another example of this effect is the difference between driving a manual transmission and an automatic. When I drive a manual, it feels like I'm in control of the engine. When I drive an automatic, it feels like I'm executive sending messages to my engineer who then applies changes to the engine... eventually.)
Thanks for the info! I was wondering if it was something more than speed, but what you said makes a lot sense. Love the "I am interacting" vs "I am requesting" way of putting it as it highlights just how dramatically different of an experience it is.
Sublime is really snappy and responsive. But it also doesn't have as many fancy automation like jetbrains. Maybe that keeps the code "real", rather than some artifact that you have the computer manipulate for you.
This is the main reason I've ever found myself using it if not vscode or now cursor. If I have some massive file that needs messing with nothing handles it as well as sublime does.
That’s definitely part of it. Though even before I start typing and am just looking at the characters on the screen, they seem more dense, tactile, and real. Is there a categorical difference for how Sublime renders text vs other editors out there?
I don't use or actually even like Sublime, but I have the exact same experience of it. Quick loads and lack of "extras" that cause even portions of lag in the experience; there's an immediacy to Sublime.
But those things that introduce clunkiness are often very useful. They take away from the aesthetic feel of writing code, but give advantages that are too useful to give up, imho.
I wonder how much of it is simply that Sublime has a very pleasant default color theme (Monokai) in my opinion. It feels warmer than other IDEs. I actually use it in VScode too now.
I use sublime as a copy paste buffer when I need excellent visual regex search and replace. Vscodes regex search has awkward semantics (or at least I don't know them as well as sublimes) so I usually paste things into sublime, edit them with the regexes, then go back to what I was doing. My work has some extensions that only work in vscode so I'm stuck with it but it's good enough. I also never close sublime tabs and it persists them indefinitely with minimal memory usage, so I sometimes go back to grab things I was doing a few days ago. Definitely not the intended use but it works really well for me.
I really want to like Sublime (it's so fast, I like the minimal UI), but VS Code has so much inertia, and does so much out of the box or with minimal extra effort that it's hard to not use it instead.
At the end of the day, I have things to get done, I'm not here to tinker with tools. Same reason I never got into vim/emacs etc as a daily driver.
Emacs and Neovim are things one gets into in ones free time and gets good enough to make the switch at some point at the job. Of course that is mostly only feasible, if the projects at the job are set up in a tool agnostic way or choice exists in the first place.
I also want to like Sublime, but I already have a well configured Emacs and I like using free/libre software. While Sublime was great when I used it in the past, I am not sure I would use it much, since I use Emacs all day now. But the reason for Sublime over VS code is, that it is way less bloated and not running in a browser. Would need to see a direct comparison, but wouldn't be surprised, if it showed to be way snappier. If one does not need lots of specifically VS code features, I think Dublime gets out of ones way and lets you get shit done.
> Emacs and Neovim are things one gets into in ones free time and gets good enough to make the switch at some point at the job.
I'd probably never end up proficient with vim (and today neovim) if I didn't do the complete opposite of this and forced myself to use it for real work directly. True, I went a bit slower for one/two weeks, but if you really have to use something foreign for most of your work, you'll learn it really quickly, as long as you're up for looking things up as you go along. Of course, YMMV and all that yadda yadda.
I would be curious to know how you managed to do this. I really tried to do this but the tons of dev tools I am using was too much for transitioning to neovim for my daily work. Namely, I need a DAP, multiple dev tools (lsps, linters, formatters) because I work with several projects which do not have the same tools[^1]. Luckily, I do not mix multiple programming languages. Plus, I containerize all my dev env. There might be some elements missing, but the point is the number of tools is overwhelming and it makes me think that I should do the whole configuration/setup on my free time.
Did you face similar issues? If yes, how did you solve them? Or maybe your work does not need that much tools? Or you have been more minimalistic than me for the number of features to be included in the neovim configuration?
[1]: I work in R&D, I need to tweak and contribute in many papers code or different toolboxes/frameworks on top of the team projects.
I don't remember what exact year I did the transition at, but around 2014 - 2016 I think. At the time I was working on a PHP Symfony application (and its frontend made with Backbone.js) powering Typeform, and I think this was right about when docker entered the scene, we were still using Vagrant with what I think was NFS syncing or something else dog-slow. But both Docker and Vagrant works fine with vim, as long as you have a generic VM/container setup, it shouldn't matter what editor you use, in my mind.
But before that I was using Sublime Text 2, with minimal plugins/extensions, so moving to vim was mostly getting used to moving around and manipulating text, using some very basic text-based autocomplete, before eventually migrating to a "proper" setup years later. Since then, I honestly haven't touched my config much, so I'm sure there are smoother/better ways now.
Since then, I've used (neo)vim to write JavaScript (+HTML+CSS), Ruby, Go, Python, Rust, various other languages, but mostly Clojure/Script. When trying out a new language, I find some (neo)vim plugin that seems suitable and try it out. If it works well, great, otherwise try another one.
LSP and formatter were really fast to set up. I used kickstart.nvim to get started and lsp and formatter are already mostly configured.
DAP is trickier to set up but is doable. How often are you really debugging though? In the beginning just run both neovim and your ide and just switch when you debug.
Back when LSP wasn’t a thing I still used vim but would just switch to an IDE when I needed to go code exploring and needed to be able to jump to definition and stuff like that. Wasn’t a big deal and was worth it to use both tools because vim is such a superior method for editing text.
Yeah, I got used to vim while I was in school and probably wouldn't have put in the investment otherwise. It was worth. I'm not an expert in it, nor do I have a ton of fancy things installed, but it's fast and works in basically any situation (esp over SSH). My coworkers keep getting forced to change IDEs while I stick with vim.
I didn't want to switch to VS Code and kinda did b/c there is less friction when I'm using the same tools as my counterparts. I like VS Code just fine. My first true love was textmate tbh. :)
Same, after a certain point (for TypeScript particularly) I found it was too big a hassle not to switch to VS Code. All these years later, I still have VS Code configured to look and behave like Sublime. I found it funny one time when someone noticed me working on my laptop in public and said it was nice to see another Sublime user, which I had to correct him on.
I hear you. I think that is why I prefer Helix to Neovim when it comes to editors in terminals. There is a lot that is just done and there are sane defaults. I think the default Sublime experience is pretty slim and trim. Maybe too much for some but just right for me
I’ve tried all the other main editors but always come back to Sublime. The simplicity, the speed, the near instantaneous load time.
I feel like I’m such an outlier but for my text editor I don’t want all the fancy bells and whistles that come with all the IDEs nowadays. It feels like Sublime is the only one that is so intuitive OOTB while allowing access to a plethora of features (if you need/want them). Whereas the others throw everything in your face and it feels like a battle to just get it configured for your needs.
Granted, I mainly code for personal and side projects, and actually enjoy the coding part so I don’t want AI, or advanced features, writing code for me! Even for the productivity gains, I just find coding on my own enjoyable and solving problems as they arise.
That being said, I can totally understand why devs who need to collaborate with large teams, under strict deadline, across multiple countries - probably absolutely need the fancy features that come with enterprise IDEs.
I just love my Sublime editor and never plan on switching :)
I went back to Sublime Text after trying VS Code for a few months.
VS Code is very nice, when it works. My main problems had to do with the extension ecosystem. It felt very chaotic: it was hard to figure out which ones to install to get the functionality I wanted. Updates to Python extensions sometimes caused instability, crashing the editor. And I found it difficult to set extension preferences: the UI tries to be slick but in practice it ends up being clunky and awkward. On top of that, there was an annoying bug on Linux, related to Electron, that prevented the Save dialog box from appearing properly, which... kind of sucks. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/32857
Sublime is the perfect programmer's editor for dynamic languages like Python, and for general text editing. It's lightning fast. LSP is just enough to be helpful without getting in the way. Workspaces work the way I would expect. I prefer editing JSON files for preferences over navigating a complex GUI.
Best money I've ever spent on a license, and I'll happily renew just for maintenance updates, to be honest.
The way Sublime makes a strong effort to not only smooth out per-platform kinks but also better integrate into each platform it runs on is definitely a factor for my choice to use it over VS Code. macOS, Windows, Linux, whatever, it works correctly everywhere without also taking a “least common denominator” approach which I really appreciate. I wish more cross platform apps would do this.
Sublime is just great software. It does everything I could possibly ever want an editor to do, and it does it with half the memory usage of VS Code. I like VS Code well enough, but I can't abide resource waste like that, especially when it doesn't actually buy me anything.
Honestly, I use Sublime because nothing else can compare. Everything else is slow, bloated, worse to use, or some combination of the above.
I have, but seems it has evolved quite a bit in the past year when looking at their new front page. I'll probably give it a shot. But in any case, I don't like their focus in collaborative features. It brings unnecessary bloat, that is not present in Sublime.
What an oddly aggressive tone x) It's not "my" Zed's selling point because I don't develop or even use zed daily atm. But it's also not the selling point period, it's one of them, the others being e.g. performance, responsiveness, and low memory footprint, as well as integration with tree sitter and LSP.
Not sure what you mean by gamification and social, we're talking about collaborative editing, not posting to twitter lol
An open source, fast, customizable cross-platform text editor with native UI and support for plugins and language servers. I don't think there's any other software that can tick all these boxes.
I haven't tried Zed. I looked into it, but there was some reason I decided it wasn't for me. I want to say it was that they seemed focused on LLMs, but it's been a while so I forget exactly what it was that I didn't like about it when I researched.
Not the person you're replying to, but I have tried Zed and I think it does too much things I don't need (like LLM integration, all that "multiplayer" stuff), and it's funded by VCs, so it will go down the road of enshittification (or sale, or shut down) eventually.
I've used Sublime Text since it's initial release, and later on Sublime Merge, and i own licenses for every major version released.
However, my ST4 license recently expired, and that caused me to look back at the previous 3 years to see what my money was actually buying me, and it turns out it was mostly bugfixes. There have been, rather consistently, 2 releases per year (november and august), and the last major feature was in 2022 with syntax code folding and recent files integration, and those are the only "new features" added since ST4 was released in 2021.
Don't get me wrong, i don't mind paying for software, especially software i use every day, but ST4 more or less feels like it's on the backburner, with nothing much going on, so i let my "subscription" (ST4 licensing is more or less a subscription for 3 years) lapse.
I've instead switched to Zed (zed.dev) as my "main and fast" editor. Yes it has some rough edges, but feature wise it's very much like Sublime Text.
It doesn't support Windows (yet), which is not a problem for me, but i can see how that could be a dealbreaker for some.
I think that as software asymptotically approaches mostly-bugfix releases, it's a good sign that it's "done", and therefore just stable, reliable, and "boring".
Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit. It can free up your energy to spend it on more interesting things, like actual coding.
> Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit.
I agree, but considering the "editor space" has progressed a lot in the past decade or so, i would hardly call Sublime Text "done".
It has it's strengths and weaknesses, and while it was a great editor 15 years ago, and had it's share of innovative features, things have stagnated quite a bit in recent years. ST4 felt more like a minor update to ST3, and ST3 was probably also just a minor update to ST2 (i forgot which one was the big rewrite, but i think it was ST2).
Compare that to what has been going on with VSCode and Zed in recent years, which far surpass Sublime Text in many ways, and doing it for free.
So, in the end, for me, it turned out to be a subscription based "slightly better than average" editor. Yes, i still love it, and i would love for it to get a revival and spring to life again, and i would switch back in a heartbeat, but sadly the "maintenance mode" has been going on for almost a decade now.
I can empathize with your take, but my sentiment is the polar opposite. I like the toolchain shuffle - exploring this, trying out that - but I always, always come back to Sublime specifically because they have not implemented major changes. I _deeply_ appreciate the fact that it has remained essentially the same for years, and I very sincerely hope that it doesn't change much going forward. This boringness is what keeps me coming back, and is what I'm paying for.
Sublime has become my refuge from the crap that other editors are trying to cram in to every available nook and cranny. Zed was pleasant at first blush, but the way that AI is central to the platform was a huge turn-off and disabling that (and a few other things) was not intuitive. Same goes for many other editors I've tried over the years.
I would like to see more activity in plugin development and maintenance, but always peripheral to the core Sublime experience. Give me a stable, quiet, boring platform and let me choose the features and noise!
I similarly switched from ST4 to Zed after using it for several years. I agree that good software eventually becomes "bugfixes", but if you expand the universe of ST4 out to popular plugins for specific programming languages, it starts to become really buggy. That's something I wish ST would focus on, make the most popular plugins more stable and continue doing that for the next decade.
I posted in the ST forum that achieving a stable configuration of plugins in ST4 seems more difficult than it should be, but they declined to take this on as a problem.
Meanwhile Zed made it pretty easy to achieve a stable set of plugins very quickly, particularly around language services, shell integration, etc. That's what prompted me to switch; however Zed has taken a few steps backwards in that department since they started spinning out language extensions into plugins that require more configuration and are more prone to breaking.
Well, Apple is giving me more and more reasons to switch away from their default apps (which I used to love) with every release. They focus too much on new features, too little on stability and good experience.
I've already ditched Music (macOS: Cog; iOS: Decoupled), I'm holding off upgrading for Photos' sake, Home on macOS is an absolute nightmare, Mail is meh but ok (fingers crossed they won't accidentally break it), and I'm hoping they will never go after Notes - it's central to so many things in my life.
Meanwhile, I'm still using Emacs, because despite its many shortcomings (mostly the legacy architecture), ELisp makes writing simple plugins simple, and the few that I use are too excellent to get me to switch.
I guess your love is not unlike my long ago passion for CodeWright. It was such a flexible beast with perfect support for BRIEF bindings and an infinitely configurable user interface. Alas, the world preferred the simplicity of Visual Studio or JBuilder and the best programmer's editor for Windows slowly but surely withered away.
I'm not planning on repeating the mistake of learning a complex environment only to see it disappear with the demise of its parent company. That's why these days I'm mostly investing time in the Emacs ecosystem while occasionally trying and failing to love mode based setups like vim and neovim.
Similar to my love of KomodoEdit/IDE. Being built on XUL was fascinating to me as a Firefox die hard, web tech powered the UI which made it easy to hack on, and I still reckon it was the best most advanced editor for PHP at the time.
I came to Sublime Text 3 from Atom because I wanted a native editor. It boggles my mind that so many people love VS Code.
I’ve tried Zed, it’s a beautiful editor…it’s just too opinionated. For whatever reason, it doesn’t understand my Deno projects and I content get rid of the red squigglies.
VS code has good defaults and extensions but if you have time to configure it precisely it's also possible. When configured to your needs the differences between ST and VSC aren't big. What I don't understand is why would anyone use Eclipse.
Free or paid what’s the difference. If you have company you can afford it professionally, if you are a student you can get a free license, if you are NEET dev you can —————- it.
I understand the downvotes but it is an interesting point.
First thing, Eclipse is not just free as in free beer, it is also free as in freedom, which can matter.
In addition, you may be surprised how much free (as in free beer) matters to large companies and governments. Of course, a multi-billion dollar company can pay, but the simple act of acquiring a license, no matter the cost, can be a lengthy bureaucratic process for the lowly developer who needs it. It is usually much easier to use free software, especially big names like Eclipse that may be pre-approved. Of course, using a free licence you have no right to, let alone piracy is a big no no.
And while I don't think corporate inefficiency is a good reason, it is a reality and you have to work with it.
I don't really use it as a (lightweight) IDE or the like anymore, but as a place to keep unstructured notes and snippets and the like because SublimeText never ever loses anything unsaved. It's pretty much indispensable at this point, whenever I compose something a bit longer or have some text to do a search-replace on or just some text I need three steps later in what I'm doing, it goes in another tab in Sublime. I have at least one tab I re-use since before Covid-19, it's absolutely fantastic how stable it is. Love it for that.
That's interesting. I use BBEdit for that purpose and VSCode for code editing. I really don't like BBEdit's layout except for log viewing and unsaved snipets/notes. I might have to try Sublime now...
I used to use Sublime Text around 8-10 years ago, but once VS Code became a thing, I switched to that, then to Zed last year. Inspired by this post, I decided to give ST another try. Here's how it went:
1. Installed ST via brew, all good so far. Let's open my hobby project written in Go.
2. Syntax highlighting works by default, great! But uh-oh, there's no autocomplete or any LSP. Alright, let's install one.
3. Hmm I need to install package control first - right I'm starting to remember now. I'm thinking it's strange how they are still two separate entities.
4. Ok, PC installed. Let's install a... ok Package Control crashed...
5. Copying the error from the debug console points me to a two-year-old forum post where the accepted solution is to either remove OpenSSL (?!) or install a beta PC version (outdated now) or try to uninstall Package Control and
reinstall it.
6. Ok, how do I uninstall Package Control? The documentation says they are just package files stored on my machine. It doesn't tell me where those files are, and I can't find a menu point to open the folder containing them...
I started my career with Brackets, then Sublime, then Atom for a short while.
Then switched to VS Code for a few years and just recently switched back to Sublime because of how slow VS Code became.
Also great pricing! One time purchase for Sublime is still available in 2025!
The license does not expire after 3 years, it is perpetual, but it doesn't apply to versions released more than 3 years after your purchase. If you don't want any newer features or fixes you can simply turn off updates. We warn you before updating to a version not covered by your license.
I find this to be a very reasonable license. Cost is low but provides an ongoing revenue source. I like free or perpetual licensing as much as the next guy, but us programmers gotta eat and pay the rent.
There's not much to it: we wanted steadier income and our customers wanted more consistent updates but also perpetual licenses. This model was the natural conclusion. We tried it out with Sublime Merge and then brought it over with ST4.
I use both Sublime and Vscode every day for different things. Sublime is just so fast and responsive all the time, while vscode can get annoying slow and laggy, often because of all the many plugins I have running. If I just need simple text file editing with syntax highlighting, say while editing a markdown file, Sublime is just snappier. For actual coding VScode is much better because of all the IDE features.
I like VSCode's feature where it doesn't constantly bitch and moan about buying a license. Like cmon, there's billions of text editors to pick from, it would be like paying for breathing air or worse, for winrar.
Maybe I'm a sucker, but I bought a license for Sublime in like 2009 and re-upped for a later version. I also actually bought WinRAR from Eugene. It's good to support dedicated devs who make high quality tools that you use all the time.
The line between dedication and delusion is apparently pretty blurry. One can't seriously expect to profit with closed software in a space where free and open alternatives are the norm. VSCode is open source, 7-Zip is open source, they are both objectively better in every way. If anything I would rather support those by contributing directly.
Besides absurd levels of market saturation, code editors are a complement to software, just like libraries and frameworks, and we benefit most as a society by keeping tools open. Imagine having to pay a monthly subscription for a json lib. I find the entire concept ridiculous.
That wasn't the case in 2009. And yeah, I do use 7zip mostly now, but it was a different story back then and WinRar was really fast and had really great compression and features. And who cares, it was like $20 or something.
Yeah, screw devs for making a industry-renowned product and wanting to be able to eat food or pay the rent for having made that thing, right?!
The pricing on Sublime Text is a steal for what value a frequent user of it derives from it. And they even let you use it forever with just a nag screen if you still refuse to, or can't afford to, pay that fee, unlike a SaaS product which would just lock you out.
I can totally get the high school student not paying for Sublime because they can't, but IMO no industry professional has any legs to stand on for using ST but refusing to pay for it on principle.
The main feature of Sublime Text for me is that it doesn't throw away your buffers. Ever. So it's mainly a note taking app with vim key bindings for me / snappy scratch pad. All of my actual code editing happens in an IDE or actual VIM when on a server.
I see how the separation of "persisted active buffers" from "saved files" is important, but FWIW I have vim configured to (for a specific note-taking FileType) write the buffer out on 60 seconds of inactivity.
I write everything on All About Berlin in a souped up version of Sublime Text. I made my own color scheme for Markdown files, my own linters for the content, a build system to run the static site generator etc. I love just how fast I can move across hundreds of Markdown files, finding and replacing thimgs with regular expressions. It’s a night and day improvement over editing text in a CMS.
I chose Sublime because it was blazing fast in my wee Macbook 12”, which I used until a year ago. Sublime Merge complements it really well.
As a Sublime user I mostly agree, except for the project stuff. I can never bring myself to set that up. What are you using multiple LSP servers per file for?
If you have any in-lined code, SQL/HTML. I can see that being a great feature.
My eyes widened at that part of the article, as I have to betray syntax highlighting when I in-line something, which makes me want to break it into it's own file to get the highlighting back. But for simple things (like one-liners); breaking it into its own file makes things even more messy.
I got a perfect example: an Astro site. I currently have the Astro LSP, Tailwind LSP, and the Biome LSP, all running on the same file. I even have Typos LSP too. Having them all going at the sam time and being able to tweak their settings on a per-project basis is ideal for my workflow.
It is not just about the opening, it is about the searching. Vim is fantastique, although VSCode got faster over time too. Grep is fantastic too (I am not trying to out-hardcore here ... I mean specifically for log file searching not actual coding!). Splunk is better though, but sometimes you are local, and sometimes you don't have a few mill to burn.
I agree and I do use Vim for all quick edits I need. Just wanted to challenge the idea that Sublime Text was better than alternatives in the space of GUI text editors
I can answer the opposite of that question. Why Emacs?
For me, Emacs is valuable not for the things it can or cannot do, it's valuable because it gives me the perception of complete control over the things on my computer.
The other day, I was watching my teammate showing me some stuff over Zoom, and I didn't want to derail his thoughts by constantly stopping him: "hey, wait, don't scroll away, I'm still reading that," "wait a second, what was that URL again?" etc. So, the only thing I could do was take screenshots.
During the lunch break, I decided to solve this thing for myself. I wrote a command that checks ~/Desktop - it's where I drop my screenshots, then finds any .png file that was created no longer than 2 minutes ago, sends it to tesseract for OCR, and opens the text in a buffer. Took me less than 20 minutes.
Sure, there are many ways to get something like that done, but after trying so many different options, I was never able to extract the same feeling of control from any other alternative.
I have a command that inserts the url of my active tab in the browser, with description, in the correct format (e.g., markdown). I wrote that myself, because at some point it bothered me that I had to do that manually. There are many examples such that, where if I weren't using Emacs, I probably wouldn't even bother to acknowledge the existence of such small annoyances.
What makes Emacs truly exceptional isn't its vast feature set, but rather its ability to foster a problem-solving mentality - the "Emacs brain" - where no obstacle, regardless of size, goes unaddressed or unresolved.
I’m a long-time Sublime user who also uses Emacs for single files/at the command line (I also have Emacs key bindings set up in ST), I have found over the years that I am prone to configuration rabbit holes with Emacs and that Sublime strikes a nice balance of good defaults, simplicity, and customizability.
I think that every time I’ve worked on a large project with Emacs I’ve started trying to optimize the partial/fuzzy filename search, trying all of the different ways people suggest online to see which one feels natural until I realize I’ve spent an entire day on it.
Over time I’ve come to really value software that is customizable, but that comes with defaults that I really like, rather than software that’s even more customizable but that must be customized for it to feel right. God forbid I run Emacs somewhere without my conf and forget to disable electric indent mode and want to flip my desk when it does its terrible default behavior.
It's my new notepad. When I don't need the bloat of VSCode, or any JetBrains editor, etc. nor have the will to fight with Vim and, yet, still need something that supports code syntax.
I tried vim and nvim. Its just more overall effort and I'm never as productive as with Sublime. I tried zed and it doesn't work with Linux. I briefly opened vscode but haven't tried it out earnestly yet.
I think its mostly muscle memory. I'm just too used to the shortcuts, workflow etc. You can teach new tricks to an old dog; I can learn and get used to another editor, but ultimately I always ask myself -- why? I have to get shit done and unless the new thing has some other benefit that compensates for the productivity decline in the first weeks/months/years, it will always be a hard sell.
I hear you. Zed does supply a Sublime key mapping. But it isn't the same. There is something off about it. With all the investment in Zed and its GPU-based rendering, it still doesn't feel as snappy as Sublime to me!
I also like using Sublime as a text editor for my thoughts and notes. I don't need or want anything full fledged like a word processor. Sublime lets me write in a minimal format without distraction. Every action is instant and I'm not sure what I'd even change if given the chance.
I paid for a license on one of the versions. I initially got upset when there was a major release that auto-updated and I got the pop up. However, I looked at my purchase date and it was so many years ago, and I was able to roll back to the version I paid for, so I definitely got my money’s worth. I didn’t end up buying the newer version, because work was forcing me onto VS Code.
That guy is living off that money, and Sublime is one of the best text editors out there. Consider it like a SaaS, but something doesn't break or stop when your license expires.
If you think the price doesn't reflect the value the software brings, then it's your choice, and that's fair. But as for the things it brings to the table, I don't think it's that expensive.
I pay similar for BBEdit, and it saves my bacon regularly. Plus it's dependable.
I think Sublime Text was the first software I ever paid for. It has paid that back handsomely. And no, I’m not doing the usual “I’m a working professional so my time is directly attributable to my text editor” thing. I understand there are free options. I pay for it despite there being competition because of the extra value it brings me.
I was interested in the value that it brings you. I'm a former Sublime Text user and I switched to VS Code some time ago.
Do you also use Sublime Text as your primary IDE just like author does?
————
Mirroring the structure of the article:
1) Regarding the section about LSPs: do you also have the need to be able to “just add an LSP installed as a binary in on your usr/local/bin” even though by the author's own admission “VS Code is the LSP king”?
Kind of ironic to have the author say in the introduction about VS Code that “it probably has taken inspiration from Sublime. So why not check out one of the OGs” and then a bit later proceeds to say that the LSP “tech originat[es] with that editor [VS Code]”. I'm returning the question to the author and you: why not check out the OG?
2) Regarding the section about snippets author says that “VS Code can do this” and even that “the syntax for it is a bit nicer”.
3) Regarding workspaces VS Code does all of that. Author admits that he “ha[s]n't used it personally, so [he] can't speak to it much”.
4) Regarding build systems VS Code does all of that and it's easier because contrary to “the Package Control [that] is not part of Sublime” (and that you have to uglily inject in the Sublime Text console to get working), the VS Code plugin repository has everything already ready-to-use so that you don't need to reinvent the wheel. You can if you want though; Sublime Text doesn't provide anything extra in that regard.
5) Regarding the “Multiple cursors” VS Code has it as well.
6) Regarding the block-level key bindings, have you ever needed them? For me the last thing I want is for my shortcuts to change dynamically based on which block I am in the file. Note that in Sublime Text “they cannot be saved on a per-project basis”, which is awkward to say the least. I would (much) rather have project-level keybindings rather than only block-level keybindings that apply globally.
7) Regarding using “Python all the way down” rather than JavaScript, I'm surprised that the author finds it to be a good thing considering that they primarily use it for “web-dev” and all their examples are frontend Javascript code.
8) Finally, the author complains about the terrible documentation of Sublime Text, the lack of a plugin system, and the fact that for the 3rd-party hacked-together plugin management system he finds that getting them on the “Package Control site to be quite a chore”. I have a ton more complaints about Sublime Text to add on top of that.
I would rather directly donate money[1] to small developers rather than — as another commenter puts it — “supporting and using the products developed by a small team of dedicated engineers ...”
On the LSP stuff, yes it did originate in VS code. I just find the experience in Sublime to be better. How ironic is that?
I didn't consider the conflict between how I said "try the OG" but then say "VS code is the OG". It is a good point.
I show an example of the block level key binding. So yeah, I needed it and used it. I only showed one example but I have a few more that are my own I just didnt write about them.
Around python vs. js for plugins, have you tried to make a VS code plugin? You need a package.json, npm, and vsce installed globally. Which language is being used is usually the least of my problems. For Sublime, you need a single .py file! Someone shared this 9 line plugin they made: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/31500c17452b0fd8c55bc9460bd9c... - I don't tthink plugin development could be more simple
I bet an LLM could spit out single file plugins very easily. VS code plugins are clearly more work to create and deploy even after taking into account my critiques of Package Control. At the end of the day you can just toss your plugin in a folder or push it to github and reference it with a URL.
I didn't say the docs were "terrible". I just said they were disjointed. They are complete and fully document the APIs. I just wish they were more like the PHP docs or the ones for VS code which are docs plus guides.
All your other points are fine critiques. I'll chalk the other complaints up as a matter of opinion
You’re either hiring developers from countries where $100 is a lot of money, or you expect them to only open Sublime Text once a year. Don’t be stingy—$100 is a steal when it’s the primary tool for nearly every developer. You probably spend that much (or more) on a weekend outing with your partner or friends.
I liked sublime text, but 65$ per year you can get the jet brain ide you need and it already includes most things you need and depends not on plugins from third party.
I'm curious where you're seeing jet brains subscriptions for $65 per year? Only RustRover and WebStorm seem to be somewhat close, with the rest being significantly more expensive.
I often see downvotes when people criticise ST's pricing, but I mostly agree with the detractors - the price always seems to be just a few bucks over the magical limit I'd be willing to pay.
Tech workers often spend $100 or more on a fancy meal with friends in a single night—I've definitely done that more than once. So paying $100 for a software license that I’ll be using almost every hour of the workday, and even more when working on personal projects, feels like a bargain.
I do wonder why it is that way though, because you're right, I've balked at the cost of software before, but had no issue in spending an order of magnitude more money on a flight to SF to meet up with other developers.
probably because there's a free OSS equivalent to most software.
The free equivalent to meeting up with friends/developers is a zoom call, and those suck.
I love it too, though I never use it for working with entire projects but rather for smaller text editing tasks because it's so snappy. It's my scratchpad for notes and stuff, I will investigate and edit single files, and I use it for find-and-replace within a directory.
Though for the single file operations, it really depends on how I'm currently interacting with the system. If I'm browsing the files in a GUI then I'll use ST. If I'm in a terminal I'll use neovim.
One enhancement I would love to see to ST is better large file support. If I open a 330MB CSV in Notepad++ it displays instantly and uses 350MB of RAM. If I open the same file in ST it takes a few seconds to show and uses 1.5GB of RAM. (This is with both editors using no plugins beyond whatever is default)
Sublime is extraordinary. It's one of the softwares I've loved the most, by far. Even today, it's always opened and I use it for quick fixes and code browsing.
However, despite my fondness for it, VS Code, and now Cursor, have largely taken over for me. Cursor, in particular, has literally completely transformed how I code. And yes, it's slower and more bloated, but the value-added of Cursor is worse it.
Bloated compared to sublime, yes. But VScode is absolutely lightweight compared to something like eclipse or one of those other heavyweight enterprise Java IDE’s.
Cursor is lightweight but have you ever seen the amount of memory that thing seems to consume? Holy mother of silicone.
I completely agree. It takes a lot of resources. Again - it's all about the value it gives in return of what it takes. For me, it's worth it. For many others, it's not.
I'm always up for trying new or old text editors, but they must have certain features that work out of the box for me to even consider them. A few clicks are fine, but I don't want to edit configuration files. In 2025, remote development support is a must for me.
If you (or anyone here) feel Sublime Text is dead, the community is super active at discord. You can actively engage with ST devs and package developers there.
I used to love Sublime Text and used it for my daily driver. Even bought a license.
But just downloaded it again, and while it definitely felt snappy, after 15 minutes I still couldn't find a way to get TypeScript type checking working, or even any type of JavaScript/TypeScript autocomplete.
If you want IDE-like behavior you'll need to install the TypeScript LSP: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/LSP-typescript. We do have our own limited language-agnostic indexing and auto-complete if you open your projects folder; it relies on existing code to provide suggestions.
Oh, that's frustrating. I think it'd be great to have some more concrete guides for modern Sublime. Maybe I'll write one about getting TypeScript and everything working starting from scratch
Nobody mentionned *Pulsar* (https://pulsar-edit.dev/) which is the community maintained Atom since its sunsetting (Dec 2022). Atom was created by Nathan Sobo, who is now working on Zed (https://zed.dev/).
I too still like Sublime Text in 2025, largely for the same reasons.
I have liked it very much for the past decade or so, and at this rate, I'll most likely keep liking Sublime Text for many years to come. It's an incredible tool that does its job extremely well.
Long time Sublime Text and Sublime Merge fan, and a paying user since 2011. It's very good; I use all three OSes (Windows at work, MacOS on occasion, Linux is primary driver, and I've now switched to Pi 5. Zed does not even load on this, whereas ST just flies. (The only real competition is Neovim.)
That reminds me, I wonder if Sublime Text still has room to improve in some areas. Here's an example, in Vim generating a date stamp is a one liner incl. text expansion[0], whereas in Sublime Text, one has to write a multi line plugin and a separate keyboard shortcut[1] to get the same functionality as that of Vim.
You can achieve the same thing using the arithmetic command in the command palette: `__import__('datetime').datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")`.
I think it would be cool to see some built-in commands for common things like that. But I think the fact that your plugin is so small and so quick to add, proves that going that route is probably the best one. I'm sure if there was a plugin out there that added dozens of these little commands, it would probably do pretty well.
To echo many sentiments here: Sublime does all I want in a text editor and I use it a lot. When VSCode became all the rage, I tried it but became annoyed very quickly with the loading times and wasted resources, so I switched back to Sublime.
In my last performance review 360 feedback colleagues suggested that my use of Sublime Text may be holding me back and I should consider moving over to VSCode. They're probably right ... but I'm old and there's more exciting things to learn than all the foibles of a new editor. Plus I like supporting and using the products developed by a small team of dedicated engineers ... it makes me feel less like a cog in the machine. Luckily I no longer seek promotions so I'll continue to resist moving to VSCode until I retire, or die.
Better the tool you know. Replace VSCode and Sublime with Vim and Emacs or Eclipse and hopefully they will realise how silly their feedback is. Maybe they should switch to Sublime or IntelliJ because I think their use of VSCode may be holding them back.
I have, from time to time. It certainly has become faster but Sublime still seems to be more nimble to me. On the more emotional side, I've also grown used to Sublime and I - mostly - just like using tools made by smaller shops or individual developers more than what the big corporations produce.
I've reinstalled ST a while ago, for years I've tried VS Code and I do my main work in IntelliJ but I never got that feeling of productivity and an editor that isn't in the way back after stopping to use Sublime back in the day.
Mind you, at the time the world had moved on as well; my main ST days were developing a JS application in the days before Typescript / Flow and the like, so all my work relied on my own memory, consistent naming, global search and cmd+p to open files. There was a "gap" in between editors like IntelliJ having better / smarter support for JS and the rise of LSPs, making those features available for all editors again. IntelliJ had a competitive advantage for a while.
Likewise, VS Code had a competitive advantage along with Atom for having all its code written in web language / JS, which millions of developers learned or pivoted to in the 2010's. I still can't fully grasp how huge it was, but the last few jobs I had interviews with all used JS for back-end, migrating from PHP.
> my main ST days were developing a JS application in the days before Typescript / Flow and the like, so all my work relied on my own memory, consistent naming, global search and cmd+p to open files.
Ohh the days where you could open a JS project, immediately understand what it did and make a quick fix.
Now it's 15 lines of imports, then one line of code that you have no idea what it does because you have to find what it actually does by digging 10 layers down in the import inception. Buf if you have a IDE you can tell by the type annotation that it's an EnterpriseJavaScriptBeanConstructorFactorFunctionIterator and by clicking ctrl+space you can see that it has four methods: .create() .read() .update() and .delete()
Sublime is still my top choice for opening big data files, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But, since VS Code is becoming the new lingua franca code editor, I made the switch so as to play nice with others going forward.
Alt-tabbing (or cmd-Q if you’re done) back to your terminal window after running `subl` to edit a file is equivalent difficulty (as measured by keystrokes) to exiting nano or vim.
I'm on Linux and I just use one keystroke to switch (F2). I have F1 F2 F3 F4 keys binded to change to virtual desktops 1 2 3 4. 1 -> Console(s) 2 -> Editor (sublime) 3 -> Browser (Firefox) 4 -> Misc (File browser, other apps)
I've been using iterm for years mainly because it has a Quake style terminal window. I realise how I just can't get to grips with tabbing through screens on either macos and windows anymore, not with having multiple browser profiles (personal and work) and screens open. I should figure out a solution to that, but at the same time I decided that I should keep my various employers (I'm a contractor/consultant/temp/whatever) separated better, so, different browser profiles, password databases, etc.
I bought a "double license" for Text and Merge three years ago and spent money on Sublime for the first time. I will definitely be renewing it in February.
I love Sublime Text editor. Have been using it for 15 years now and despite the fact most of my development is done inside of VSCode or other editors, I still use ST for large files and notes. I can confidently open up a 1gb SQL dump in ST and it won't break a sweat, try that in VSCode and you can see it freeze up for a bit and that's on a decent machine too.
Using Sublime Text since version 2, one of my relatively recent discoveries has been the Markdown Images Plugin[1], which renders images inline (rather than in a separate preview, as other editors do).
I find it extremely convenient to include images alongside text, such as diagrams and schematics for work, photos of goods in a shopping list, and inspiration collections for hobby projects, etc.
When combined with a simple web clipper script[2], it has been a game changer for me.
I've installed that plugin too, thanks for the recommendation. That said, installing it did show a big concern I have, maybe not so much for this plugin but for many others; its last release was in 2022, and many plugins I used to use back in 2012 haven't seen updates since 2016-17, roughly around the time VS Code became the most popular editor. I fear community support of plugins will become a major issue. I mean as long as the APIs etc don't change it's not a problem if these plugins are "done", but it just looks like things are no longer maintained and ST is a "dead" editor.
Welcome! I don't think the Sublime developers will change the plugin API dramatically at this point (@ben-schaaf is in this thread; we can ask him :) So, old plugins should remain compatible. What we should be concerned about is that if something new is invented, it will probably appear in a more widespread editors first. However, as practice shows, new plugins for Sublime continue to be created[1] so we are not missing lot.
I'd probably move back if the sidebar could move to the right LOL. I still see people ask on the forum post and I'm always amazed this simple feature hasn't been added yet.
I'm another "use Sublime text for all kinds of scratch and random needs, but vscode daily driver". But this was a good reminder for me of the value I still get out of Sublime and that I should upgrade my license.
One small pet peeve, I do wish more of the functionality in the menu bar (mac?) was available in the command menu (cmd+shift+p). I still fairly frequently try cmd+shift+p "Spel..." to try and turn on Spell check mode, but then realize I need to hit my mac shortcut to search the menu bar (cmd+shift+/) and then type "Spel..."
That's a good one. I also noticed that I couldn't create new snippets or plugins from the command prompt. So, there are definitely some things missing from there.
Personally I'm totally sold on 'Vim' I have lsp through 'YouCompleteMe', which works great for C-languages, and I have Automatic update of tags with 'GutenTagsPlus', And I also use 'c-scope', 'Git' and 'Id-utils', and I have 'ulti-snips' which I probably use too little. So yeah, this and the GCC toolchain, is pretty much the ultimate for me, and I have tried a lot of Editors through the years.
Love Sublime and have used it since its inception long ago, however as the times changes with different built-in convenience tooling (such as AI), Zed has overtaken Sublime IMO. It's fast, has VIM mode, extensions, and takes away some of the hassle that you have to go through with ST.
I still use ST for basic editing, but for day-to-day, Zed is the go to, simply because it just helps me get my work done slightly faster.
I can totally understand that. Why only one? I still use BBEdit on my Mac for all kinds of text editing (search/replace across files is excellent in it), even though I mainly use VS Code as IDE and Emacs for orgmode and automation via Elisp.
I love BBEdit, but it has one limitation that drives me batty: it has far fewer syntax highlighting scopes than many other editors. It’s simply not possible to make it as pretty and color as others, and that’s something I personally value. I have to look at a code editor all day, and I want it to look snazzy.
I know it’s minor and petty, but it stills grates on me every time I fire it up.
Yeah, it‘s from another era. The concept of beatiful code came up with TextMate, Sublime, VS Code. And old editors tried to catch up, but didn’t really make it.
But I have a nice-ish theme in BBEdit for markdown, and I‘m ok. I don’t code in it. Just plain text editing, using it as a scratchpad. It’s open all day long.
Because it’s too complicated to learn many complicated tools well instead of tweaking Sublime to do the search and replace across files, even if it’s a bit worse. Also you’re not limited to Macs
In the argument of Sublime Text vs. VS Code, the deal breaker for me has always been VS Code telemetry. Of course, you can disable it in the settings or firewall, but then you have to constantly monitor it to ensure that some "bug" or "update" does not re-enable it back. Alternatively, you can choose not to care about potentially sharing everything with Microsoft and their 829+ partners. However, I prefer to pay for Sublime rather than participate in some manager's brilliant idea to extract revenue from a "free" user base.
I don't use ST3 as my daily driver (I use BBEdit instead - still not on the VSCode train), but I do use it for lots of random editing and scratch needs.
Shameless plug - I wrote a plugin ages ago which makes it possible to replace and sort text using Python code (https://nneonneo.github.io/sublime-replace-with-python/). This little plugin has been incredibly useful for certain tasks, and serves both as a useful prototyping tool (playing with text modifications before implementing a full-blown script) as well as a general-purpose text wrangling utility. Basically, you can select some text (or find it with regex), then activate the plugin and type a line of Python code; it will then run the code for each selection region and produce the replacement. Sorting works similarly - select some regions, enter an expression as a sort key, and the selections will be rearranged according to the key.
I love how a plugin I wrote nearly a decade ago is still working with essentially no changes needed since 2017. Stable software is reliable software!
> Shameless plug - I wrote a plugin ages ago which makes it possible to replace and sort text using Python code [...]
I've been trying out Lite XL, and I have a crude (WIP) plugin that can pipe selected text thru any shell command (sed, sort, etc), and either output to a new buffer, or replace the selection. Then I started writing some scripts to supply the commands I miss from Emacs, like align-regexp. Since it's just shell commands, you can write them in any language.
I'm not sure if I like Lite XL, but the scripts I already wrote would be easily reusable in any editor that supports piping selections. Perhaps it would be a fun project to create a collection of such portable scripts, sort of like what LSP did.
Sublime Text used to be my go-to editor when I didn't need a full fledged IDE. A rare gem in an arena of slow mammoths. I've since switched over to Lite XL, which is FOSS, just as fast (if not faster), and the plugins cover nearly all my niche use cases.
While I respect the effort that goes into creating quality software and am not averse to spending money, I'd rather not live in a world where the best softwares are closed source.
Sublime Text is _the_ Swiss knife of all text editors:
- Loads up fast, supports tons of very useful packages (e.g. TextPastry, SQLTools), extremely customisable.
- Multi-cursors, multi-panes (e.g. with Origami), spellcheckers, extremely fast filesystem integration/browsing/preview (whether with/without projects and workspaces), color/UI schemes, syntax highlighting, search browsers, Git support (particularly when used with Sublime Merge), etc.
Sure I love my Jetbrains IDEs and Vim, but nothing comes close; Sublime Text is in its own league.
I reckon all text editors are some form of a Swiss army knife.
IDE-ajacent text editors like VSCode et al are more like those ridiculous fat one with everything in it [1], and Sublime is the elegant model with only a blade and can opener, but the blade and can opener are both really good.
And then you get Microsoft Notepad, one of those shitty metal nail files that seemingly everyone's wife has in the bottom of her handbag.
This is the one app I use every day. I practically live in it. Most editors are slower and more visually cluttered, or pack so much functionality that I often get lost. Sublime strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality. Probably Emacs or Vim are even more expressive, but I've never bothered to learn those, Sublime just packs enough power for me. The LSP plugins are a good addition to give Sublime the same code completion / AI functionality of other editors.
Sublime Text is my primary editor. I had a brief 2 years where I used VSCode and got addicted to plugins, until I realized I was spending too much time configuring plugins and went back to Sublime Text with the release of ST4. It was mind-boggling to me after those 2 years how much faster ST was than VSCode. The LSP plugin was icing on the cake. Even in instances where I lack LSP, Sublime Text 4's context-aware autocomplete/finder works surprisingly well. The only thing I really find myself missing is a visual debugger.
I've tried Neovim and Zed -- Sublime Text is still faster and more polished in my experience. It embodies the "do one thing well" philosophy perfectly. Also, Sublime Merge is awesome.
I think you can opt out of its AI features more or less completely, but you do have to look up all the relevant config options (mostly to hide buttons in the UI leading to AI festures).
Few years ago I wrote a guide about turning Sublime Text into IDE which will be on-par with IDE features of VSCode while retaining performance benefits of ST — https://www.brachkow.com/notes/sublime-text/.
Sadly, I almost stopped using Sublime Text around a half year ago. Development of AI coding tools made flexible UI plugins support a must. Right now when I'm using ST as main editor I feel like 0.5x developer compared to myself and my colleagues with Cursor, because of being limited to very lazy and limited Copilot suggestions passed via LSP.
I think once we get some good LSPs that can do AI work then you can come back to Sublime! There are some out there. I have tried about 3. But they haven't really worked well for me yet. I think the best option for me right now is just a simple build system that calls Ollama or a remote API. I don't want code completion. I usually want some type of "enhanced google"
Sublime is still great. I wish it had a tighter LSP integration — the plugin is decent, but individual language implementations are hit or miss. I sincerely appreciate that it has an old school fallback for languages that don’t have robust LSP support (looking at you Ruby).
What I love most is how well "out of the box" sublime work for me.
Even on a fresh install it's very usable without doing anything, I usually install about 3 extensions (not counting specific language syntax support).
Integrated LSP would be nice to have, but most of the time I don't use it and I like to be able to turn it of and have the simple autocomplete that is very predictable and unintrusive.
And performance, I know Zed showed some benchmarks on how fast it is, I still had some hang up from time to time with it and some crash, I can't suffer jankiness in my editor, it stress me out.
I think the best thing about Sublime's LSP plugin is that you have everything off by default and then only turn it on on a per-project basis. I actually have an example of that in the article. Do a search on the article for "eslint" and you'll find the section where I show ESLint being disabled and Biome being enabled
I still use the Sublime shortcuts in my IDE to this day. Sublime had a big impact on me when I got my first job as it introduced me to multiple cursors. It's still the best tool for many tasks.
I love it. I had to drop it temporarily recently for a go project using bazel that simply just doesn't work well in many editors other than Intellij. But I got back to it recently on another go project and god damn it's so fast. I'm so much more productive using it. Global symbol search is always amazing and everything is always so damn snappy. If I could buy a lifetime license I would. I hope it doesn't go away for as long as I want to write code
I was a longtime user of Sublime Text and switched to VSCode because of Remote Development and Pylance. Everything else is pretty much fine and Sublime has always had better performance, though these days having support for AI integration (a la Copilot) is also necessary for me.
I tried Zed recently because it has remote support and AI integration, but the Python integration is limited to Pyright so I gave up temporarily (I guess I can recreate Pylance using this doc: https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/blob/main/USING...).
Been using it and upgrading each new version. One of the best software applications I've ever used that's both multi platform and actually-good on every platform, not just a skinned web app like Photoshop
I freakin' love Sublime Text but the AI chat features of Cursor make all of the benefits in this post irrelevant.
It's fast? Not as fast as an LLM.
LSP code completion? Not as good as LLM completions aware of your entire codebase at once.
Snippets? These don't matter if an LLM can just make them up on the fly.
We've entered a new paradigm of what it means to be a good code editor. I'd love if Sublime added the LLM chat and code diff from Cursor but I think the new way to edit code is going to look a lot more like having a conversation (text or voice) with an LLM that's making the changes for you.
AI LSPs are coming. There are about half a dozen of them right now that you can find on GitHub, but I haven't been able to get any of them working really nicely and Sublime. But I have faith that eventually they'll mature up and a good one will surface as the go-to solution.
Deep understanding and being able to reason about problems is more important than speed. Offloading too much to LLMs has a detrimental effect on our brains.
I'm not saying don't use LLMs. Use them in ways that increase your skills, and be wary of using them in ways that atrophy your skills.
This brings back good old memories. Sublime was my editor from 2010 until 2016, when I switched to VS Code. Eventually, I got hooked on Neovim, and I still use it to this day since I can't live without Vim motions anymore.
But I built dozens of websites using Sublime, so in a way, it helped me earn $300k.
Tried few times, nothing beats TextMate ergonomics. It's just a small things like the cursor will be in a place where it should be after autocompletions or closing brackets will align where they belongs to, but it makes huge difference for me
I still use it, just love the Mac style text manipulation shortcuts, the way spell check actually works properly and natively in code (Spell check within strings only) which VSCode can't seem to handle with any of the plugins that claim to.
I use VSCode on Windows but no matter what I do to it I can't get it feeling right.
Is TextMate still being maintained? Last time I looked, there were very few signs of life. If that is accurate, the clock is ticking until Apple inevitably drops Rosetta support on Apple Silicon Macs sometime in the (probably not too distant) future.
It's open source, think the developer is on a break from it. He's left it for a few years then done a set of updates in the past or fixed it if it broke because of an Apple update previously.
I've tried a few times, but Sublime is so obviously not a native Mac app, I find it painful to use. It's definitely the closest match to TM though; it was pretty obvious it was inspired by TM. I think it even used to (still does?) use the same language grammars as TM (regexes that define scopes, basically).
I use Sublime as my notepad alternative. I use no plugins and don't know any keyboard shortcuts but I love it. It's quick, the tabs work well, you don't have to save files for it to remember them...
My files are on a NAS using Samba, and Sublime Text constantly does something (maybe it tries to poll the directory?) that makes it hang for around 10 seconds every minute, making it unusable.
VS Code does nothing of the sort, it has plugins for any language imaginable; it's much faster and much better IMHO.
I’ve been using Sublime Text many times a day since around 2010 for my daily and weekly logs. My Mac is set to use it as the default for .py, .md, and .txt files, so I find myself in Sublime all the time—and I absolutely love it! Sure, I develop in VS Code, but I live in sublime. It’s fast, clean, and dependable. Thanks to the team for building such a fantastic editor!
I love Sublime and am probably the only one at work still using it. LSP support is nice but there doesn't seem to be great support for a TypeScript LSP server that works reliably with large projects. VSCode is slow here, too, but there are some specific optimizations they do I think that help a bit.
I've used Sublime since 2012 or 2013 or so. It's really legit. Lightweight, "it just works", and has generally stayed the same while adding some nice features along the way. Thank you!! <3
The first two points are a good illustration of how varied an audience may be. Most of the time I see people striving to make their text editor experience such that they don't have to reach for the mouse at all.
The last point is a good illustration that your product may have terrible bugs that destroy user data, and still be well-loved because the overall experience is slick, and certain other capabilities are second to none.
I love sublime text but it has been feeling like its falling behind other editors. Whenever see someone showing off a tip or trick in VSCode I am disappointment to learn it doesn't exist in sublime text and there isn't a package for it.
I find ST and the SFTP plugin (paid) a killer workflow combo, super useful for updating WordPress sites.
Update your file locally, hit the shortcut to upload, done. I find this experience superior to editing directly on the external file as I may want to save but not necessarily commit that change. And for smaller projects you are the only developer on, git can be overkill.
vscode keybindings are insane. There are couple of thousands of them turned on by default with multiple duplications and no abstrations. So you have to negate them all first (that takes around 5000 lines of json) and then carefully go over around 500-700 definitions which might be important for you. So, my custom keymap in intellij has 44 definition, the vscode equivalent takes 675 and 2000 lines of json.
Used to use sublime, and wanted to purchase a license, but it is only good for the version you are on. Since I use gentoo and it upgrades frequently, my license would require me to hold it back, and eventually it will break. How do others deal with this? Just keep purchasing a license?
I used ST2 for like five years in its unregistered state. (I rationalized that by telling myself that nothing I used it for made me money, but I still feel a little gross about it.) In practice it was no problem.
I paid for an ST3 license, then I paid again for an ST4 license. Whenever ST5 comes out, if they ask, I'll pay for that too.
I hard a hard time getting LSP to work with Neovim, had to give up. Didn't want to install yet another plug-in manager like Mason etc some of which go out of circulation or could be risky. Maybe I am below average. As it is free, I just use it without any extras although that is less productive of course.
I had been considering switching to VS Code because of its plugin support, but decided against it because it couldn't regex-grep a codebase anywhere nearly as fast as Sublime Text, or with extended regex features
I've bought a license recently. I found the LSP-clangd plugin to be useful for the linting features of clangd and clangd-tidy for a C++ project recently. Having the lint highlighting helped me clean up some possible problems, (after reducing the number of types of lint to a shortish whtielist)
Not sure how projects and workspaces are a feature, it's the most convoluted thing ever. I just use `subl .` to open my project directory. I think it would be saner to just have a dot file in the directory if you want to tweak settings for that project/directory.
Another happy customer of Sublime Text here, but still not dare to take the step to buy SublimeMerge, I'm pretty well served in console for my git use, except for 'git blame' that I prefer to do in a UI tool, but SublimeMerge blame support is awful.
Sublime text is the best. I change _one_ setting (disable word wrap by default) and I have an entirely usable editor, I then install syntax packages as needed. Its beautiful, simple, and performant.
The only gripe I have is I have like 100 project windows open and I need to look for it (ctrl+P only works within the project window). Otherwise, it’s pretty much a perfect editor. Maybe I’m missing a plugin.
I use a mix of sublime and vscode.
I often pick sublime, because I want peace of mind.
I trust it to not try to make me 'do something else'. It (mostly) doesn't pester me with things to update or that are out-of-date, it doesn't run or fail with weird things in the background I didn't ask it to do.
It sticks to a minimal layout.
I had a similar love relationship with early versions of paintshop-pro - it contained the right balance of 'enough to do what you need, but not too much to overwhelm you'.
Whenever I ran into a too-new version of paintshop-pro, I closed it again because I didn't want to deal with their lost-sense-of-balance.
Sublime for me is like that, it is a hammer where the head won't suddenly fall off.
I had an eye-opening experience with VSCode recently:
I had brought one of my laptops on a car drive, where I had a few hours before the people (family) I chauffeured would come back, and I had a coding project I wanted to update some stuff on.
The kicker: I didn't have internet in the car,
but for local vscode editing, that shouldn't be a problem, right(?) At least, I had not thought it would be.
Well, for some reason, VSCode suddenly became stupid. It could not longer figure out
where my methods and classes were defined, so I had to navigate my code-base by hand (god forbid).
It also flashed something about not being able to connect to "dot net" / ".NET" or something similar.
I am not quite sure what was going on, maybe copilot..?
Whatever, my VSCode was in a mode where it seemed to rely on some online resource to operate,
and suddenly had become braindead by severing the cord..??
They are a company and they are still good. They changed their licensing model for v4 onwards. I have been using it for most of my note keeping and lite code editing tasks and its excellent as always. I think they can still get back to the old hype if they choose to use typescript for their plugin system. A lot of vscode plugins can be ported that way I hope
I doubt they'd want to create a schism and add a JS engine on top of the existing stuff. That said, Atom and VS Code's plugins being JS based was a huge benefit for them as at the time millions of developers started their career with or switched to using JS and web technology for their day job with webapps and nodejs.
Just a shout out to Sublime Text. My first text editor that I have used for serious work. Even though I have moved to Vscode, it is my go to open text files in GUI. It rarely fails me.
It's what i started programming with . Used it until i fell into the neovim rabbit hole . Still use it sometimes to write my notes and to make simple changes to code
Sublime does everything that I want to do with it.
What I do with it is throw arbitrary text files at it, and do quick text manipulations, especially multi cursor edits. I’m sure I could do this stuff just as well with something else, but I’d have to relearn my muscle memory.
I’ve had VS Code crash on me (repeatedly) with very large text files. Sublime is able to handle these files, even if it has to chunk on them for a while, if I do something silly like try to edit with several thousand cursors, but it will still do it.
I appreciate all of them— VS Code, Vi, Emacs, Sublime, JetBrains, Cursor. At the end of the day, they’re all text editors, and each has its own strengths.
AFAIU, Sublime Text and Kate (my editor of choice) are pretty similar in spirit, so when I read something nice about ST, I mentally insert "... and Kate". They are both snappy power editors, not IDEs, with LSP support.
Yes, KATE, ST and BBEdit (and VSCode) are "Code aware text editors". I use KATE and BBEdit for smaller project and Go mostly, and use Eclipse for the bigger stuff which needs its own "space" to be developed well and kept organized.
It's a "correct tool for the job at hand" situation for me.
There are others, this is the first that appears on a search. Sublime's package control makes it really easy to find tools like this. Another favorite is the one that renames the currently opened file.
I also use ST and use browser if I need some AI assisted coding. What about you guys? Is using IDEs with native AI coding plugin a good reason to switch away from ST?
If anything, ST taught me that I didn't actually need an IDE to be productive, but mind you this was in the years where JS became huge but didn't have good editor support yet.
vscode would be better than sublime, but I hate so much every notification and dialogs every time popping up when i just trying to focus on my work.
for this reason i still use sublime 3, yes not the 4 because the 3 was supposed to have lifetime licesense.
I recently switched from TextMate to Zed because of the lack of LSP support and other modern features. Zed comes closest to a native macOS app of all the editors I tried, but nothing could beat TextMate at that. What did you do to get LSP supported? I might give TextMate another try.
Reluctant VScode user here. Sublime's speed make it the best editor to work with by far, but its package manager is in a sorry state. A good 70%+ of packages are outdated or don't work.
The code might be GPLv3, which is my favorite license BTW, but they have a "nice" CLA [0] and Privacy Policy [1] which doesn't inspire confidence.
I think CLA is a nuanced thing, since Eclipse also has one and didn't rugpull anyone ever, but their Privacy Policy states that the tool is chockful with telemetry and can collect any personal and non-personal data as they see fit.
When somebody tells that you can opt-out of this, I have a hard time believing that the switches are connected to anything.
And yet, ST is closed source. Still a wild comparison.
This isn’t just license preference either. I would imagine the efforts of the sublime lsp people would be greatly eased if they had access to the source.
No it's not. I mostly find closed source application with clear lines more trustworthy than openwashed software.
I'm a big Free Software supporter. For my personal projects, I only use (A)GPLv3 or later.
However, I have a problem with software which comes with "GPLv3 BUT..." licenses. We have seen how CLAs weaponized against their contributors with rugpull license changes.
Also, Zed was closed source at first. I had beta access to that thing. Then they pivoted to "Open source with closed source collaboration servers" thing, and they claimed rights on anything passing through their servers (collaboration / zed-ai).
When software stops being local-only, being Free Software loses half the meaning, because you can do all the nefarious things on the backend, without people seeing them. "We only send harmless usage data" you may say, but you don't say how you process and which other signals you mix into that data from other sources or data brokers. That's a problem.
Remember Go's opt-out telemetry debacle. The math was solid, it was anonymous, yes. However it was forced opt-out via an environment variable, so the burden was continuously on us, the users.
If the Go team didn't change it to opt-in, I was ready to drop Go as a programming language, like many individuals and companies. Now the telemetry is opt-in, and users have better control.
These things are nuanced. We should be diligent. For example, Eclipse (my favorite IDE for the last two decades) has CLA, but they never abused the power they have, plus that thing is Apache 2.0 licensed. However, Zed's actions, combined with their privacy policy, doesn't inspire confidence, so I don't use it, and share my view about Zed.
If you don't agree that's fine, but pointing fingers like that is not.
As I said, I have chosen BBEdit over sublime 15 years ago, and still use that, and if BBEdit can detect and run any supported LSP OOTB, like magic, Sublime can do the same technically. So they should barrage the bug tracker. It's on Sublime to make it better. It's closed source, so the developer has forced themselves to fix it by making it closed source.
> Then they pivoted to "Open source with closed source collaboration servers" thing, and they claimed rights on anything passing through their servers (collaboration / zed-ai).
Does this apply if you use it same as Sublime? That is without collaboration / ai.
In Zed's case, it's already dependent on "Magik". It constantly downloads something to provide some functionality. I can't vet, follow, verify that thing all day long.
Moreover, if it wasn't doing that, again yes.
If they didn't provide the functionality to begin with, then they can move on to "let's evaluate whether it's acceptable" phase.
> If you thought Sublime was dead, well you couldn't be more wrong! The latest build of Sublime as of this post is "4192" and was released 20th January 2025.
Since a huge chunk of value here is in the plugins (hello, there isn't even a built-in plugin manager, it's 3rd party and still haven't fully transitioned to 3.8 - and this isn’t a nitpick, the fact that it’s not part of the core, and the author went MIA is part of the problem), the release date of the editor itself doesn't determine the state of Schrödinger
> I think the thing to consider is how Sublime is basically "done" software.
Or, you know, take a look at the issue tracker, pick up a couple of dozen issues that impact you (directly or via the plugins that are blocked by these), and realize how far from reality this statement is. Or just look at your own wishlist…
> Sublime is fast. It starts instantly.
But it’s not usable instantly because a lot of functionality is in the slower loading Python plugins, so if you have some shortcut that depends on a plugin, you can’t use it right away…
> But I prefer authoring snippets in XML rather than JSON.
> Obviously, I'm twisted.
Obviously
> have tried Helix and I think it is a lot closer to what I would want from a modern editor
Indeed, operation after selection is much more intuitive, especially when limited to the viewport, but then unfortunately Sublime doesn’t have great modal editing support, and none that would mimic Helix visual-first paradigm
> The key and mouse bindings are what you would expect from a modern editor.
That’s what you’d expect from a pre-modern editor, a modern one should have much more sophisticated keybinding support, for example, you’d be able to pick that great modal Helix or Spacemacs keybinding scheme. And have great searchable help for that instead of having to look into the void trying to understand where exactly that `` contextual javascript keybinding was set and how to disable it.
It sounds like you've had some unfortunate issues with Sublime in the past. Maybe it's just the different types of projects that we're both working on or what plugins we have installed. I haven't encountered any day-destroying bugs since at least version 3 came out. I think the most recent bug I came across was that a language-specific syntax broke, but that was because I updated Sublime and the syntax wasn't updated for it. I don't really know who's to blame in that scenario, though.
So, uh, the author mentions the "command palette" as being a killer feature, and links to an article about them, that has zero images of this GUI feature. I can't even ... what?
I found [1] which at least shows what it looks like, for those of us who haven't had the pleasure to test Sublime Text. I gather that the search that is integrated in the palette is an important aspect of their use, so perhaps it's hard to show actual UX in a still image.
I use Sublime everyday and pay for it for more than 10 years. It’s hands down the best piece of proprietary software I ever bought.
I heavily customize Sublime and supercharge it with a few high quality plugins.
I also contribute to the ecosystem. To another 10 sublime years.
I definitely still use Sublime. It's not my go-to for everything now, but my job has drifted in a way that means I don't DO those kinds of tasks that often anymore. For writing I've gravitated towards tools with better innate outlining and/or Markdown support (Obsidian); my work notes are still mostly in emacs/orgmode.
But if I need to open a big-ass text file, or process something in a pure text environment without anything helping me or trying to preserve formatting... yeah, it's probably still Sublime.
There's a, community supported, Copilot LSP plugin for Sublime. It can be rough around the edges - but I tried it and it was enough to get me to buy a 1yr Copilot seat (at current pricing).
Completely understand if Copilot is enough to make people want to switch over - but for me it wasn't, and I don't feel like I'm missing out with this setup.
There is a lot to like about Zed. But I still can't get past how it doesn't feel as snappy as Sublime. As I mentioned in the post, their snippet solution is not ideal for my needs. Something I didn't mention, though, was that I find the LSP configuration to be really frustrating in Zed. Their configuration/settings file is kind of a mess. They've clearly gone through a couple different versions of how to configure things because every couple of releases. They have changed the way that LSP formatting is configured at least twice.
Kernel, compiler, text editor: all must be free software, with full source code and permissive licenses.
I will die on this hill.
Closed source editors (including VS Code) are simply nonstarters for me.
This is my toolchain, my job, my life, my hobby, my passion. The legal prohibition on modifying it is against every single thing I sit down at a computer to do.
It might sound snobbish, but if you can’t (or don’t) modify your #1 tool (your editor), are you really a hacker? What are you hacking on, and why, then?
I'm going to comment on sublime merge since I see others have.
(I'm a paid user and paid again for the latest year or whatever the term of support is).
To be honest, I'm not sure what this product does or does better than all the other similar apps. VSCode has git tools. There's gitlens add on. There's also github's git UI app and some other ones. https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis
In all of them I see diffs. I can stash/stage/commit. I'm not sure what "amazing" features one has over the other.
What I can't do
* I can't copy text from anywhere in the UI. I might be looking at a diff, a path appears, I want to open that path in my editor, so, I want to be able to copy the path from Sublime Merge and paste the path into my editor or shell. Sorry, S.O.L.
* It puts headings on diff sections. I want to copy text that from Sublime Merge and search for the identifier in my editor. Sorry, S.O.L.
* I want to search for things across changes - sorry, S.O.L. - "someIdenifier" doesn't exist in the current code. When was it deleted? Let me search.
Also a minor nit. I hate that it doesn't respect platform conventions. The default folder to open should not be root, it should be my user folder (or something) but definitely not root. No other app on my Mac does this. If you want yours to be root find, add a pref, but by default it should do what other apps do.
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As for Sublime Text - Of course you can use whatever you want. I used SlickEdit since ~1994 through ~2015 (forgot when I switched to VSCode). The thing is, you should at least know what you're missing.
In VSCode I use it's SSH remote feature to connect to my linux machine. This is not simple SSH file sharing (Slickedit had that and FTP even). VSCode starts a custom server on the remote machine and uses it to coordinate. Examples:
* open remote /usr/my/project1
VSCode loads that project remotely. It edits the files locally (meaning when you open a file, it copies it from my linux box back to the mac in the local editor. IIUC, it proxies the language server stuff so it launches language server support on linux remotely. This means all the TS/C++/Rust etc intellisense stuff is being indexed on Linux in that project's environment.
VSCode opens a terminal to /usr/my/project1 in VSCode. I can start running shell commands. I used to use separate terminals, external to VSCode, and I still do. But the nice thing about the VS code ones is they're per project. If I switch over the a different project (multiple projects at once), each one has it's own terminal, relevant to that project
VSCode monitors and forwards servers from that terminal. If I type `python3 -m http.server 9000` in the VSCode terminal, it will launch python3 and then VSCode will automatically forward that port to my mac. I can open http://locahost:9000 on my mac and access the server running on linux (yes I can do that manually. It's nice that it's zero effort)
VSCode debugs remotely. If I launch the debugger it will debugger (gdb/llvm) on linux but the UI will be local (mac). I can set breakpoints in VSCode in mac, it will set them remotely on linux. I can view data etc.
VScode opens local UIs remotely. If, in the terminal for /usr/me/project1 I `cd ../project2 && code .` or `code ../project2` (so these commands are running on linux), it spawns a new window on Mac connected via SSH automatically to /usr/me/project2
VSCode's terminal is using an editor window and keeping it synchronized with the remote shell. This means it's more responsive than SSH from a normal terminal. In a normal terminal IIUC. I type 'x' on my keyboard. It's sent to the remote server over SSH. The shell over there emits an 'x' which is sent back to my local machine. In VSCode. I type 'x', the 'x' is put in the editor control that's shadowing the terminal. It's assumed the remote machine will return 'x' but it doesn't wait for it. Rather, you're typing locally, and it's catching up. So, even and a slow connection you can type faster in VSCode's terminal than you could in a standard SSH terminal. I'm sure there are places where this is not perfect but the general experience is it's way more responsive .
This is a short list of some of the things that VSCode is doing that AFAIK, most other editors are not (yet?). There's lot of other features though.
I have lots of issues with VSCode. I wish it had keyboard macros. I wish it it's undo system didn't suck. I wish it did auto backups like Slickedit did. I wish it had search and replace across a folder tree with undo like Slickedit did. I wish it had column select (different than multi-cursor as a column can go into virtual space and multi-cursor can't)
All that said, the pluses outweigh the minuses and I can't go back.
apparently I can't edit that previous comment so to add
sublime merge
* I want to see blame and modified dates for folders and files. This lets me look at folders and find the one that has a recent change and then glance at the files and see which ones changed recently. Maybe that feature is in there but "View Tree" is not it. That shows a plain tree. No modified dates, no people
VSCode
VSCode loads that project remotely. It edits the files locally (meaning when you open a file, it copies it from my linux box back to the mac in the local editor. IIUC, it proxies the language server stuff so it launches language server support on linux remotely. This means all the TS/C++/Rust etc intellisense stuff is being indexed on Linux in that project's environment and then that info is proxied back to the Mac and shows up in VSCode on the mac as info/completions/docs
Thank you for taking the time to share all this feedback - I genuinely appreciate it and will be looking into this further.
A couple of things to note:
> It puts headings on diff sections. I want to copy text that from Sublime Merge and search for the identifier in my editor. Sorry, S.O.L.
I've just added support for this internally, thank you for the feedback!
> I want to search for things across changes - sorry, S.O.L. - "someIdenifier" doesn't exist in the current code. When was it deleted? Let me search.
You can use the search tool (Ctrl + F) and add the query `contents: someIdentifier`. It will return every commit which contains that term within the changes.
thanks! to be clear tho. searching the commit comment is one thing. I want to search the file contents across history. which files used to contain the word "foo"
also, the tree based folder and file blame. GitHub, the website, shows this info by default. It would be nice if sublime merge had a similar view. The code view on github, the default view for any project, shows a line for each file and folder, followed by the commit msg summary in the middle, and a commit date on the right
They need to enhance their plugin API asap, i remember wanting to make a small assistant panel, the only choice was to use a pseudo mini-HTML api, it's not good for anything dynamic.. a shame
I'd love an Immediate Mode API, give me full control, or give me access to your OpenGL context, i'll write my own UI
They also need to improve the layout system for their panels, Origami is good, but sometimes using your mouse is better
And i agree about getting stuff to Package Control, it's unnecessary painful
Other than that, it's the perfect editor, but that plugin API holds it back, lots of missed opportunity, specially with the advent of AI stuff
About 10 years ago, I was working with a much younger team (I'm 61 now), and we had a Sun box that was broken in a co-lo.
The guy sent down there had a laptop and a serial cable.
I talked him through how to use one of the serial comms programs (miniterm?) to connect, but of course, there was no ncurses or equivalent, so not even vi would work to edit a file.
So I got him to use "ed". It was hilarious that he thought I was, in some way, a magician. He and the others I was working with (all at least 2 decades younger than me) didn't understand why you'd want a "line editor" or how you could possibly write code using a DECwriter or, even worse, an ASR-33.
It was then that I started feeling "old" in this industry.
There's dozens of us. Dozens! Seriously though, having a lightweight text editor like Sublime that I use is an interesting comparison when I see people immediately reach for tools like VS Code. Especially my juniors.
The thing about VS Code is not that it's bad, it's just, like everything and the kitchen sink? Sublime Text just feels like a really nice tool bench that your craft for yourself.
I'm really happy to hear there are others out there.
(And yes, I totally bought the license, but never enter it in)
Maybe Sublime Text is good, but I refuse to pay for something as profane as a text editor. A decent editor (syntax highlighting, LSP, regex search, keybindings for the 21st century etc) needs to be part of every operarting system.
I have actually tried Lapce because I like Lua and I thought it would be a nice alternative to building plugins in Lua rather than Python. But I can't get over how clunky the UI is in Lapce. I also find it will randomly crash on me and I can't really tell why. There's also no easy way to add additional LSPs. You have to look at these extensions, and there is a very limited number of them. I wish they would just allow you to configure the LSP through a JSON object like Sublime does.
Agreed, it has rough edges. But the UI got improved with the last update to 0.4.2.
Havent had crashes on Linux, had some on Windows through. But still, its Beta quality Software and better than most other editors already. And its cross platform and really fast
You can essentially use Sublime for free indefinitely. It shows you a prompt to buy a license for every few saves you make but that’s about it. Not invasive in my book. I also think people underestimate the amount of work that goes into building a good text editor and keeping it up to date over the years.
That’s a good point. I think if you really like the editor it might be something your employer could pay for. At least ST only offers a one-time fee for each major version. Of course that depends on where you work and their policies. So I see how it’s not so easy and my comment definitely missed that part.
I love Sublime Text. It's one of my favorite pieces of software. I have it running 100% of the time on every machine I work on.
It's where I write all of my personal notes, blog posts, and it's where I wrote both "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters".
At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that's been Visual C++, Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and most recently VS Code.
That doesn't mean to me that I want Sublime to turn into an IDE. I like that it's lighterweight than that. It's the perfect sweet spot for me of rich enough to handle piles of notes and documents and small scale code editing, but not so huge and cumbersome that it gets in my way.
Funnily, my approach is somehow opposite. I run Emacs with all bells and whistles to write whatever language. With LSPs, you are now not married to a language-specific IDE. As a developer, I just start Emacs in server mode and never shut it down.
Then I use emacsclient to edit all kinds of files. It loads instantly, handles any reasonable files, can access remote files when needed, and has all the tools I want handy.
OTOH the IDE features do not clutter anything: I have no tabs, no toolbars, no file trees — not until I ask for them.
That sounds like an academic exercise rather than anything practical
In what world does the topic of setting up an editor have any academic value?
It looks like the comment is posted to a wrong thread.
(FTR, the setup above is used for practical, mostly commercial programming; I've left academia without even finishing my post-grad study, decades ago.)
Obligatory xkcd
https://xkcd.com/378/
I use sublime in exactly the same way. I've written hundreds of blog post on it. I use it for light data manipulation and other file editing. For writing, I like how I can move text up/down like code when I want to move around items in my outline. I showed a writer friend of mine this and it blew his mind (he doesn't know anything about text editors).
For data manipulation, I like multi-line cursors. Sure, I have expensive IDEs that can do this too, but sublime is great for non-technical people and it's very affordable and lightweight as you mentioned.
My other friend spends a lot of time in spreadsheets, and he was trying to import a bunch of tabular data one time and it didn't quite work due to the source formatting. I showed him how to pull it into sublime, quickly add some commas and remove some junk data on every line to get it in shape for importing into Excel. He loved it!
Well said. I work in networking, and I use Sublime for editing router configurations before updating them/applying them etc. I love that it's fast and performant and isn't chock-full of IDE features. I've been a vim user for almost all my life, but a workmate showed me him editing configs using Sublime and he was so fast and quick (especially multiple pointers) - plus we use git a lot (sublime merge) so I tried it and was very impressed. I still use vim a lot, but I simply love Sublime Text (and Merge) as well.
> At the same time, it's not the tool I use as an IDE. For programming, I use whatever IDE is dominant for the language I'm working in. Over time, that's been Visual C++, Visual Studio, XCode, Eclipse, IntelliJ, and most recently VS Code.
This is what I do too, some IDEs are just well-suited for one language or stack over others. That said, I wish languages and IDEs and editors would share ideas more often. I actually don't hate XCode except for the performance, but I prefer the git interface of VSCode, and I prefer the ability to dangle commas and easily format JS/TS consistently (although the tools somehow used to be easier to set up) in VSCode. (absolutely hate prettier)
Thanks for your books!
Same! I love that it is so snappy and fast, and don't choke on larger files. I use it for all of my non-programming note taking. I also hope it don't turn into a IDE.
I feel exactly the same about it.
SublimeText is where I go to take some notes I want to write unformatted, or with some markdown.
It's where I go to paste some blob of JSON or logs from a random command that I want to parse out into something more readable than my terminal gave me.
It's where I write a random snippet of code to help someone who's asking me a question, or a bash script for a one-off job.
It's not my IDE and I don't want it to replace my IDE, just like I don't want my leatherman tool or swiss army knife to replace my power drill or pliers.
I've been a big fan of VS Code but the latest updates have shown Microsoft simply can't shake their addiction to bloating software with unnecessary features, so likely back to Sublime Text I go.
I've been running vscodium for a couple of years now, and they rip out the MS specific stuff so no ChatGPT and so forth. I haven't noticed any slowdowns.
Maybe give it a try? https://vscodium.com/
Well that'd be just about perfect! Thank you stranger!
Out of curiosity, what is it about an IDE that you find useful...? I'm probably just a heathen, but I've always done the build/run steps on the command line, and Sublime has LSP for all the syntax & semantics goodies other than that -- like for Python, I've got Ruff (syntax), Jedi (semantics), and CoPilot (autocomplete) running happily, with what I feel is an impressive amount of configurability.
Are people just working on more complex software than I am so you need the build steps hidden behind a UX, or am I missing some killer IDE feature that I don't even know about?
EDIT: It probably helps that I'm a vim die-hard and couldn't imagine clicking on something to rebuild the program! And Sublime's Vim support is better than any real vim program I've ever used, much less the half-hearted versions available in the IDEs I've tried. Maybe that's the main disconnect, and y'all just prefer having dropdown menus?
For me, it's:
* Automated type-based code navigation: go to definition, find all uses, etc.
* Auto-complete: Personally, I prefer simple auto-complete based on static analysis over AI "hope for the best"-style auto-complete.
* Debugger with all the bells and whistles: Step in and out, inspect variables, modify variables, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, etc.
* Automated refactoring: Rename, etc.
Most text editors can do most of those, but I find that good debugger integration is rare outside of a dedicated IDE.
IDEs can have just as powerful keyboard shortcuts. IdeaVIM within Jetbrains is probably the most feature complete vim emulation?
What sets IDEs apart from trying to convert an editor to an IDE with a bunch of plugins is:
- somebody somewhere is hopefully sitting down with a cohesive vision of tying these tools together, instead of an assemblage of plugins each with their own visions. I would very much prefer to use their vision (a la macos/windows/Ubuntu) vs trying to configure each plugin to my own (arch/Gentoo). It could be an age thing, but at this point I really don't have the enthusiasm to become an expert at 12 different config file syntaxes and read the docs for all the options for each plugin i would need to tweak.
- an IDE is all encompassing in certain ways that is amazing. For example, Jetbrains is not only a fantastic code editor/refactoring swiss knife, it also has excellent git integration, and can leverage the same code navigation capabilities within diffs and PRs. It will autostash in branch specific stashes, and I can visually browse and diff these. I can attach to databases and get full SQL query and view capabilities, so it isn't just about general purpose programming languages.
- it can be hard to explain to people who haven't used a language specific IDE, how much further along its refactoring capabilities are compared to any LSP. Note that this applies much more to Java/C# than to something like python, both because of static typing and decades of investment.
- as an example of integration, say you add a new function in a file. Not only does Jetbrains highlight the modified file in the Git commit panel, but the structure panel will actually color that function differently and so on.
- due to widespread use of Jetbrains in certain communities, people will build valuable plugins to relatively niche things. So Jetbrains has excellent CMake support and decent Bazel support.
- I like the keyboard, but I also like and acknowledge that the mouse is much better at certain things. For interactive reading, I like I can right click on a commit and say "rebase from here" instead of looking up, copying and posting the red into my git rebase -i command. Conflict resolution, line by line inclusion etc. is also easier with a mouse.
I am very competent at the command line, but beyond a certain project size, IDEs just make sense to me.
You didn't mention debugging (breakpoints, step through, inspecting variable values at runtime). If you are writing code and aren't doing these things, you probably should be!
Some of us have jobs and do this professionally, not as a hobby. That’s why we use an IDE. Vim is a fun toy where you can hack together a poor man’s IDE but I grew out of that phase a long time ago.
In some cases we are forced to use a specific IDE. Not optional.
Not sure if you are facetious or not, but here's why I use an IDE.
Many years ago I saw an advertisement about some cooking tool. This old East Asian grandma, ninja grandma looking, was doing some prep work for some dish. She stops, looks in disgust at the tool she was using and says "this is meant to bring joy, but this is not bringing any joy". She then switched to the "better" tool and all was good with the universe and much joy for everyone.
This is why I use the tools I use, because they bring me joy. There is an argument to be made that I use some of my tools because they bring me less sadness, but oh well.
I use vscode because it brings me joy, nevermind that I use less than 10% of its capabilities (eyeballing). I compile, run tests, use source control in Windows Terminal, because Windows Terminal brings me more joy than the vscode terminal.
I use a cage on my photo camera because it brings me joy. I use a Peak Design sling because it brings me joy. I use my Lowepro sling bag, that I got as a bonus after buying a cheapish tripod, because it brings me joy. The next version of my bag, size wise, it's a proper backpack, now I'm planning to get one and see how the joy levels are.
You use whatever you use because that brings you joy. You can try and rationalize this in any way you want, at the end of the day, the amount of joy is the only real reason you use what you use. Whatever we use doesn't make us better or worse, it makes us human.
couldn't imagine clicking on something to rebuild the program!
Do you really think that's how people use IDEs?
I've never used an IDE that didn't have comprehensive keyboard shortcuts, and I don't remember one that didn't allow customization of shortcuts.
I assume they mean they build their projects by typing in the terminal commands directly, not that they have vim rigged up to build stuff via keyboard shortcut. I don't think most people use their IDEs like a text editor with a built-in terminal.
100% ditto for me. It's the interface for my external brain. The file search and global search are exactly what I need, and the multi-cursor editing, etc. are fantastic.
I always have my IDE up on one monitor and Sublime on the other.
Do you mostly use your file explorer to see the list of files? Or do you use any plugins to sort and view your files?
Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.
For starters, I love the licensing, as it is very fair: I bought a personal license and I can take it to as many machines as I have (I do use many different computers). And you can buy it one time, no silly monthly subscription fees.
As a result, Sublime ist the only commercial (locally installed) software I still use, and it is always open.
There are situations, where I use macros, regex substitutions, or browsing the file system (using the keyboard only for speed) when I prefer to use my other editor, Emacs.
I recently played with Zed, which looks cute, but I immediately lost an important file, so back I was in the Sublime buffer. (Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything.)
I tend to have many Windows open (several dozens), some of them for several years, others for five minutes. The only two features I would like are: - search across all open files and - a list of edit buffers that is itself an editable buffer that you can walk around using cursor key and select a file by hitting RETURN like Emacs has it.
Generally, I prefer that I doesn't become a feature overloaded big monster of a program that can do everything (that's Emacs already, but I like both, I just want them to stay different).
Although for longer-term programming of bigger projects I prefer IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or PyCharm CE, in recent time, I had to write mostly small programs, and both Emacs or Sublime fit that bill (no need for language servers for me for two screens full of a Python script as I also teach that stuff).
It's not a one-time purchase if you consider updates.
> Personal licenses are a once off purchase, and come with 3 years of updates. After 3 years, an upgrade will be required to receive further updates.[0]
Tbh I think this is fair, but it surprises me every 3 years when I have to pay up again xD
[0]: https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text
I actually like when I get the note that I need to pay for the upgrade. It's a good reminder that I still find Sublime valuable (so much that I use almost daily), and that I got 3-4 years of free upgrades for a fair price (vs. subscription models like 1Password, or version-specific rip-offs, like VMware Workstation).
It's one of my favorite piece of software. Obsidian being another one.
> but I immediately lost an important file
Zed has an "autosave" setting, it's just off by default.
Sublime’s behaviour isn’t an autosave, it just never loses text in a window. You can upgrade the entire OS, start Sublime and your windows and text will be waiting for you, regardless of saved or unsaved state. I’ve got five-year-old scratchpad windows open that I’ve never saved.
I do this with Notepad++ and honestly I have mixed feelings about it. It's so convenient but I feel weird about constantly pasting semi-important notes and snippets into this unnamed, unsaved, unsynced doc that just sits there always open on my desktop.
Basically I just feel guilty that I'm not using a "proper" note taking application when so many of them exist.
I use notepad++ in the same way without guilt, I also have a paper notebook where I write things in the same random chaos. In the past I had at a time a LG monitor that had really large bezels and I used to glue post its to it all the time as my "temporary" notes.
Most of note taking applications I tried attempt to convince all my text is important and must be stored and if possible classified and that's just not how my relationship with physical notes is.
I resonate a lot with this. Like most of what goes into that system really is pretty disposable, but it would be nice if a note-taking app could just quietly swallow anything I didn't look at for a few days, while still making it available as an "also, this?" entry in full text search. Or maybe for a kind of context-aware search/browsing, if it were possible to do a query like "show me everything I added or altered around the same time I was working with keywords x and y".
I used to use a clipboard manager. It had two functionalities:
- The ability to scroll or search my clipboard history
- The ability to pin/favorite individual entries, which would then show up in the pinned/favorited tab
That thing was practically my extra brain before the database corrupted itself... (that threw me so off that I don't even remember anymore most of the time from back when I had it.)
It's saved, just not to separate files.
And the solution to getting it synced is to back up your computer, which you should definitely be doing.
Same. Although I just discovered UpNote, which seems good so far.
>never loses
That was not my experience with sublime because it'd just spontaneously lose a session along with all unsaved data. Some other people would have similar problems too (just look up 'sublime lost session', and apparently people are still having these kinds of problems with them complaining even quite recently).
That's still my favorite feature of all, it even remembers the undo history. Never lost anything to a crash.
I think you need to create a project file and then it stores things there.
For a long time I would get paranoid about accepting Mac updates which would require a reboot because then I'd lose my undo history and then I discovered that this is all I would need to do.
It doesn't remember undo history after you close the tab, would love to see that feature though!
I had no idea it preserved this too.
Fwiw zed also has this explicit "sublime style" save all buffers since 3-4 months ago.
It doesn’t save unnamed files which is mostly how I use this feature in sublime-text (as a scratch pad): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4985
How do you enable it? I just installed Zed yesterday and I was looking for this setting.
Edit, I suspect what I wanted was the "after delay" setting here https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#autosave
VSCode does this as well.
It works well, but Zed consuming too much CPU on Linux: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14833
>Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything.
Unless, of course, you accidentally press "delete folder" instead of "remove folder from project" in the sidebar context menu.
As far as I’m aware it just goes to the bin, it’s not rm’d, so it is recoverable.
> but I immediately lost an important file
Notepad++ has had that feature (persisting temporary text buffers) before Sublime Text even existed.
I'd guess vim has had this (the .swp files) since the 90's.
How did you lose a file?
possibly restarting the System
Hey! I'm a Sublime Text user since ST2 in 2011.
I love ST (my last blog post is https://blog.separateconcerns.com/2025-01-04-teal-lsp-sublim...) and I think the main thing lacking compared to the competition is the remote development experience.
I work in AI so we typically work over SSH on machines with big GPUs. Most of my colleagues use VSCode because it has a very good Remote Development extension.
I actually have heard that working over a remote connection can be a pain. From what I've seen from other Sublime users is that they will usually just mount a drive and then edit off that. There are also a couple of SSH plugins that can be used. In the past, I've just downloaded the files I've needed and then used rsync or scp. Not slick, but it works.
Same experience. My local machine at $Job is so slow and locked down that spinning up a VM in the cloud + VSCode remote plugin is the only way I can develop now. I would not have switched if I could edit the remote filesystem without syncing. I've worked on a ton of projects with the paid SFTP plugin but it was too painful in this case.
Likewise!
The only reason I moved away from subl is that I got access to a big ass machine and I needed to work remotely. The performance of VS code here is so good that often times I forget that the code and terminal is not my local machine.
This would be my top feature request. In addition to being great to have generally, there are increasingly environments where this is essentially a requirement and local copies are often verboten so you can't just use rsync/ssh.
This! Upvote for ST SSH remote development, currently using ST for local dev and VSCode for remote.
IMO remote mounts is a feature of the OS.
For Linux and macOS, you can mount ssh directly.
Unfortunatley, Windows makes it a little more complicated.
But there's hope. You can use yasfw with dokany (dokan fork).
https://github.com/DDoSolitary/yasfw
https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
Or mount from inside WSL.
In principle I agree, in practice I haven't found an OS based filesystem mount that works as reliably as vscode. In particular, I mean the connection is relatively robust, reconnects automatically most of the time after an outage and editing is totally asynchronous, i.e. there's no noticeable pause after saving before continuing editing and no lag (other than what's induced by the electron) when editing.
Can't this be solved using a remote file system these days?
I haven't done it in years since with every customer from the last few years the only official way to get to prod is a CI-pipeline, but I think I remember using sfpt or ssh-based file systems even a decade back?
You can use a remote FS but it is nowhere close to the experience VSCode gives you. For instance, running code will run it locally, not on the remote machine.
Remote development is VSCode's killer feature.
My preference is that it could use .ssh/config to explore the remote machine and then open/edit the file/dir.
Same here, for 15 years. I mainly use vi on the remote machine.
I've used it for 15 years and ST is still the first thing I install on a new PC.
All thoughts, meeting notes, journals, blog post drafts... everything is jotted down in ST first. I even went as far as writing my own to-do list syntax highlighter[1] which is the main reason ST is always open, at home and at work, even though I mostly use VSCode and IntelliJ for coding nowadays.
[1]: https://github.com/mlagerberg/todo
I also use sublime for managing todo and IDE for coding as my work repo uses custom tooling for build and autocomplete which only supports Visual Studio.
I use PlainTasks [0] which is very similar to your plugin but also has a few keyboard shortcuts to toggle the item state. Using this with a watered down GTD setup has really brought a lot of peace in both my personal and professional life.
[0] https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks
Wow, you really pulled out all the tricks for this one! Commands, key bindings, completions, snippets, and a syntax! Nicely done!
Love the simplicity of your to to-do list syntax highlighter in comparison to todo.txt. That's more how my brain works, as simple as possible. Especially your take on the due date vs. date when you plan to do it. Will definitely try it out.
That's really cool. Great work!
Same! I use ST for my to-do list and personal wiki, with custom highlighting and commands, and VSCode for coding.
Why does sublime do code navigation in such a clunky way? Such as "go to definition". Control click does not work, instead you need to press the far away F12 key. It then opens up a new tab instead of an inline dropdown. Apparently that tab isn't normal text, it's clickable text. it contains usages as well as definitions so you need to manually scan and decipher the results. When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)
The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.
Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.
Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?
Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.
> It then opens up a new tab instead of an inline dropdown. Apparently that tab isn't normal text, it's clickable text.
If you're talking about the built-in goto-definition then it's definitely not a tab, it's a popup similar to goto-anything and the command palette. You can type to filter, use the arrow keys, press enter, ctrl+enter for side-by-side, etc.
If you want to use the mouse you can hover over the symbol and get a list of definitions and references.
> it contains usages as well as definitions
That sounds like you've got a syntax that isn't classifying its symbols correctly. I vaguely remember Microsoft's Typescript package doing this. All the built-in syntaxes properly classify definitions so you won't have references show up in that list. It's possibly simply removing a package will fix this for you.
> When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)
Not scrolling to the definition is odd, it's working fine for me. I agree we could highlight the definition better; by default the line is highlighted though. You can enable line highlighting if that's too subtle.
> The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.
We don't currently have a terminal, but the Terminus plugin is fairly popular if that's what you're looking for.
> Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.
We generally don't integrate that tightly with build systems; doing so effectively requires a plugin per external build system. Though I don't know if you'd actually want to have all targets listed for Make, since virtually everything is a target (and apparently this wasn't possible until --print-targets was added last year).
> Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?
If you have the build system set to "Automatic", then ST will automatically pick which ones to make available. For Make it'll check for a Makefile for instance. You can then use Build With… to select the one you want to use. If you've manually picked a different build system then that's what ST will use.
> Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.
The behavior you want it to have sounds like how I remember it being, but that's clearly not the case; I'll have to look into that, thanks.
Thank you for responding. I was wrong about some of these in hind sight.
Today when I tried goto-definition, it worked as expected. I'm not sure why it didn't before. This was for a C project. I do have various Package Control packages installed:
And you were right, I had set my build process manually. I'm sorry for slandering.What I meant by "terminal" is the output monitoring pane. Whenever I build "C - single file" or "Python - single file", a pane with <textarea> behavior appears in the bottom, showing the program output. But if said program is interactive, there's no way to send it any input. Nor to stop the program. Building it again leads to a new instance of the program being spawned, but the old one stays running.
It's rare for an app dev (of such a popular tool) to go out of their way to respond to a random forum user. Even rarer is to address every point on their list with patience and consideration.
You must be a remarkable person and I wish you nothing but success.
Is there any chance we'd see a Sublime Debug? Loved Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. The main thing I'm missing in my life is a really good and fast cross platform UI for a LOT of debugger backends. (I tend to works with a lot of programming languages, and CLI debuggers are really clunky to use).
I have found this plugin works surprisingly well
https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Debugger
Wow, I did not know about this.
ST user who is on it still mostly just by inertia (learning tools is my least favorite part of the job) but really not getting the features I want/need from it. This'll help!
Cool, but git integration in the editor was also cool until SublimeHQ decided to spin out a dedicated client for it.
The only debugger I'm happy with right now (in terms of performance/features) is RemedyBG, but it's windows only and compiled languages only. In general, I mostly live with painfully slow debugging in VSCode.
I would really love to see RemedyBG's dedicated debugging UI/UX approach refined by some group like SublimeHQ. A group who knows how to turn the UX up to 11.
> Cool, but git integration in the editor was also cool until SublimeHQ decided to spin out a dedicated client for it.
Is it completely removed from Sublime Text?
I love merge, but the simplest controls like stage/unstage/commit/indicate file status seem kind of essential.
Having said that, Merge is far and away the best git UI I've used. It has saved my bacon a few times. I'm not terrible with git in the terminal (I use it there 98% of the time), but sometimes... I really don't want to be doing things without a decent visual representation of the mess and chaos, and intuitive access to the tools available. I get why they wanted to create Merge.
> Is it completely removed from Sublime Text?
Of course not. I was just describing 2 different levels of coolness.
I'd also be delighted with, and happy to part with cash for, such a thing.
Thanks for Sublime Text! It's been my daily driver for over 15 years :). 10 of those developing Rust, and making heavy use of the Rust Analyzer/LSP plugin infra.
I also want to thank you for having such a reasonable licensing model, I'm launching my own desktop app in the next week or so, and I plan to have a very similar model to Sublime (free to use with nags, license is good for any personal usage, inclusive of updates for X period of time).
The most important thing for me as I am using ST since ca. 2009. I am retro programming fan and ST is the only editor that still allows me to conveniently work on windowses across 98 to 7. I am not using the most recent version, heck I haven't upgraded it for few years now, but I hope the compatibility still remains.
I've been using Sublime Text since version 2, so probably close to 15 years, and I love it! It's my go to editor for code (mostly front end web dev but I've used it for C# as well, when VS won't get out of the way) as well as all of my writing (using Markdown). I've published 5 tabletop RPGs and related supplements (with another on the way) all written using Sublime plus so many lines of notes and blog posts. It's a dream to work with!
I've paid for my licence but is there a tip jar anywhere?
I've been a Sublime Text user for ten years, bought it and Sublime Merge multiple times. A year ago, I permanently moved to VSCode because of three things:
1. Solid coding AI integration with frequent improvements. Sublime Text at best gives you an option to plug an LSP with modest capabilities. It's behind the times.
2. Small community, infrequent extension updates.
3. Limited UI capabilities. Extensions have to contort hard to fit into available extension points.
What's your vision of ST future?
Those are actually some of the reasons why I use Sublime.
I agree. The last thing I want from Sublime is to have AI nonsense.
Yeah I have accessibility/distraction issues with all the flair and animations and small text in vs code.
I know all text editors need some degree of config to be comfortable but sublime is nearly immediately usable. Vs code is the only thing I need to configure to remove flair and features vs extend them.
That's basically my experience. I've switched from ruby to golang a while ago and developing in sublime text was become a pure pain, while vscode provided a lot of plugins to solve basic needs. Then i switched back to ruby and discovered that vscode also have superior ruby support.
I still love sublime text, but there is no way i'm going back to it.
Here's my two (or three?) cents
1. There are several plugins that allow AI integration 2. There is an active community on https://discord.sublimetext.io
3. From what I can perceive based on Sublime HQ's responses, it's main focus for Sublime Text is simplicity and to be a text editor. You can notice this if you look at the banner text in the website; it says "Text Editing, Done Right". And while it is mainly used for code and most of its users are developers, it tries not to be. However, it does provide people the ability to extend it however they please.
Overall, Sublime Text is indeed not as fully featured as VSCode because it is not supposed to.
I don't use it much for programming, since I mostly use IntelliJ for that.
Where Sublime shines for me is opening large files, and opening pretty much any file. So many times MacOS wants me to open a json file in Xcode, or a txt file in TextEdit, when all i want to do is open it in Sublime! And I know that i can open files that are multiple GB without issues, just takes a few seconds :P
And the Ctrl-D shortcut and multi-cursor in general is so neat. I know other editors have it too now, but when I showed my wife how useful it was for simple tasks like formatting a list of emails...she ended up making her company buy her a license and teaching others how to use it.
Just in case you or another reader doens't know (you probably do), it is very easy to configure MacOS to by default open .txt or .json (or whatever) files in the app of your choice, such as ST. I have ST opening .txt and .json, yeah.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/choose-an-app-to-op...
(There's also prob some way to do it from terminal, but I do it the above way)
Perhaps Sublime Text could run some annual anonymous survey?
It could both be an indicator of what the community is doing, and who your users are, and also a way to promote some new features people might have missed (like the survey "state of CSS").
I enjoy both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge almost everyday, thank you very much for making them!
Some annoyances, though:
- the way plugins are displayed inside ST while browsing for them is limited. Other editors usually provide a much better UI. The web version of package control is required in the end.
- Ctrl-P does not the same thing in ST and SM, and it always tricks me. I wished they would be more aligned by default, but that ship has sailed I guess. I should rebind them.
- SM UI can be slow / be unresponsive for a while like when a tool has run and 20k files were created but not part of git ignore yet. It makes deleting them quite difficult from the UI.
- I wish SM would allow me to pick up patch files from the diff UI and import them from there more easily.
- I wish Mac OS dictation would be more native in SM, and allow me to change language like in other Mac OS apps.
I'm genuinely interested in seeing what you kind of envision for Sublime Text, its evolved nicely, and arguably I would say that it inspired some of today's top editors like VS Code and even Atom, I definitely felt like those took strong inspiration from ST.
Piling up to the grateful comments, I've been using Sublime Text for years and still love it. It has never quite done it as an IDE for me as I'm used to more fully fledged ones like IntelliJ, however it is an amazing scratch pad and text manipulation tool. I pretty much have it permanently open. This post made me realise I had never bought a license, it is now done. Thank you for it being fair, by the way.
On the odd chance that you read this and feel like replying, I have always been in awe of Sublime Text's UI. Can you elaborate a bit on how it works? There was a short comment by Jon Skinner that it is custom and written on top of a cross-platform portability layer, but I mean, I'd love to hear some more details.
I’ve been a happy user customer for subl and smerge since launch even when a student.
I really really appreciate how few regressions, amazing low latency and always refining everything. And I’ve def had positive interactions with everyone who is working on the sublime sublime software since it’s been out. So like 10-15 years ish I’m going to guess without looking stuff up
Are there are plans to improve Search UI and make sidebar more capable. I really like the way VSCode’s search interface where results are listed on sidebar and clicking an item opens the file in the editor.
Regardless of the above experience, Sublime Text is still my daily driver since 2012. Nothing has come close to it.
there is a "Find in Files" feature. It will show you a new tab with results where you can use key binds to navigate (next, previous, open line of result)
You can see the feature under "Find > Find in Files" You can see the "navigation" under "Find > Find Results"
For more help, head over to https://discord.sublimetext.io (and tag me, I'll reply when I can)
Sublime Text team, thank you so much for creating the best tool out there! I truly appreciate the stability and simplicity of your product.
My main request is to add a tool similar to Cursor Composer and Chat. Thank you again!
As someone who also loves ST, please do not do this. Stay far away from bringing in something like that. If someone really wants this it seems much better suited for a plugin, which anyone can make.
Long time Sublime customer here: Please, please do not add any LLM integrations. One of the main reasons I love Sublime is that I can just focus on writing code, without 100 distracting things popping in and popping out. Also, that I support a business with my money that does not spend resources on the LLM hype.
Would be good to have it opt-in, without any sort of inpact, for users, who aren't using it.
The resistance developers have to LLMs considering how much they're 10xing myself and many other devs I know is just sad to see. Anytime new disruptive technology comes in there's always an old guard that doesn't adapt in time.
In this thread you're seeing survivorship bias. We're discussing an editor that doesn't support AI.
AI is Rashomon. It's just an association engine of immense scope. We're not talking to an alien intelligence; we're talking to ourselves. It's an existential mirror, and each person's experience will vary. Some people can control the dance of the campfire flames. Some people just aren't cut out to be shamans.
Evolution is always making failed experiments, as a hedge against catastrophic ecosystem change. I'm convinced that neurodivergents are better suited to becoming AI Centaurs, in the sense Gary Kasparov promoted after he came to terms with his chess loss to IBM's Big Blue.
I made my career by computerizing a branch of mathematics that did not want to cooperate. Now in retirement, I see AI as the key to achieving my dreams before my father's dementia arrives. It has radically transformed my past month.
My preferred language is Lean 4, and AI has as hard a time coding in it as people. This morning's retooling has been distilling the Lean 4 website down to fit well within a 200K token context window. I prefer AI chat at arms length so I make the mistakes not it, but with enough editor integration that we can both see what we're doing.
I loved Sublime Text when I used it. And AI coding doesn't primarily accelerate one's original spec, it encourages tool scopes one might never have dared attempt. So writing a Sublime Text plugin that interfaces with an Anthropic API key is something any of us could probably knock off.
I am in the exact opposite boat - AI is significantly improving my programming flow and having to use VSCode (well, VSCodium in my case) rather than something lightweight like Sublime is suboptimal - I would love a good plugin for LLM integration ala Cody and frankly that's the only way I could see myself as a paying customer.
I'm in the best boat, I don't want to use LLM but I think ST having hooks to allow people to make such plugins (if those don't already exist) would be a fine thing. Luckily, that boat has loads of space and you're all invited :P
Sure, I'm fine with this boat :D
Similar to LSPs our approach to this sort of thing is to enable plugins authors to integrate 3rd party tools.
I just added a "Open In Cursor" plugin:
https://github.com/spencerchristensen/sublime-open-in-cursor
It isn't on Package Control yet as I just submitted the PR.
I made this as I love Sublime Text as a text editor and do not want to pollute it with AI garbage. However, there are times where I want to quickly open the same file in Cursor to hash out some their agents. Workflow is:
- lovely text editing in Sublime
- encounter something I would like AI assistance for
- quickly pop open the thing in Cursor and do the AI stuff
- hop back to Sublime to continue my lovely editing
as a paying customer I will stop renewing my license if AI slop generation appears in the product
Thank a lot for sublime, this software is incredible, especially the consistent keyboard handling across all UI, all others editors messes up on this one !
I've things I'd like to see with sublime:
- I'd like to have all menu entries accessible from command palette.
- I dont use files tabs (always hidden). I'd like to have a special mode that only tracks saved/unsaved status on files, no opened status, or something like auto close on file switch. I've just no use for the opened status, I'm not even sure why it exists besides being a relic of the past (good old) times where "goto file" did not exist.
- I like sublime to be aware of git branches changes, eg having heuristic for auto closing or revert saved files are not present in FS after branch switch. The feature is partially here with the reload suggestion. (this partially overlaps the no-open status)
- Goto default file listing should be last opened file present on fs, and then alnum sorted listing
I suspect there are roadblocks for these suggestions, sorry if I overlooked obvious issues.
Love sublime text! Would be amazing to see a blog post from you guys go over the gui framework. Really cool tech! It’s my editor of choice!
Thank you so much for the tool you've built, and for being so generous in how you license it. Sublime is always installed on my machine, Sublime Merge is great too :)
Was a sublime user through version 2 and 3, which were always champions of performance, but while I installed and used 4 for a bit it never quite became part of my workflow.
I think part of it was because it sat between using neovim vs. using vscode, and if I had to reach out for vscode I probably wanted to use remote code editing, code intelligence or AI integration which a default sublime setup wasn't quite offering, and the plugin game seemed stale. Maybe there were also some Wayland issues, don't remember.
Maybe I'll try again and see what you have been up to. Using a proprietary text editor in ${current_year} feels a bit weird though.
Sublime is the best! I've been creating a new programming language ACPUL with Sublime for 10 years https://old.reddit.com/r/acpu/comments/1fxxjtx/acpu_mobile_d... .
I don't have the resources, so please add support for the ACPUL programming language. If Sublime had a good debugger, it would be even more powerful.
Support for syntaxes (and/or debuggers) are mostly provided by the community. Creating a syntax for your language shouldn't be that hard afaik. Just head over to https://discord.sublimetext.io to talk to the active community
Big fan of the tool. Sublime was one of the few editors that could even open the massive logs one project was generating. The recovery is so good, I've realized I had dozens of tabs unsaved for years until IT updated machines.
One question: is there going to be another 3.x release? The popup takes you to a 4.x release, which is great if you are on 4.x. If it hit EOL, it makes it easy for us to force the update. Right now, it is in a bit of a weird in between.
ST3 won't be receiving any bugfixes or new features, so it's effectively EOL. Anyone's of course free to use ST3 or 2 or 1 if they don't wish to upgrade, we still make those available on our website.
The last release of ST3 was in 2019 [1], 2 years before the first stable release of ST4. It is dead.
[1]: https://www.sublimetext.com/3
Hi, I just renewed my sublime text and merge licenses after starting in 2021. Thank you for sticking to simple product excellence and not following trends. Thanks for focusing on the editor for human users and not pushing some service based enterprise licensing system or ai tooling where the company aspires to 1000x. It’s a great product and my most used PC software.
Maybe you can priorize https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/1649. As a heavy LSP user, I find it very inconvenient not being able to copy text out of popups.
Also, I think you should open-source `minihtml`.
That would be handy. I tend to use the "diagnostic panel" like one of the comments suggests for that reason. It isn't perfect but it works.
Sublime user for many many years now. I've tried VSCode many times, never liked it. I use Cursor a bit now but still prefer Sublime. Thank you for building it!
You really should write a book on programming a text editor. It seems like we’ve all been on this journey with you.
One tiny thing, that I haven't investigated at all... And doesn't seem to be a common thing to worry about... If I have a file with an asterisk in it, then Sublime [0] seems to have issues displaying the file name.
*.x will appear as [].x for some reason.
[0] (Build 4180, out of date...)
That could be any number of things, I suggest posting an issue on our public issue tracker: https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues
Please fix the bug if possible with Sublime Merge where the UI just becomes completely unresponsive... it always happens due to using it on a workspace and its so annoying to force close and reopen it every day! I love sublime merge otherwise!
G'day, I head up the Sublime Merge team.
Firstly, thanks for using it and supporting us!
If you haven't already, it would help immensely to get a bug report here: https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_merge/issues/new/choose
I'll definitely look into this further and get it sorted
My colleague does Sublime Merge, but I can look into this for you. Have you reported this on our issue tracker: https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_merge/issues?
I think a big hit for ST's popularity - next to the rise of Atom and VS Code - was its upgrade from version 3 to 4; are you considering to do that again or, if funds are required, do a different way to raise money?
With the new licensing model we no longer need to hold back changes and do major releases. Avoiding the big pause in updates was partly why it was changed.
It makes sense. As a mostly casual user I couldn’t justify the new model so have kept the previous version, which still works for my needs.
Thank you for sublime! Have used it for the past 10 years. Do you mind if I ask is it your full time job?
It's myself and my colleagues full time jobs, yes. Jon Skinner (ST's creator and owner) also works full time with us.
I don't use ST as my daily driver any more but I still use it for fast editing of large files occasionally. I am daily driving Merge though. Any other Sublime apps in the works?
Have you also considered offering ST and SM as a bundle price with a discount? I'd be interested just because of my lopsided use of the two apps.
We already offer ST and SM in a discounted bundle :)
Duh, I completely missed it somehow! Skim reading is a bad habit kids.
Bought Sublime a decade ago, bought the new version last year, still love it.
If we're doing feature requests: a "recently closed windows" alongside the "recently closed files" would be amazing, for when I misclick and close a window containing a bunch of open files and a folder or two :)
Hi! I was a Sublime Text fan throughout University, and I would have loved to continue using it. Unfortunately for me Sublime lacks too many necessities, and that forced me off Sublime and onto the much slower VSCode.
I really wish Sublime would develop a more solid plugin system and have some sane built-ins such as a terminal.
> sane built-ins such as a terminal.
It’s all preference. I think it’s insane that people use the terminal in their editors.
Why is it insane? Along with a terminal, I also use a database editor inside my code editor.
That’s the point behind an IDE - integrated developer environment.
I get where you're coming from and generally agree. The trouble is that the integrated tools are all pretty bad, in my experience. If I can use DataGrip instead of some VS Code extension called "Database Client", I'm going to use DataGrip. I will often even prefer pgsql for many tasks. A mediocre tool might save time here and there because it's convenient, but I find their broader impact is poorer work done in worse ways.
Of course, this is all opinion in a very subjective context. Some people do best-in-class work with terrible tools.
Datagrip, of course, is just the integrated database editor of intellij packaged without the rest of intellij, so it's not a rule that integrated tools are always bad
Is it integrated into their IDEs? That's incredible. Fair point, then.
Maybe I should consider using their IDEs.
Yes and since few weeks ago it now comes for free with WebStorm.
It’s insane bc I don’t like it :)
Like I said, it’s all personal preference.
I mainly code in neovim, I do a lot of work ssh-ing into other machines (sometimes with multiple hops.)
I live in the terminal and sometimes cat very very large log files and would like an experience that is terminal centric.
It very much surprised me to learn how many devs there are nowadays who aren’t terminal centric (outside of windows land)
Also I use my text editor to edit database records (via a plugin) as well. Editing DB rows in vim is the kind of crazy I like.
Sublime isn't an IDE - it's an editor.
But Sublime isn't an IDE, it's just a text editor. The line is blurry (especially with how VS Code is used these days) but I have ST running next to IntelliJ all day, they serve different roles.
At this point I’d call vscode an IDE.
Or at least an IDE platform where plugins provide the language integration.
You don't like quickly accessing the terminal? The biggest draw for me is that VSCode can easily attaches to terminal processes, so I can launch a debugging session with custom arguments with a simple "CTRL+~" and a "npm run foo".
“Alt+tab” works all the time.
Guake is a great terminal for quick access too.
I have a hot key for opening kitty as well.
Vscode attaching the debugger automatically is a really nice feature, though.
Nothing you couldn’t do with a few shell scripts, but it’s nice that it does it automatically.
I'd use those terminals, maybe, if the implementations weren't so bad. The one in VS Code is a sad version of what's possible.
100%. I prefer having a separate client for various tasks.
Why don't you request a text editor inside of your terminal program? ;)
> sane built-ins such as a terminal
After I initially switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text, I used Terminus [1], which I used to swear by. But then I made an effort to strip back the amount of plugins I used, and just bound a hotkey to focus my default terminal (Konsole on KDE), and I don't really miss the integrated terminal anymore.
[1] https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Terminus
Thank you! Can you share some technical details of the product, if not against the contract you signed?
I'm mostly interested in UI so would love to know how is the custom UI code structured?
Would also be very nice if you could talk a bit about interesting text editor programming/challenges you encountered.
Thanks for the product.
Just FYI - I think there is an incorrect date in the change log.
The latest build (4192), says it was released in "2024" when I think you mean to say "2025".
https://www.sublimetext.com/download
Sublime Text is great the way it is. If you have to change things, please make them just tiny, incremental changes.
Promise, when my situation get better i will pay the 80$ license. It is on my buylist since a lot of time :)
Thanks for the software
I have a lot of respect for Sublime Text not being yet-another-electron-monster. Thanks for your work.
I bought Sublime with my first developer paycheck, eons ago. Thanks for your great work <3.
I paid for a license for Sublime, but then I was forced to upgrade a while ago, and my license no longer works with the new version. Is there a solution to this?
I'd start here: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/previous_versions.html (^:
Thank you!
[dead]
FYI the latest update on the site and when updating via UI says "20 Jan 2024", not 2025.
Great product, thank you for being awesome :-).
You're welcome. Keep up the good work. I will keep buying it as long as I keep using it!
I bought sublime text 3 over a decade ago. What are the top new features of sublime text 4 that make it worth upgrading too?
We list the big ones on our front page:
Some personal standouts not listed are:Has the UI become more Mac-like on the Mac? This is the only reason I still go back to TextMate even though I purchased SublimeText.
Not a question, but by God I hope Sublime makes enough money to justify continuing to do business, because if you can't both make something you love and get paid a good chunk of change for one of the best quality editors in the industry, then it would make me very sad.
ST user here, just wanted to say thank you.
Please make an Evernote competitor out of Sublime…
Oooh, or an Obsidian competitor that doesn't take 10 minutes to boot.
Some notetaking app would be amazing
I'm happy with the most of the features, bought v2, 3 & 4 over the last 13 years, but it lacks debugger, so for Rusti, I have to use VS Code -- which is awful, but there's no better alternative. I'd pay for a special plugin that will work faster than VS Code.
Semantic highlighting! The LSP thing I mean [1]. It's the one thing which I thought was just an aesthetic nicety but actually makes a huge difference. In C++ for example:
- Color virtual calls differently from direct calls to tell them at a glance
- Class members in a different color than regular variables
- Arguments in a different color than locals, in a different color than statics
- Consts in red, mutable variables in orange
makes a huge difference in effortlessly reading the code.
It's not supported in Sublime (though you can hack a kludge to make a basic version of it work).
[1] https://gist.github.com/swarn/fb37d9eefe1bc616c2a7e476c0bc03...
absolutely loving SublimeMerge!
Thank you! Let me know if anything is missing for you and I can work on getting it added in.
I’d happily pay again if you come up with remote editing like VSCode has. It’s the killer feature. You can forbid me from using any of its extensions and turn off syntax highlighting, but as long as I can connect somewhere over SSH and still have the latency of local editing, I’d be using it.
That said, it seems like in 2025 AD the LSP client should come baked in and integrated, with configurations for how to start individual LSP servers possibly shipping on the side. I liked how the whole Go shebang was accessible in Zed in one click, same in VSCode.
That all said, I still use Sublime Text whenever I can.
First: I love your software, it is such an inspiration. I have been a fan for more than a decade at a point.
There are two pieces of software I would love you to implement, and I would buy both:
1. Spreadsheet App 2. An AI aware editor like Cursor that uses DeepSeek or equivalent. You could sell a subscription to it like Cursor also.
I think you could make both of these sing.
- build system that understand colors.. out of the box..
- revamped project system so i don't have to store extra files in my root directory, there is a plugin for it, but this should be working out of the box imo
- drag&drop panels to create layout with the mouse
- tabs in output/temporary panels
- UI API for status panel, side panel and in the views
- a proper built-in terminal, i know there is Terminus, but color support is lacking, tabs support is lacking, doesn't work well with tmux, overall it's very janky (wrt to scrolling)
- sticky scrolling (the thing that pins the scope name) or - the thingy that says where in the code we are, i forgot how it's called: [MyStruct > my_function]
I'd be willing to pay extra for a proper terminal for ST
Suggestion: implement a vimtutor: subltutor
There's this...
https://sublimetutor.com
But for v3.
See also on Package Control...
https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Sublime%20Tutor
Not really a question, but please do not deprecate mini_auto_complete! It is one of the most useful (despite being hidden/undocumented) features of ST to me.
Have y'all considered something like vscode's extension experience in sublime. The current one is not really intuitive or easier to setup
Thank you for well crafted and performant software! I'm oscillating often between Helix/Zed/Sublime but I'm probably never going to drop Sublime Text even if I would have to obtain new licenses for next versions.
So glad to see this. I have been down a long road of text editors:
- Sublime - Vim - Emacs - Atom - VSCode - Jetbrains IDE - Neovim - Zed - Cursor
And these aren’t just little flings. I’ve spent months if not years in most of these editors. However, at the end of the day I always come back to one: Sublime.
It is a beautiful piece of software. It feels like writing with one’s “good pen and good paper”, that high quality stationary sort of thing. It is just me and the code. There is something that just feels different or even tactile about Sublime. That actually leads me to ask as this is outside of my expertise: why does Sublime feel more tactile/real than other editors? When I look at the code in other editors it feels like I’m looking at a projector on a wall. When I look at the code in Sublime it feels like I’m looking at something painted on the wall. Anybody else have the same experience? What’s the psychological/software reason for that?
> That actually leads me to ask as this is outside of my expertise: why does Sublime feel more tactile/real than other editors?
Performance is a big part of that.
Even a few millisecond delay changes the user experience from "I am physically interacting with an object" to "I am requesting this service do a thing on my behalf". Sublime is consistently fast enough to feel like the former. Most other IDEs feel like the latter.
(Another example of this effect is the difference between driving a manual transmission and an automatic. When I drive a manual, it feels like I'm in control of the engine. When I drive an automatic, it feels like I'm executive sending messages to my engineer who then applies changes to the engine... eventually.)
Thanks for the info! I was wondering if it was something more than speed, but what you said makes a lot sense. Love the "I am interacting" vs "I am requesting" way of putting it as it highlights just how dramatically different of an experience it is.
Sublime is really snappy and responsive. But it also doesn't have as many fancy automation like jetbrains. Maybe that keeps the code "real", rather than some artifact that you have the computer manipulate for you.
This is the main reason I've ever found myself using it if not vscode or now cursor. If I have some massive file that needs messing with nothing handles it as well as sublime does.
That’s definitely part of it. Though even before I start typing and am just looking at the characters on the screen, they seem more dense, tactile, and real. Is there a categorical difference for how Sublime renders text vs other editors out there?
I don't use or actually even like Sublime, but I have the exact same experience of it. Quick loads and lack of "extras" that cause even portions of lag in the experience; there's an immediacy to Sublime.
But those things that introduce clunkiness are often very useful. They take away from the aesthetic feel of writing code, but give advantages that are too useful to give up, imho.
I wonder how much of it is simply that Sublime has a very pleasant default color theme (Monokai) in my opinion. It feels warmer than other IDEs. I actually use it in VScode too now.
I use sublime as a copy paste buffer when I need excellent visual regex search and replace. Vscodes regex search has awkward semantics (or at least I don't know them as well as sublimes) so I usually paste things into sublime, edit them with the regexes, then go back to what I was doing. My work has some extensions that only work in vscode so I'm stuck with it but it's good enough. I also never close sublime tabs and it persists them indefinitely with minimal memory usage, so I sometimes go back to grab things I was doing a few days ago. Definitely not the intended use but it works really well for me.
If you use windows, you can use WIN + V instead of using an editor for a copy paste buffer.
WIN + V activates clipboard history, so you can see and select things you copied previously.
This is the kind of thing I love HN for. Great tip!
Sounds like how I use Np++
I'm gonna start doing that, cause TextEdit can't even copy-paste reliably, and vim isn't super convenient for this either.
Edit: Wow Sublime is the nicest GUI text editor I've ever seen
This is exactly how it use it too
I really want to like Sublime (it's so fast, I like the minimal UI), but VS Code has so much inertia, and does so much out of the box or with minimal extra effort that it's hard to not use it instead.
At the end of the day, I have things to get done, I'm not here to tinker with tools. Same reason I never got into vim/emacs etc as a daily driver.
Emacs and Neovim are things one gets into in ones free time and gets good enough to make the switch at some point at the job. Of course that is mostly only feasible, if the projects at the job are set up in a tool agnostic way or choice exists in the first place.
I also want to like Sublime, but I already have a well configured Emacs and I like using free/libre software. While Sublime was great when I used it in the past, I am not sure I would use it much, since I use Emacs all day now. But the reason for Sublime over VS code is, that it is way less bloated and not running in a browser. Would need to see a direct comparison, but wouldn't be surprised, if it showed to be way snappier. If one does not need lots of specifically VS code features, I think Dublime gets out of ones way and lets you get shit done.
> Emacs and Neovim are things one gets into in ones free time and gets good enough to make the switch at some point at the job.
I'd probably never end up proficient with vim (and today neovim) if I didn't do the complete opposite of this and forced myself to use it for real work directly. True, I went a bit slower for one/two weeks, but if you really have to use something foreign for most of your work, you'll learn it really quickly, as long as you're up for looking things up as you go along. Of course, YMMV and all that yadda yadda.
I would be curious to know how you managed to do this. I really tried to do this but the tons of dev tools I am using was too much for transitioning to neovim for my daily work. Namely, I need a DAP, multiple dev tools (lsps, linters, formatters) because I work with several projects which do not have the same tools[^1]. Luckily, I do not mix multiple programming languages. Plus, I containerize all my dev env. There might be some elements missing, but the point is the number of tools is overwhelming and it makes me think that I should do the whole configuration/setup on my free time.
Did you face similar issues? If yes, how did you solve them? Or maybe your work does not need that much tools? Or you have been more minimalistic than me for the number of features to be included in the neovim configuration?
[1]: I work in R&D, I need to tweak and contribute in many papers code or different toolboxes/frameworks on top of the team projects.
> Did you face similar issues?
I don't remember what exact year I did the transition at, but around 2014 - 2016 I think. At the time I was working on a PHP Symfony application (and its frontend made with Backbone.js) powering Typeform, and I think this was right about when docker entered the scene, we were still using Vagrant with what I think was NFS syncing or something else dog-slow. But both Docker and Vagrant works fine with vim, as long as you have a generic VM/container setup, it shouldn't matter what editor you use, in my mind.
But before that I was using Sublime Text 2, with minimal plugins/extensions, so moving to vim was mostly getting used to moving around and manipulating text, using some very basic text-based autocomplete, before eventually migrating to a "proper" setup years later. Since then, I honestly haven't touched my config much, so I'm sure there are smoother/better ways now.
Since then, I've used (neo)vim to write JavaScript (+HTML+CSS), Ruby, Go, Python, Rust, various other languages, but mostly Clojure/Script. When trying out a new language, I find some (neo)vim plugin that seems suitable and try it out. If it works well, great, otherwise try another one.
Thanks for sharing your experience!
LSP and formatter were really fast to set up. I used kickstart.nvim to get started and lsp and formatter are already mostly configured.
DAP is trickier to set up but is doable. How often are you really debugging though? In the beginning just run both neovim and your ide and just switch when you debug.
Back when LSP wasn’t a thing I still used vim but would just switch to an IDE when I needed to go code exploring and needed to be able to jump to definition and stuff like that. Wasn’t a big deal and was worth it to use both tools because vim is such a superior method for editing text.
I would include helix in the list with nvim nowadays.
The LSP support is native and very easy to set up for most languages.
Yeah, I got used to vim while I was in school and probably wouldn't have put in the investment otherwise. It was worth. I'm not an expert in it, nor do I have a ton of fancy things installed, but it's fast and works in basically any situation (esp over SSH). My coworkers keep getting forced to change IDEs while I stick with vim.
I didn't want to switch to VS Code and kinda did b/c there is less friction when I'm using the same tools as my counterparts. I like VS Code just fine. My first true love was textmate tbh. :)
Same, after a certain point (for TypeScript particularly) I found it was too big a hassle not to switch to VS Code. All these years later, I still have VS Code configured to look and behave like Sublime. I found it funny one time when someone noticed me working on my laptop in public and said it was nice to see another Sublime user, which I had to correct him on.
I hear you. I think that is why I prefer Helix to Neovim when it comes to editors in terminals. There is a lot that is just done and there are sane defaults. I think the default Sublime experience is pretty slim and trim. Maybe too much for some but just right for me
Well that is my rationale for working with Sublime instead of VScode!
That's also why I use emacs. It was the first text editor I learned.
I. Love. Sublime
I’ve tried all the other main editors but always come back to Sublime. The simplicity, the speed, the near instantaneous load time.
I feel like I’m such an outlier but for my text editor I don’t want all the fancy bells and whistles that come with all the IDEs nowadays. It feels like Sublime is the only one that is so intuitive OOTB while allowing access to a plethora of features (if you need/want them). Whereas the others throw everything in your face and it feels like a battle to just get it configured for your needs.
Granted, I mainly code for personal and side projects, and actually enjoy the coding part so I don’t want AI, or advanced features, writing code for me! Even for the productivity gains, I just find coding on my own enjoyable and solving problems as they arise.
That being said, I can totally understand why devs who need to collaborate with large teams, under strict deadline, across multiple countries - probably absolutely need the fancy features that come with enterprise IDEs.
I just love my Sublime editor and never plan on switching :)
I went back to Sublime Text after trying VS Code for a few months.
VS Code is very nice, when it works. My main problems had to do with the extension ecosystem. It felt very chaotic: it was hard to figure out which ones to install to get the functionality I wanted. Updates to Python extensions sometimes caused instability, crashing the editor. And I found it difficult to set extension preferences: the UI tries to be slick but in practice it ends up being clunky and awkward. On top of that, there was an annoying bug on Linux, related to Electron, that prevented the Save dialog box from appearing properly, which... kind of sucks. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/32857
Sublime is the perfect programmer's editor for dynamic languages like Python, and for general text editing. It's lightning fast. LSP is just enough to be helpful without getting in the way. Workspaces work the way I would expect. I prefer editing JSON files for preferences over navigating a complex GUI.
Best money I've ever spent on a license, and I'll happily renew just for maintenance updates, to be honest.
The way Sublime makes a strong effort to not only smooth out per-platform kinks but also better integrate into each platform it runs on is definitely a factor for my choice to use it over VS Code. macOS, Windows, Linux, whatever, it works correctly everywhere without also taking a “least common denominator” approach which I really appreciate. I wish more cross platform apps would do this.
Sublime is just great software. It does everything I could possibly ever want an editor to do, and it does it with half the memory usage of VS Code. I like VS Code well enough, but I can't abide resource waste like that, especially when it doesn't actually buy me anything.
Honestly, I use Sublime because nothing else can compare. Everything else is slow, bloated, worse to use, or some combination of the above.
Have you tried Zed, and if so, what's your opinion?
I have, but seems it has evolved quite a bit in the past year when looking at their new front page. I'll probably give it a shot. But in any case, I don't like their focus in collaborative features. It brings unnecessary bloat, that is not present in Sublime.
Fwiw you can disable all AI bloat and online features with a couple of config keys
But isn't that your "zed"'s selling point? What remains if you turn those off?
Does it have gamification too, in addition to "AI" and "social"?
What an oddly aggressive tone x) It's not "my" Zed's selling point because I don't develop or even use zed daily atm. But it's also not the selling point period, it's one of them, the others being e.g. performance, responsiveness, and low memory footprint, as well as integration with tree sitter and LSP.
Not sure what you mean by gamification and social, we're talking about collaborative editing, not posting to twitter lol
An open source, fast, customizable cross-platform text editor with native UI and support for plugins and language servers. I don't think there's any other software that can tick all these boxes.
Language servers means "AI" right?
The other boxes can be ticked by a lot of editors that were made before the js monopoly.
I tried it a few months ago and it was a buggy mess with strange defalts. Totally unusable on a couple of the projects I tried it on.
I haven't tried Zed. I looked into it, but there was some reason I decided it wasn't for me. I want to say it was that they seemed focused on LLMs, but it's been a while so I forget exactly what it was that I didn't like about it when I researched.
Not the person you're replying to, but I have tried Zed and I think it does too much things I don't need (like LLM integration, all that "multiplayer" stuff), and it's funded by VCs, so it will go down the road of enshittification (or sale, or shut down) eventually.
I don't want to support VC-backed companies.
I've used Sublime Text since it's initial release, and later on Sublime Merge, and i own licenses for every major version released.
However, my ST4 license recently expired, and that caused me to look back at the previous 3 years to see what my money was actually buying me, and it turns out it was mostly bugfixes. There have been, rather consistently, 2 releases per year (november and august), and the last major feature was in 2022 with syntax code folding and recent files integration, and those are the only "new features" added since ST4 was released in 2021.
Don't get me wrong, i don't mind paying for software, especially software i use every day, but ST4 more or less feels like it's on the backburner, with nothing much going on, so i let my "subscription" (ST4 licensing is more or less a subscription for 3 years) lapse.
I've instead switched to Zed (zed.dev) as my "main and fast" editor. Yes it has some rough edges, but feature wise it's very much like Sublime Text.
It doesn't support Windows (yet), which is not a problem for me, but i can see how that could be a dealbreaker for some.
I think that as software asymptotically approaches mostly-bugfix releases, it's a good sign that it's "done", and therefore just stable, reliable, and "boring".
Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit. It can free up your energy to spend it on more interesting things, like actual coding.
> Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit.
I agree, but considering the "editor space" has progressed a lot in the past decade or so, i would hardly call Sublime Text "done".
It has it's strengths and weaknesses, and while it was a great editor 15 years ago, and had it's share of innovative features, things have stagnated quite a bit in recent years. ST4 felt more like a minor update to ST3, and ST3 was probably also just a minor update to ST2 (i forgot which one was the big rewrite, but i think it was ST2).
Compare that to what has been going on with VSCode and Zed in recent years, which far surpass Sublime Text in many ways, and doing it for free.
So, in the end, for me, it turned out to be a subscription based "slightly better than average" editor. Yes, i still love it, and i would love for it to get a revival and spring to life again, and i would switch back in a heartbeat, but sadly the "maintenance mode" has been going on for almost a decade now.
I can empathize with your take, but my sentiment is the polar opposite. I like the toolchain shuffle - exploring this, trying out that - but I always, always come back to Sublime specifically because they have not implemented major changes. I _deeply_ appreciate the fact that it has remained essentially the same for years, and I very sincerely hope that it doesn't change much going forward. This boringness is what keeps me coming back, and is what I'm paying for.
Sublime has become my refuge from the crap that other editors are trying to cram in to every available nook and cranny. Zed was pleasant at first blush, but the way that AI is central to the platform was a huge turn-off and disabling that (and a few other things) was not intuitive. Same goes for many other editors I've tried over the years.
I would like to see more activity in plugin development and maintenance, but always peripheral to the core Sublime experience. Give me a stable, quiet, boring platform and let me choose the features and noise!
I similarly switched from ST4 to Zed after using it for several years. I agree that good software eventually becomes "bugfixes", but if you expand the universe of ST4 out to popular plugins for specific programming languages, it starts to become really buggy. That's something I wish ST would focus on, make the most popular plugins more stable and continue doing that for the next decade.
I posted in the ST forum that achieving a stable configuration of plugins in ST4 seems more difficult than it should be, but they declined to take this on as a problem.
Meanwhile Zed made it pretty easy to achieve a stable set of plugins very quickly, particularly around language services, shell integration, etc. That's what prompted me to switch; however Zed has taken a few steps backwards in that department since they started spinning out language extensions into plugins that require more configuration and are more prone to breaking.
The Apple macOS model of implementing useful features from apps (in ST's case: plugins) stands out as long as there are reasonable trade offs.
Without it, you have to use so much glue for a good experience. So, look at the very popular extensions and see if they can become native.
Well, Apple is giving me more and more reasons to switch away from their default apps (which I used to love) with every release. They focus too much on new features, too little on stability and good experience.
I've already ditched Music (macOS: Cog; iOS: Decoupled), I'm holding off upgrading for Photos' sake, Home on macOS is an absolute nightmare, Mail is meh but ok (fingers crossed they won't accidentally break it), and I'm hoping they will never go after Notes - it's central to so many things in my life.
Meanwhile, I'm still using Emacs, because despite its many shortcomings (mostly the legacy architecture), ELisp makes writing simple plugins simple, and the few that I use are too excellent to get me to switch.
Do you prefer the modern style of application that breaks your workflow every 6 hours with popups advertising the latest feature you don't care about?
I'm assuming "license expired" means losing just access to newer versions. Which you explicitly said that you don't need.
Why change the tool then?
I got a burn-out and lost my job. In the meantime my license expired. Once I get a job again (if ever) I will once again buy a license.
I'll give zed a look. One thing I miss with ST is remote editing.
I guess your love is not unlike my long ago passion for CodeWright. It was such a flexible beast with perfect support for BRIEF bindings and an infinitely configurable user interface. Alas, the world preferred the simplicity of Visual Studio or JBuilder and the best programmer's editor for Windows slowly but surely withered away.
I'm not planning on repeating the mistake of learning a complex environment only to see it disappear with the demise of its parent company. That's why these days I'm mostly investing time in the Emacs ecosystem while occasionally trying and failing to love mode based setups like vim and neovim.
Similar to my love of KomodoEdit/IDE. Being built on XUL was fascinating to me as a Firefox die hard, web tech powered the UI which made it easy to hack on, and I still reckon it was the best most advanced editor for PHP at the time.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I loved Komodo.
I came to Sublime Text 3 from Atom because I wanted a native editor. It boggles my mind that so many people love VS Code.
I’ve tried Zed, it’s a beautiful editor…it’s just too opinionated. For whatever reason, it doesn’t understand my Deno projects and I content get rid of the red squigglies.
Sublime lives up to its name.
VS code has good defaults and extensions but if you have time to configure it precisely it's also possible. When configured to your needs the differences between ST and VSC aren't big. What I don't understand is why would anyone use Eclipse.
Eclipse is a full IDE. Sublime Text and VSCode are not.
A competitor to Eclipse would be JetBrains IntelliJ or Visual Studio (not Code), both are often considered superior by far, but neither are free.
Eclipse is also a platform for creating applications (RCP/RAP).
> Eclipse is a full IDE. Sublime Text and VSCode are not.
I don't understand what practical difference there is between Eclipse/IntelliJ and VSCode with extensions that makes one an IDE and the other not.
Free or paid what’s the difference. If you have company you can afford it professionally, if you are a student you can get a free license, if you are NEET dev you can —————- it.
I understand the downvotes but it is an interesting point.
First thing, Eclipse is not just free as in free beer, it is also free as in freedom, which can matter.
In addition, you may be surprised how much free (as in free beer) matters to large companies and governments. Of course, a multi-billion dollar company can pay, but the simple act of acquiring a license, no matter the cost, can be a lengthy bureaucratic process for the lowly developer who needs it. It is usually much easier to use free software, especially big names like Eclipse that may be pre-approved. Of course, using a free licence you have no right to, let alone piracy is a big no no.
And while I don't think corporate inefficiency is a good reason, it is a reality and you have to work with it.
Ugh, typo.
*"cannot", not "content"
I don't really use it as a (lightweight) IDE or the like anymore, but as a place to keep unstructured notes and snippets and the like because SublimeText never ever loses anything unsaved. It's pretty much indispensable at this point, whenever I compose something a bit longer or have some text to do a search-replace on or just some text I need three steps later in what I'm doing, it goes in another tab in Sublime. I have at least one tab I re-use since before Covid-19, it's absolutely fantastic how stable it is. Love it for that.
That's interesting. I use BBEdit for that purpose and VSCode for code editing. I really don't like BBEdit's layout except for log viewing and unsaved snipets/notes. I might have to try Sublime now...
I used to use Sublime Text around 8-10 years ago, but once VS Code became a thing, I switched to that, then to Zed last year. Inspired by this post, I decided to give ST another try. Here's how it went:
1. Installed ST via brew, all good so far. Let's open my hobby project written in Go.
2. Syntax highlighting works by default, great! But uh-oh, there's no autocomplete or any LSP. Alright, let's install one.
3. Hmm I need to install package control first - right I'm starting to remember now. I'm thinking it's strange how they are still two separate entities.
4. Ok, PC installed. Let's install a... ok Package Control crashed...
5. Copying the error from the debug console points me to a two-year-old forum post where the accepted solution is to either remove OpenSSL (?!) or install a beta PC version (outdated now) or try to uninstall Package Control and reinstall it.
6. Ok, how do I uninstall Package Control? The documentation says they are just package files stored on my machine. It doesn't tell me where those files are, and I can't find a menu point to open the folder containing them...
7. Open Zed.
Sublime rules.
I started my career with Brackets, then Sublime, then Atom for a short while. Then switched to VS Code for a few years and just recently switched back to Sublime because of how slow VS Code became.
Also great pricing! One time purchase for Sublime is still available in 2025!
Where is one time purchase available? The only option I see is $99 for three years.
The license does not expire after 3 years, it is perpetual, but it doesn't apply to versions released more than 3 years after your purchase. If you don't want any newer features or fixes you can simply turn off updates. We warn you before updating to a version not covered by your license.
I find this to be a very reasonable license. Cost is low but provides an ongoing revenue source. I like free or perpetual licensing as much as the next guy, but us programmers gotta eat and pay the rent.
How did you arrive at this model?
There's not much to it: we wanted steadier income and our customers wanted more consistent updates but also perpetual licenses. This model was the natural conclusion. We tried it out with Sublime Merge and then brought it over with ST4.
Unlike traditional Saas, you can still use Sublime after 3 years. You just won't get regular updates.
I drive a 18 year old car. I don't need all the upgrades I just need something to drive me from a to b. This business model is similar.
PS I believe you can use it without paying anything. They nag you to pay but in a very subtle way.
I use both Sublime and Vscode every day for different things. Sublime is just so fast and responsive all the time, while vscode can get annoying slow and laggy, often because of all the many plugins I have running. If I just need simple text file editing with syntax highlighting, say while editing a markdown file, Sublime is just snappier. For actual coding VScode is much better because of all the IDE features.
I like VSCode's feature where it doesn't constantly bitch and moan about buying a license. Like cmon, there's billions of text editors to pick from, it would be like paying for breathing air or worse, for winrar.
Maybe I'm a sucker, but I bought a license for Sublime in like 2009 and re-upped for a later version. I also actually bought WinRAR from Eugene. It's good to support dedicated devs who make high quality tools that you use all the time.
The line between dedication and delusion is apparently pretty blurry. One can't seriously expect to profit with closed software in a space where free and open alternatives are the norm. VSCode is open source, 7-Zip is open source, they are both objectively better in every way. If anything I would rather support those by contributing directly.
Besides absurd levels of market saturation, code editors are a complement to software, just like libraries and frameworks, and we benefit most as a society by keeping tools open. Imagine having to pay a monthly subscription for a json lib. I find the entire concept ridiculous.
That wasn't the case in 2009. And yeah, I do use 7zip mostly now, but it was a different story back then and WinRar was really fast and had really great compression and features. And who cares, it was like $20 or something.
Yeah, screw devs for making a industry-renowned product and wanting to be able to eat food or pay the rent for having made that thing, right?!
The pricing on Sublime Text is a steal for what value a frequent user of it derives from it. And they even let you use it forever with just a nag screen if you still refuse to, or can't afford to, pay that fee, unlike a SaaS product which would just lock you out.
I can totally get the high school student not paying for Sublime because they can't, but IMO no industry professional has any legs to stand on for using ST but refusing to pay for it on principle.
The main feature of Sublime Text for me is that it doesn't throw away your buffers. Ever. So it's mainly a note taking app with vim key bindings for me / snappy scratch pad. All of my actual code editing happens in an IDE or actual VIM when on a server.
I see how the separation of "persisted active buffers" from "saved files" is important, but FWIW I have vim configured to (for a specific note-taking FileType) write the buffer out on 60 seconds of inactivity.
Not the same, but adequate for my needs.
This is similar to how I use Kate on Windows. The configs can be somewhat complicated but it is very flexible and nice to use.
I write everything on All About Berlin in a souped up version of Sublime Text. I made my own color scheme for Markdown files, my own linters for the content, a build system to run the static site generator etc. I love just how fast I can move across hundreds of Markdown files, finding and replacing thimgs with regular expressions. It’s a night and day improvement over editing text in a CMS.
I chose Sublime because it was blazing fast in my wee Macbook 12”, which I used until a year ago. Sublime Merge complements it really well.
Thanks for your website, it helped me enormously.
I often get asked why I still use Sublime. So I wrote this article singing it's praises.
As a Sublime user I mostly agree, except for the project stuff. I can never bring myself to set that up. What are you using multiple LSP servers per file for?
If you have any in-lined code, SQL/HTML. I can see that being a great feature.
My eyes widened at that part of the article, as I have to betray syntax highlighting when I in-line something, which makes me want to break it into it's own file to get the highlighting back. But for simple things (like one-liners); breaking it into its own file makes things even more messy.
Hmm, so while it's not LSP I do have a Markdown plugin that highlights code blocks. But I don't rely on autocomplete there.
I got a perfect example: an Astro site. I currently have the Astro LSP, Tailwind LSP, and the Biome LSP, all running on the same file. I even have Typos LSP too. Having them all going at the sam time and being able to tweak their settings on a per-project basis is ideal for my workflow.
I never get asked. It’s obvious. Just open a 4Gb log file as a developer.
All my developers have it.
I only keep sublime text around for opening +500mb dumps, everything else was moved to vscode years ago.
Anything more than 500mb and I switch to less for instant reading/searching and sed for instant find/replace.
Absolutely. I actually just made my own syntax for highlighting the log files in Laravel (Monolog): https://github.com/james2doyle/sublime-log-syntax
VSCode is just as fast for opening 4 GB log files
It is not just about the opening, it is about the searching. Vim is fantastique, although VSCode got faster over time too. Grep is fantastic too (I am not trying to out-hardcore here ... I mean specifically for log file searching not actual coding!). Splunk is better though, but sometimes you are local, and sometimes you don't have a few mill to burn.
Vim is not slower!
I agree and I do use Vim for all quick edits I need. Just wanted to challenge the idea that Sublime Text was better than alternatives in the space of GUI text editors
I'm curious though- as somebody who is reasonably technical I get why you would prefer Sublime to something like VSCode, but why not Emacs?
I can answer the opposite of that question. Why Emacs?
For me, Emacs is valuable not for the things it can or cannot do, it's valuable because it gives me the perception of complete control over the things on my computer.
The other day, I was watching my teammate showing me some stuff over Zoom, and I didn't want to derail his thoughts by constantly stopping him: "hey, wait, don't scroll away, I'm still reading that," "wait a second, what was that URL again?" etc. So, the only thing I could do was take screenshots.
During the lunch break, I decided to solve this thing for myself. I wrote a command that checks ~/Desktop - it's where I drop my screenshots, then finds any .png file that was created no longer than 2 minutes ago, sends it to tesseract for OCR, and opens the text in a buffer. Took me less than 20 minutes.
Sure, there are many ways to get something like that done, but after trying so many different options, I was never able to extract the same feeling of control from any other alternative.
I have a command that inserts the url of my active tab in the browser, with description, in the correct format (e.g., markdown). I wrote that myself, because at some point it bothered me that I had to do that manually. There are many examples such that, where if I weren't using Emacs, I probably wouldn't even bother to acknowledge the existence of such small annoyances.
What makes Emacs truly exceptional isn't its vast feature set, but rather its ability to foster a problem-solving mentality - the "Emacs brain" - where no obstacle, regardless of size, goes unaddressed or unresolved.
I’m a long-time Sublime user who also uses Emacs for single files/at the command line (I also have Emacs key bindings set up in ST), I have found over the years that I am prone to configuration rabbit holes with Emacs and that Sublime strikes a nice balance of good defaults, simplicity, and customizability.
I think that every time I’ve worked on a large project with Emacs I’ve started trying to optimize the partial/fuzzy filename search, trying all of the different ways people suggest online to see which one feels natural until I realize I’ve spent an entire day on it.
Over time I’ve come to really value software that is customizable, but that comes with defaults that I really like, rather than software that’s even more customizable but that must be customized for it to feel right. God forbid I run Emacs somewhere without my conf and forget to disable electric indent mode and want to flip my desk when it does its terrible default behavior.
Can’t not mention tonsky’s post about most important feature of Sublime: https://tonsky.me/blog/sublime/
Step 1. Write blog post about how unnecessary feature churn can make a product worse.
Step 2. Put an avalanche of moving snowflakes in the background of the blog post to make it nearly unreadable.
It's my new notepad. When I don't need the bloat of VSCode, or any JetBrains editor, etc. nor have the will to fight with Vim and, yet, still need something that supports code syntax.
+1
Sublime user since 2014.
I tried vim and nvim. Its just more overall effort and I'm never as productive as with Sublime. I tried zed and it doesn't work with Linux. I briefly opened vscode but haven't tried it out earnestly yet.
I think its mostly muscle memory. I'm just too used to the shortcuts, workflow etc. You can teach new tricks to an old dog; I can learn and get used to another editor, but ultimately I always ask myself -- why? I have to get shit done and unless the new thing has some other benefit that compensates for the productivity decline in the first weeks/months/years, it will always be a hard sell.
> I tried zed and it doesn't work with Linux
Did you mean to say Windows? It definitely does work with Linux
I hear you. Zed does supply a Sublime key mapping. But it isn't the same. There is something off about it. With all the investment in Zed and its GPU-based rendering, it still doesn't feel as snappy as Sublime to me!
I wrote all my articles and three books with it.
I love Sublime Text :) !
I also like using Sublime as a text editor for my thoughts and notes. I don't need or want anything full fledged like a word processor. Sublime lets me write in a minimal format without distraction. Every action is instant and I'm not sure what I'd even change if given the chance.
Sublime Text is so awesome, I don't mind it's constant begging for a license purchase or whatever. It's right up there with Winrar.
I paid for a license on one of the versions. I initially got upset when there was a major release that auto-updated and I got the pop up. However, I looked at my purchase date and it was so many years ago, and I was able to roll back to the version I paid for, so I definitely got my money’s worth. I didn’t end up buying the newer version, because work was forcing me onto VS Code.
And the license is awfully expensive. I was going to the website to pay $50 for my 7 developers, but it turns out it’s $100. No way.
Or $65 per year: https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text
That guy is living off that money, and Sublime is one of the best text editors out there. Consider it like a SaaS, but something doesn't break or stop when your license expires.
If you think the price doesn't reflect the value the software brings, then it's your choice, and that's fair. But as for the things it brings to the table, I don't think it's that expensive.
I pay similar for BBEdit, and it saves my bacon regularly. Plus it's dependable.
I think Sublime Text was the first software I ever paid for. It has paid that back handsomely. And no, I’m not doing the usual “I’m a working professional so my time is directly attributable to my text editor” thing. I understand there are free options. I pay for it despite there being competition because of the extra value it brings me.
What extra value does it bring you compared to free alternatives like Notepad++?
Not trying to be rude but the article does a pretty good job laying out some reasons why I pick it.
I was interested in the value that it brings you. I'm a former Sublime Text user and I switched to VS Code some time ago.
Do you also use Sublime Text as your primary IDE just like author does?
————
Mirroring the structure of the article:
1) Regarding the section about LSPs: do you also have the need to be able to “just add an LSP installed as a binary in on your usr/local/bin” even though by the author's own admission “VS Code is the LSP king”?
Kind of ironic to have the author say in the introduction about VS Code that “it probably has taken inspiration from Sublime. So why not check out one of the OGs” and then a bit later proceeds to say that the LSP “tech originat[es] with that editor [VS Code]”. I'm returning the question to the author and you: why not check out the OG?
2) Regarding the section about snippets author says that “VS Code can do this” and even that “the syntax for it is a bit nicer”.
3) Regarding workspaces VS Code does all of that. Author admits that he “ha[s]n't used it personally, so [he] can't speak to it much”.
4) Regarding build systems VS Code does all of that and it's easier because contrary to “the Package Control [that] is not part of Sublime” (and that you have to uglily inject in the Sublime Text console to get working), the VS Code plugin repository has everything already ready-to-use so that you don't need to reinvent the wheel. You can if you want though; Sublime Text doesn't provide anything extra in that regard.
5) Regarding the “Multiple cursors” VS Code has it as well.
6) Regarding the block-level key bindings, have you ever needed them? For me the last thing I want is for my shortcuts to change dynamically based on which block I am in the file. Note that in Sublime Text “they cannot be saved on a per-project basis”, which is awkward to say the least. I would (much) rather have project-level keybindings rather than only block-level keybindings that apply globally.
7) Regarding using “Python all the way down” rather than JavaScript, I'm surprised that the author finds it to be a good thing considering that they primarily use it for “web-dev” and all their examples are frontend Javascript code.
8) Finally, the author complains about the terrible documentation of Sublime Text, the lack of a plugin system, and the fact that for the 3rd-party hacked-together plugin management system he finds that getting them on the “Package Control site to be quite a chore”. I have a ton more complaints about Sublime Text to add on top of that.
I would rather directly donate money[1] to small developers rather than — as another commenter puts it — “supporting and using the products developed by a small team of dedicated engineers ...”
————
[1] And I do! Currently sponsoring 14 developers on a monthly basis[1]: https://github.com/devnoname120?tab=sponsoring
On the LSP stuff, yes it did originate in VS code. I just find the experience in Sublime to be better. How ironic is that?
I didn't consider the conflict between how I said "try the OG" but then say "VS code is the OG". It is a good point.
I show an example of the block level key binding. So yeah, I needed it and used it. I only showed one example but I have a few more that are my own I just didnt write about them.
Around python vs. js for plugins, have you tried to make a VS code plugin? You need a package.json, npm, and vsce installed globally. Which language is being used is usually the least of my problems. For Sublime, you need a single .py file! Someone shared this 9 line plugin they made: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/31500c17452b0fd8c55bc9460bd9c... - I don't tthink plugin development could be more simple
I bet an LLM could spit out single file plugins very easily. VS code plugins are clearly more work to create and deploy even after taking into account my critiques of Package Control. At the end of the day you can just toss your plugin in a folder or push it to github and reference it with a URL.
I didn't say the docs were "terrible". I just said they were disjointed. They are complete and fully document the APIs. I just wish they were more like the PHP docs or the ones for VS code which are docs plus guides.
All your other points are fine critiques. I'll chalk the other complaints up as a matter of opinion
It doesn't look like arse
Software you like for the equivlaent of 0-2 hours of that dev's pay seems worth it.
You’re either hiring developers from countries where $100 is a lot of money, or you expect them to only open Sublime Text once a year. Don’t be stingy—$100 is a steal when it’s the primary tool for nearly every developer. You probably spend that much (or more) on a weekend outing with your partner or friends.
$100 for 7 developers is "Awfully expensive"?
Yes
I liked sublime text, but 65$ per year you can get the jet brain ide you need and it already includes most things you need and depends not on plugins from third party.
I'm curious where you're seeing jet brains subscriptions for $65 per year? Only RustRover and WebStorm seem to be somewhat close, with the rest being significantly more expensive.
What it does not include is the hefty PC needed for it to run compared to sublime.
JetBrains runs a lot slower than sublime!
also now full of AI slop advertisements
I've stopped paying them as a result
I often see downvotes when people criticise ST's pricing, but I mostly agree with the detractors - the price always seems to be just a few bucks over the magical limit I'd be willing to pay.
Tech workers often spend $100 or more on a fancy meal with friends in a single night—I've definitely done that more than once. So paying $100 for a software license that I’ll be using almost every hour of the workday, and even more when working on personal projects, feels like a bargain.
I do wonder why it is that way though, because you're right, I've balked at the cost of software before, but had no issue in spending an order of magnitude more money on a flight to SF to meet up with other developers.
probably because there's a free OSS equivalent to most software. The free equivalent to meeting up with friends/developers is a zoom call, and those suck.
You said in a separate comment that all your developers use it. You're in violation of the software's evaluation license.
I love it too, though I never use it for working with entire projects but rather for smaller text editing tasks because it's so snappy. It's my scratchpad for notes and stuff, I will investigate and edit single files, and I use it for find-and-replace within a directory.
Though for the single file operations, it really depends on how I'm currently interacting with the system. If I'm browsing the files in a GUI then I'll use ST. If I'm in a terminal I'll use neovim.
One enhancement I would love to see to ST is better large file support. If I open a 330MB CSV in Notepad++ it displays instantly and uses 350MB of RAM. If I open the same file in ST it takes a few seconds to show and uses 1.5GB of RAM. (This is with both editors using no plugins beyond whatever is default)
Sublime is extraordinary. It's one of the softwares I've loved the most, by far. Even today, it's always opened and I use it for quick fixes and code browsing.
However, despite my fondness for it, VS Code, and now Cursor, have largely taken over for me. Cursor, in particular, has literally completely transformed how I code. And yes, it's slower and more bloated, but the value-added of Cursor is worse it.
That is an early candidate for Freudian Slip of the Year.
How come?
Your typo: "worse it", vs "worth it." E.g. Cusors Bloat makes it worth it, but also makes it worse.
Bloated compared to sublime, yes. But VScode is absolutely lightweight compared to something like eclipse or one of those other heavyweight enterprise Java IDE’s.
Cursor is lightweight but have you ever seen the amount of memory that thing seems to consume? Holy mother of silicone.
I completely agree. It takes a lot of resources. Again - it's all about the value it gives in return of what it takes. For me, it's worth it. For many others, it's not.
I'm always up for trying new or old text editors, but they must have certain features that work out of the box for me to even consider them. A few clicks are fine, but I don't want to edit configuration files. In 2025, remote development support is a must for me.
Sadly it seems that Sublime doesn't do that yet
Sublime Merge offers a graphical user interface to edit the settings. I’m not sure why they haven’t implemented that in Sublime Text yet.
If you (or anyone here) feel Sublime Text is dead, the community is super active at discord. You can actively engage with ST devs and package developers there.
Just head over to the unofficial discord server: https://discord.sublimetext.io/
I used to love Sublime Text and used it for my daily driver. Even bought a license.
But just downloaded it again, and while it definitely felt snappy, after 15 minutes I still couldn't find a way to get TypeScript type checking working, or even any type of JavaScript/TypeScript autocomplete.
If you want IDE-like behavior you'll need to install the TypeScript LSP: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/LSP-typescript. We do have our own limited language-agnostic indexing and auto-complete if you open your projects folder; it relies on existing code to provide suggestions.
I installed that. Spent 15 minutes trying to get it to work. No joy :(
Oh, that's frustrating. I think it'd be great to have some more concrete guides for modern Sublime. Maybe I'll write one about getting TypeScript and everything working starting from scratch
If you are locked in to TypeScript, you are basically locked in to VSCode (albeit a "soft" lock-in).
Not really, I didn't see much difference between ST with all LSPs configured and VSCode. What features do you find missing?
See parent comment
Nobody mentionned *Pulsar* (https://pulsar-edit.dev/) which is the community maintained Atom since its sunsetting (Dec 2022). Atom was created by Nathan Sobo, who is now working on Zed (https://zed.dev/).
I too still like Sublime Text in 2025, largely for the same reasons.
I have liked it very much for the past decade or so, and at this rate, I'll most likely keep liking Sublime Text for many years to come. It's an incredible tool that does its job extremely well.
Worth every penny!
Long time Sublime Text and Sublime Merge fan, and a paying user since 2011. It's very good; I use all three OSes (Windows at work, MacOS on occasion, Linux is primary driver, and I've now switched to Pi 5. Zed does not even load on this, whereas ST just flies. (The only real competition is Neovim.)
That reminds me, I wonder if Sublime Text still has room to improve in some areas. Here's an example, in Vim generating a date stamp is a one liner incl. text expansion[0], whereas in Sublime Text, one has to write a multi line plugin and a separate keyboard shortcut[1] to get the same functionality as that of Vim.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/2d7a750e6cf8b96f98f028e90c8ab...
[1]: https://gist.github.com/ckunte/31500c17452b0fd8c55bc9460bd9c...
You can achieve the same thing using the arithmetic command in the command palette: `__import__('datetime').datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")`.
I think it would be cool to see some built-in commands for common things like that. But I think the fact that your plugin is so small and so quick to add, proves that going that route is probably the best one. I'm sure if there was a plugin out there that added dozens of these little commands, it would probably do pretty well.
To echo many sentiments here: Sublime does all I want in a text editor and I use it a lot. When VSCode became all the rage, I tried it but became annoyed very quickly with the loading times and wasted resources, so I switched back to Sublime.
In my last performance review 360 feedback colleagues suggested that my use of Sublime Text may be holding me back and I should consider moving over to VSCode. They're probably right ... but I'm old and there's more exciting things to learn than all the foibles of a new editor. Plus I like supporting and using the products developed by a small team of dedicated engineers ... it makes me feel less like a cog in the machine. Luckily I no longer seek promotions so I'll continue to resist moving to VSCode until I retire, or die.
Better the tool you know. Replace VSCode and Sublime with Vim and Emacs or Eclipse and hopefully they will realise how silly their feedback is. Maybe they should switch to Sublime or IntelliJ because I think their use of VSCode may be holding them back.
To be frank, it sounds like your colleagues may be holding you back.
> They're probably right ...
Fuck them. TypeScript is a cult and they're gaslighting you. Seriously.
You should consider trying it again, it's pretty fast now.
I have, from time to time. It certainly has become faster but Sublime still seems to be more nimble to me. On the more emotional side, I've also grown used to Sublime and I - mostly - just like using tools made by smaller shops or individual developers more than what the big corporations produce.
I've reinstalled ST a while ago, for years I've tried VS Code and I do my main work in IntelliJ but I never got that feeling of productivity and an editor that isn't in the way back after stopping to use Sublime back in the day.
Mind you, at the time the world had moved on as well; my main ST days were developing a JS application in the days before Typescript / Flow and the like, so all my work relied on my own memory, consistent naming, global search and cmd+p to open files. There was a "gap" in between editors like IntelliJ having better / smarter support for JS and the rise of LSPs, making those features available for all editors again. IntelliJ had a competitive advantage for a while.
Likewise, VS Code had a competitive advantage along with Atom for having all its code written in web language / JS, which millions of developers learned or pivoted to in the 2010's. I still can't fully grasp how huge it was, but the last few jobs I had interviews with all used JS for back-end, migrating from PHP.
> my main ST days were developing a JS application in the days before Typescript / Flow and the like, so all my work relied on my own memory, consistent naming, global search and cmd+p to open files.
Ohh the days where you could open a JS project, immediately understand what it did and make a quick fix. Now it's 15 lines of imports, then one line of code that you have no idea what it does because you have to find what it actually does by digging 10 layers down in the import inception. Buf if you have a IDE you can tell by the type annotation that it's an EnterpriseJavaScriptBeanConstructorFactorFunctionIterator and by clicking ctrl+space you can see that it has four methods: .create() .read() .update() and .delete()
Sublime is still my top choice for opening big data files, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But, since VS Code is becoming the new lingua franca code editor, I made the switch so as to play nice with others going forward.
+1 I was amazed the first time I opened a multi-GB sized sqldump in sublime
I'm lazy, I don't want to leave the terminal.
Alt-tabbing (or cmd-Q if you’re done) back to your terminal window after running `subl` to edit a file is equivalent difficulty (as measured by keystrokes) to exiting nano or vim.
I'm on Linux and I just use one keystroke to switch (F2). I have F1 F2 F3 F4 keys binded to change to virtual desktops 1 2 3 4. 1 -> Console(s) 2 -> Editor (sublime) 3 -> Browser (Firefox) 4 -> Misc (File browser, other apps)
I've been using iterm for years mainly because it has a Quake style terminal window. I realise how I just can't get to grips with tabbing through screens on either macos and windows anymore, not with having multiple browser profiles (personal and work) and screens open. I should figure out a solution to that, but at the same time I decided that I should keep my various employers (I'm a contractor/consultant/temp/whatever) separated better, so, different browser profiles, password databases, etc.
Isn't that kind of where macOS features like Exposé and Mission Control come in handy?
I bought a "double license" for Text and Merge three years ago and spent money on Sublime for the first time. I will definitely be renewing it in February.
Hell, I still like TextMate in 2025 :)
(Though I use Sublime more, and I like it as well)
I love Sublime Text editor. Have been using it for 15 years now and despite the fact most of my development is done inside of VSCode or other editors, I still use ST for large files and notes. I can confidently open up a 1gb SQL dump in ST and it won't break a sweat, try that in VSCode and you can see it freeze up for a bit and that's on a decent machine too.
Using Sublime since 2008. Never liked the bloated and telemetry-infested mess that VSCode is.
Using Sublime Text since version 2, one of my relatively recent discoveries has been the Markdown Images Plugin[1], which renders images inline (rather than in a separate preview, as other editors do).
I find it extremely convenient to include images alongside text, such as diagrams and schematics for work, photos of goods in a shopping list, and inspiration collections for hobby projects, etc.
When combined with a simple web clipper script[2], it has been a game changer for me.
[1]: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Markdown%20Images
[2]: https://github.com/dmi3/bin/blob/master/url-preview-md.py
I've installed that plugin too, thanks for the recommendation. That said, installing it did show a big concern I have, maybe not so much for this plugin but for many others; its last release was in 2022, and many plugins I used to use back in 2012 haven't seen updates since 2016-17, roughly around the time VS Code became the most popular editor. I fear community support of plugins will become a major issue. I mean as long as the APIs etc don't change it's not a problem if these plugins are "done", but it just looks like things are no longer maintained and ST is a "dead" editor.
Welcome! I don't think the Sublime developers will change the plugin API dramatically at this point (@ben-schaaf is in this thread; we can ask him :) So, old plugins should remain compatible. What we should be concerned about is that if something new is invented, it will probably appear in a more widespread editors first. However, as practice shows, new plugins for Sublime continue to be created[1] so we are not missing lot.
[1]: https://packagecontrol.io/browse/new
I'd probably move back if the sidebar could move to the right LOL. I still see people ask on the forum post and I'm always amazed this simple feature hasn't been added yet.
I haven't heard that complaint before. But it's a good one! I personally don't use a sidebar, but I can see that being annoying if you do
I'm another "use Sublime text for all kinds of scratch and random needs, but vscode daily driver". But this was a good reminder for me of the value I still get out of Sublime and that I should upgrade my license.
One small pet peeve, I do wish more of the functionality in the menu bar (mac?) was available in the command menu (cmd+shift+p). I still fairly frequently try cmd+shift+p "Spel..." to try and turn on Spell check mode, but then realize I need to hit my mac shortcut to search the menu bar (cmd+shift+/) and then type "Spel..."
That's a good one. I also noticed that I couldn't create new snippets or plugins from the command prompt. So, there are definitely some things missing from there.
I'm glad you're fond of Sublime Text.
Personally I'm totally sold on 'Vim' I have lsp through 'YouCompleteMe', which works great for C-languages, and I have Automatic update of tags with 'GutenTagsPlus', And I also use 'c-scope', 'Git' and 'Id-utils', and I have 'ulti-snips' which I probably use too little. So yeah, this and the GCC toolchain, is pretty much the ultimate for me, and I have tried a lot of Editors through the years.
Love Sublime and have used it since its inception long ago, however as the times changes with different built-in convenience tooling (such as AI), Zed has overtaken Sublime IMO. It's fast, has VIM mode, extensions, and takes away some of the hassle that you have to go through with ST.
I still use ST for basic editing, but for day-to-day, Zed is the go to, simply because it just helps me get my work done slightly faster.
PS I still pay for a ST License every 3 years <3
I can totally understand that. Why only one? I still use BBEdit on my Mac for all kinds of text editing (search/replace across files is excellent in it), even though I mainly use VS Code as IDE and Emacs for orgmode and automation via Elisp.
I love BBEdit, but it has one limitation that drives me batty: it has far fewer syntax highlighting scopes than many other editors. It’s simply not possible to make it as pretty and color as others, and that’s something I personally value. I have to look at a code editor all day, and I want it to look snazzy.
I know it’s minor and petty, but it stills grates on me every time I fire it up.
Yeah, it‘s from another era. The concept of beatiful code came up with TextMate, Sublime, VS Code. And old editors tried to catch up, but didn’t really make it.
But I have a nice-ish theme in BBEdit for markdown, and I‘m ok. I don’t code in it. Just plain text editing, using it as a scratchpad. It’s open all day long.
That’s totally reasonable. And I know that’s a goofy hill to die on, when it’s otherwise architecturally beautiful.
But darn it, even if it turned out to be my perfect car, I don’t want to drive an Aztek.
Because it’s too complicated to learn many complicated tools well instead of tweaking Sublime to do the search and replace across files, even if it’s a bit worse. Also you’re not limited to Macs
In the argument of Sublime Text vs. VS Code, the deal breaker for me has always been VS Code telemetry. Of course, you can disable it in the settings or firewall, but then you have to constantly monitor it to ensure that some "bug" or "update" does not re-enable it back. Alternatively, you can choose not to care about potentially sharing everything with Microsoft and their 829+ partners. However, I prefer to pay for Sublime rather than participate in some manager's brilliant idea to extract revenue from a "free" user base.
If telementry is your main concern, just use vscodium. (or stick to SublimeText - I use both) https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases
Have a look at VSCodium (https://vscodium.com/), it's a freely-licensed binary distribution of VS Code without the telemetry.
I don't use ST3 as my daily driver (I use BBEdit instead - still not on the VSCode train), but I do use it for lots of random editing and scratch needs.
Shameless plug - I wrote a plugin ages ago which makes it possible to replace and sort text using Python code (https://nneonneo.github.io/sublime-replace-with-python/). This little plugin has been incredibly useful for certain tasks, and serves both as a useful prototyping tool (playing with text modifications before implementing a full-blown script) as well as a general-purpose text wrangling utility. Basically, you can select some text (or find it with regex), then activate the plugin and type a line of Python code; it will then run the code for each selection region and produce the replacement. Sorting works similarly - select some regions, enter an expression as a sort key, and the selections will be rearranged according to the key.
I love how a plugin I wrote nearly a decade ago is still working with essentially no changes needed since 2017. Stable software is reliable software!
> Shameless plug - I wrote a plugin ages ago which makes it possible to replace and sort text using Python code [...]
I've been trying out Lite XL, and I have a crude (WIP) plugin that can pipe selected text thru any shell command (sed, sort, etc), and either output to a new buffer, or replace the selection. Then I started writing some scripts to supply the commands I miss from Emacs, like align-regexp. Since it's just shell commands, you can write them in any language.
I'm not sure if I like Lite XL, but the scripts I already wrote would be easily reusable in any editor that supports piping selections. Perhaps it would be a fun project to create a collection of such portable scripts, sort of like what LSP did.
Why BBEdit? What languages do you code in?
Sublime Text used to be my go-to editor when I didn't need a full fledged IDE. A rare gem in an arena of slow mammoths. I've since switched over to Lite XL, which is FOSS, just as fast (if not faster), and the plugins cover nearly all my niche use cases.
While I respect the effort that goes into creating quality software and am not averse to spending money, I'd rather not live in a world where the best softwares are closed source.
Sublime Text is _the_ Swiss knife of all text editors:
- Loads up fast, supports tons of very useful packages (e.g. TextPastry, SQLTools), extremely customisable.
- Multi-cursors, multi-panes (e.g. with Origami), spellcheckers, extremely fast filesystem integration/browsing/preview (whether with/without projects and workspaces), color/UI schemes, syntax highlighting, search browsers, Git support (particularly when used with Sublime Merge), etc.
Sure I love my Jetbrains IDEs and Vim, but nothing comes close; Sublime Text is in its own league.
I reckon all text editors are some form of a Swiss army knife.
IDE-ajacent text editors like VSCode et al are more like those ridiculous fat one with everything in it [1], and Sublime is the elegant model with only a blade and can opener, but the blade and can opener are both really good.
And then you get Microsoft Notepad, one of those shitty metal nail files that seemingly everyone's wife has in the bottom of her handbag.
1 - https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fp...
[flagged]
Sackmesser.
Thanks for the enlightenment. I didn't know this term.
What algorithm?
This is the one app I use every day. I practically live in it. Most editors are slower and more visually cluttered, or pack so much functionality that I often get lost. Sublime strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality. Probably Emacs or Vim are even more expressive, but I've never bothered to learn those, Sublime just packs enough power for me. The LSP plugins are a good addition to give Sublime the same code completion / AI functionality of other editors.
Sublime Text is my primary editor. I had a brief 2 years where I used VSCode and got addicted to plugins, until I realized I was spending too much time configuring plugins and went back to Sublime Text with the release of ST4. It was mind-boggling to me after those 2 years how much faster ST was than VSCode. The LSP plugin was icing on the cake. Even in instances where I lack LSP, Sublime Text 4's context-aware autocomplete/finder works surprisingly well. The only thing I really find myself missing is a visual debugger.
I've tried Neovim and Zed -- Sublime Text is still faster and more polished in my experience. It embodies the "do one thing well" philosophy perfectly. Also, Sublime Merge is awesome.
I have always loved Sublime Text, but in 2023, Zed captured my heart, and now I have neither Sublime Text nor VS Code installed on my machine anymore.
Is Zed's AI integration optional or are they pushing it hard like intellij, vs code and warp are?
I think you can opt out of its AI features more or less completely, but you do have to look up all the relevant config options (mostly to hide buttons in the UI leading to AI festures).
Few years ago I wrote a guide about turning Sublime Text into IDE which will be on-par with IDE features of VSCode while retaining performance benefits of ST — https://www.brachkow.com/notes/sublime-text/.
Sadly, I almost stopped using Sublime Text around a half year ago. Development of AI coding tools made flexible UI plugins support a must. Right now when I'm using ST as main editor I feel like 0.5x developer compared to myself and my colleagues with Cursor, because of being limited to very lazy and limited Copilot suggestions passed via LSP.
I think once we get some good LSPs that can do AI work then you can come back to Sublime! There are some out there. I have tried about 3. But they haven't really worked well for me yet. I think the best option for me right now is just a simple build system that calls Ollama or a remote API. I don't want code completion. I usually want some type of "enhanced google"
Sublime is still great. I wish it had a tighter LSP integration — the plugin is decent, but individual language implementations are hit or miss. I sincerely appreciate that it has an old school fallback for languages that don’t have robust LSP support (looking at you Ruby).
What I love most is how well "out of the box" sublime work for me. Even on a fresh install it's very usable without doing anything, I usually install about 3 extensions (not counting specific language syntax support).
Integrated LSP would be nice to have, but most of the time I don't use it and I like to be able to turn it of and have the simple autocomplete that is very predictable and unintrusive.
And performance, I know Zed showed some benchmarks on how fast it is, I still had some hang up from time to time with it and some crash, I can't suffer jankiness in my editor, it stress me out.
Thanks for the work done on Sublime.
I think the best thing about Sublime's LSP plugin is that you have everything off by default and then only turn it on on a per-project basis. I actually have an example of that in the article. Do a search on the article for "eslint" and you'll find the section where I show ESLint being disabled and Biome being enabled
I still use the Sublime shortcuts in my IDE to this day. Sublime had a big impact on me when I got my first job as it introduced me to multiple cursors. It's still the best tool for many tasks.
I love it. I had to drop it temporarily recently for a go project using bazel that simply just doesn't work well in many editors other than Intellij. But I got back to it recently on another go project and god damn it's so fast. I'm so much more productive using it. Global symbol search is always amazing and everything is always so damn snappy. If I could buy a lifetime license I would. I hope it doesn't go away for as long as I want to write code
I was a longtime user of Sublime Text and switched to VSCode because of Remote Development and Pylance. Everything else is pretty much fine and Sublime has always had better performance, though these days having support for AI integration (a la Copilot) is also necessary for me.
I tried Zed recently because it has remote support and AI integration, but the Python integration is limited to Pyright so I gave up temporarily (I guess I can recreate Pylance using this doc: https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/blob/main/USING...).
Been using it and upgrading each new version. One of the best software applications I've ever used that's both multi platform and actually-good on every platform, not just a skinned web app like Photoshop
I freakin' love Sublime Text but the AI chat features of Cursor make all of the benefits in this post irrelevant.
It's fast? Not as fast as an LLM.
LSP code completion? Not as good as LLM completions aware of your entire codebase at once.
Snippets? These don't matter if an LLM can just make them up on the fly.
We've entered a new paradigm of what it means to be a good code editor. I'd love if Sublime added the LLM chat and code diff from Cursor but I think the new way to edit code is going to look a lot more like having a conversation (text or voice) with an LLM that's making the changes for you.
AI LSPs are coming. There are about half a dozen of them right now that you can find on GitHub, but I haven't been able to get any of them working really nicely and Sublime. But I have faith that eventually they'll mature up and a good one will surface as the go-to solution.
Deep understanding and being able to reason about problems is more important than speed. Offloading too much to LLMs has a detrimental effect on our brains.
I'm not saying don't use LLMs. Use them in ways that increase your skills, and be wary of using them in ways that atrophy your skills.
This brings back good old memories. Sublime was my editor from 2010 until 2016, when I switched to VS Code. Eventually, I got hooked on Neovim, and I still use it to this day since I can't live without Vim motions anymore.
But I built dozens of websites using Sublime, so in a way, it helped me earn $300k.
Maybe it's time I migrated off TextMate.
Tried few times, nothing beats TextMate ergonomics. It's just a small things like the cursor will be in a place where it should be after autocompletions or closing brackets will align where they belongs to, but it makes huge difference for me
I still use it, just love the Mac style text manipulation shortcuts, the way spell check actually works properly and natively in code (Spell check within strings only) which VSCode can't seem to handle with any of the plugins that claim to.
I use VSCode on Windows but no matter what I do to it I can't get it feeling right.
Is TextMate still being maintained? Last time I looked, there were very few signs of life. If that is accurate, the clock is ticking until Apple inevitably drops Rosetta support on Apple Silicon Macs sometime in the (probably not too distant) future.
It's open source, think the developer is on a break from it. He's left it for a few years then done a set of updates in the past or fixed it if it broke because of an Apple update previously.
Ultimately it kinda does everything it needs to.
it is Apple Silicon native
I migrated off textmate to sublime, never regreted it.
I've tried a few times, but Sublime is so obviously not a native Mac app, I find it painful to use. It's definitely the closest match to TM though; it was pretty obvious it was inspired by TM. I think it even used to (still does?) use the same language grammars as TM (regexes that define scopes, basically).
I use Sublime as my notepad alternative. I use no plugins and don't know any keyboard shortcuts but I love it. It's quick, the tabs work well, you don't have to save files for it to remember them...
I used sublime from 2013 to 2021. It was great. Since, I've switched to VS Code and haven't looked back.
My files are on a NAS using Samba, and Sublime Text constantly does something (maybe it tries to poll the directory?) that makes it hang for around 10 seconds every minute, making it unusable.
VS Code does nothing of the sort, it has plugins for any language imaginable; it's much faster and much better IMHO.
You can prevent indexing in the config file
I’ve been using Sublime Text many times a day since around 2010 for my daily and weekly logs. My Mac is set to use it as the default for .py, .md, and .txt files, so I find myself in Sublime all the time—and I absolutely love it! Sure, I develop in VS Code, but I live in sublime. It’s fast, clean, and dependable. Thanks to the team for building such a fantastic editor!
Besides Sublime Text, the same company makes Sublime Merge, a great git UI.
I love Sublime and am probably the only one at work still using it. LSP support is nice but there doesn't seem to be great support for a TypeScript LSP server that works reliably with large projects. VSCode is slow here, too, but there are some specific optimizations they do I think that help a bit.
I've used Sublime since 2012 or 2013 or so. It's really legit. Lightweight, "it just works", and has generally stayed the same while adding some nice features along the way. Thank you!! <3
I still like BBEdit, and I've been using it for over 30 years.
https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
Switched to it last year for working on a large C codebase, huge fan. Visual Studio Code was always way too slow at indexing, Sublime is fast.
Sublimes' skeleton is excellent- Python extensions are a pleasure to write compared to VS Code.
HOWEVER it desperately needs a UI/UX polish pass to stay competitive:
* Drag and drop in the sidebar folder list.
* Drag and drop tab to create 2+ column view.
* Focus the open tab if a file is already open in any Sublime window.. Please stop opening duplicates- one mistake and you've overwritten your work.
The first two points are a good illustration of how varied an audience may be. Most of the time I see people striving to make their text editor experience such that they don't have to reach for the mouse at all.
The last point is a good illustration that your product may have terrible bugs that destroy user data, and still be well-loved because the overall experience is slick, and certain other capabilities are second to none.
I love Sublime Text, it is so snappy and lightweight. Great software!
I love sublime text but it has been feeling like its falling behind other editors. Whenever see someone showing off a tip or trick in VSCode I am disappointment to learn it doesn't exist in sublime text and there isn't a package for it.
I find ST and the SFTP plugin (paid) a killer workflow combo, super useful for updating WordPress sites.
Update your file locally, hit the shortcut to upload, done. I find this experience superior to editing directly on the external file as I may want to save but not necessarily commit that change. And for smaller projects you are the only developer on, git can be overkill.
I use sublime text to edit all my notes for both work and personal. It runs on every computer and laptop I have.
I love sublime text. I'm on version 3, i think there is a 4 out but nothing is drawing me to use it.
vscode keybindings are insane. There are couple of thousands of them turned on by default with multiple duplications and no abstrations. So you have to negate them all first (that takes around 5000 lines of json) and then carefully go over around 500-700 definitions which might be important for you. So, my custom keymap in intellij has 44 definition, the vscode equivalent takes 675 and 2000 lines of json.
Used to use sublime, and wanted to purchase a license, but it is only good for the version you are on. Since I use gentoo and it upgrades frequently, my license would require me to hold it back, and eventually it will break. How do others deal with this? Just keep purchasing a license?
I used ST2 for like five years in its unregistered state. (I rationalized that by telling myself that nothing I used it for made me money, but I still feel a little gross about it.) In practice it was no problem.
I paid for an ST3 license, then I paid again for an ST4 license. Whenever ST5 comes out, if they ask, I'll pay for that too.
That is kind of why so many software companies switched to subscription models.
I still like TextMate.
ELI5 Why use Sublime over NeoVim?
I hard a hard time getting LSP to work with Neovim, had to give up. Didn't want to install yet another plug-in manager like Mason etc some of which go out of circulation or could be risky. Maybe I am below average. As it is free, I just use it without any extras although that is less productive of course.
I had been considering switching to VS Code because of its plugin support, but decided against it because it couldn't regex-grep a codebase anywhere nearly as fast as Sublime Text, or with extended regex features
I've bought a license recently. I found the LSP-clangd plugin to be useful for the linting features of clangd and clangd-tidy for a C++ project recently. Having the lint highlighting helped me clean up some possible problems, (after reducing the number of types of lint to a shortish whtielist)
I also prefer Sublime Text to all of the clones.
I'm more of less forced to use VS Code at present and it's an overengineered slow mess.
Yesterday, I got laughed at for "still" using ST. Today, HN delivers.
I got you
Not sure how projects and workspaces are a feature, it's the most convoluted thing ever. I just use `subl .` to open my project directory. I think it would be saner to just have a dot file in the directory if you want to tweak settings for that project/directory.
Well that exactly how it works ahaha! There's the .sublime-project file with settings for that directory.
I'm a professional data scientist and still use TextMate, AMA
I tried really hard to stay on Sublime Text.
But one fateful day, the Go plugin made itself hard to install so I downloaded VSCode, installed all the useful plugins, and never look back.
Another happy customer of Sublime Text here, but still not dare to take the step to buy SublimeMerge, I'm pretty well served in console for my git use, except for 'git blame' that I prefer to do in a UI tool, but SublimeMerge blame support is awful.
G'day, I head up the Sublime Merge team.
I'd love to hear your feedback on how we can improve the blame functionality! I can look into getting anything resolved there.
Sublime text is the best. I change _one_ setting (disable word wrap by default) and I have an entirely usable editor, I then install syntax packages as needed. Its beautiful, simple, and performant.
The only gripe I have is I have like 100 project windows open and I need to look for it (ctrl+P only works within the project window). Otherwise, it’s pretty much a perfect editor. Maybe I’m missing a plugin.
Yeah this, it's annoying to find a specific open file if you have tons of windows. Absolutely love sublime text apart from that.
Sublime Text user here, it's been my go to editor for the last few years. The best. A keeper.
I use a mix of sublime and vscode. I often pick sublime, because I want peace of mind. I trust it to not try to make me 'do something else'. It (mostly) doesn't pester me with things to update or that are out-of-date, it doesn't run or fail with weird things in the background I didn't ask it to do. It sticks to a minimal layout. I had a similar love relationship with early versions of paintshop-pro - it contained the right balance of 'enough to do what you need, but not too much to overwhelm you'. Whenever I ran into a too-new version of paintshop-pro, I closed it again because I didn't want to deal with their lost-sense-of-balance. Sublime for me is like that, it is a hammer where the head won't suddenly fall off.
I had an eye-opening experience with VSCode recently: I had brought one of my laptops on a car drive, where I had a few hours before the people (family) I chauffeured would come back, and I had a coding project I wanted to update some stuff on. The kicker: I didn't have internet in the car, but for local vscode editing, that shouldn't be a problem, right(?) At least, I had not thought it would be.
Well, for some reason, VSCode suddenly became stupid. It could not longer figure out where my methods and classes were defined, so I had to navigate my code-base by hand (god forbid). It also flashed something about not being able to connect to "dot net" / ".NET" or something similar. I am not quite sure what was going on, maybe copilot..? Whatever, my VSCode was in a mode where it seemed to rely on some online resource to operate, and suddenly had become braindead by severing the cord..??
This reminds me why I like sublime.
Sublime was going great at some point and I guess the dev burned out churning new releases every week. So it got abandoned for a good amount of time.
Something like 2 years. At the same time Atom and VsCode came in with all the good ideas from Sublime.
I hope they made tens of millions during the height of its popularity.
> I hope they made tens of millions during the height of its popularity.
I'm shocked at how often I'd see software engineers making software engineer salaries not pay for Sublime.
They are a company and they are still good. They changed their licensing model for v4 onwards. I have been using it for most of my note keeping and lite code editing tasks and its excellent as always. I think they can still get back to the old hype if they choose to use typescript for their plugin system. A lot of vscode plugins can be ported that way I hope
I doubt they'd want to create a schism and add a JS engine on top of the existing stuff. That said, Atom and VS Code's plugins being JS based was a huge benefit for them as at the time millions of developers started their career with or switched to using JS and web technology for their day job with webapps and nodejs.
Just a shout out to Sublime Text. My first text editor that I have used for serious work. Even though I have moved to Vscode, it is my go to open text files in GUI. It rarely fails me.
I am gen x and stuck in my ways. I still love Notepad++ What are people using now instead of this that is supposedly better?
It's what i started programming with . Used it until i fell into the neovim rabbit hole . Still use it sometimes to write my notes and to make simple changes to code
Sublime does everything that I want to do with it.
What I do with it is throw arbitrary text files at it, and do quick text manipulations, especially multi cursor edits. I’m sure I could do this stuff just as well with something else, but I’d have to relearn my muscle memory.
I’ve had VS Code crash on me (repeatedly) with very large text files. Sublime is able to handle these files, even if it has to chunk on them for a while, if I do something silly like try to edit with several thousand cursors, but it will still do it.
This is my use case as well - large .csv's, scratch pad, pasting some bug error message in a cleaner format - Sublime is perfect for that IMO.
I appreciate all of them— VS Code, Vi, Emacs, Sublime, JetBrains, Cursor. At the end of the day, they’re all text editors, and each has its own strengths.
sublime still has the lowest latency compared to any other major text editor i've tried
I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. I personally use Eclipse, BBEdit and KATE in 2025, and love them.
Sublime is one of the tools which really grown and aged well, so it deserves the love it gets.
I personally don't let anybody to tell me which tool to use. It's rude to mock and belittle the tools people use.
AFAIU, Sublime Text and Kate (my editor of choice) are pretty similar in spirit, so when I read something nice about ST, I mentally insert "... and Kate". They are both snappy power editors, not IDEs, with LSP support.
Yes, KATE, ST and BBEdit (and VSCode) are "Code aware text editors". I use KATE and BBEdit for smaller project and Go mostly, and use Eclipse for the bigger stuff which needs its own "space" to be developed well and kept organized.
It's a "correct tool for the job at hand" situation for me.
I used Sublime for coding before switching to VS Code for coding, but I could never leave Sublime text for some use cases. For example:
The possibility to edit large SQL dump files, which I cannot even open in VS Code.
Ha, I,m cannot use st for large file editing, in this case vscode is more performant.
Very relatable piece, the intro felt like I could have written it (I like the URL too).
“It fast” is enough for me, many of the “features” in editors are noise, and Sublime is the simplest and least noisy.
I love using Sublime for Python. It's still my go-to IDE for development.
I implemented the Python Debugger plugin for ST
I'm happy with just fast, multiple cursors, plugins -> syntax highlighting. Sometimes I paste a JSON dump in there to prettify it.
I refer to a lot of tools as knives, but Sublime Text is the chopping block.
How do you prettify it in Sublime?
There's plugins like this: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Pretty%20JSON
There are others, this is the first that appears on a search. Sublime's package control makes it really easy to find tools like this. Another favorite is the one that renames the currently opened file.
A lot of the LSP plugins have a format feature, so you can format your code. I set most of mine up to trigger on save
I also use ST and use browser if I need some AI assisted coding. What about you guys? Is using IDEs with native AI coding plugin a good reason to switch away from ST?
If anything, ST taught me that I didn't actually need an IDE to be productive, but mind you this was in the years where JS became huge but didn't have good editor support yet.
Frankly yes, though I still prefer text editing in Sublime Text.
Thank you. Sublime text is my goto text editor. I code in VSCode but whenever I need to edit a text file I switch to Sublime text.
vscode would be better than sublime, but I hate so much every notification and dialogs every time popping up when i just trying to focus on my work. for this reason i still use sublime 3, yes not the 4 because the 3 was supposed to have lifetime licesense.
Sublime Text has always been great and reliable.
But like with everything, having a great choice of fantastic text editors is always good so everyone finds something they enjoy using.
I love Sublime Text and would use it and pay for a license regularly if it were open source.
Sometimes when the OS built in search does not work I Open the directory in Sublime and use it as search tool.
I still like textmate and use it daily, together with heavy IDEs, imo best multiline editing and search in large codebase
As do I. TextMate is still unbeatable, especially after I added Copilot and LSP to it!
I recently switched from TextMate to Zed because of the lack of LSP support and other modern features. Zed comes closest to a native macOS app of all the editors I tried, but nothing could beat TextMate at that. What did you do to get LSP supported? I might give TextMate another try.
Zed is as close as it gets, I also use it, but it is still slow and cumbersome sometimes.
https://github.com/tectiv3/lsp-client/issues/1
Sublime is my default editor on Windows since 2012. I really enjoy its lightweight and cleanness.
+1 love sublime
Sublime Text is a great piece of software
You should fix your atom feed
Long live Sublime Text!
also pretty please give us a native FreeBSD port...
Recommended due to the good property of a file system search.
Reluctant VScode user here. Sublime's speed make it the best editor to work with by far, but its package manager is in a sorry state. A good 70%+ of packages are outdated or don't work.
Fix this and I'd be back in a flash.
Also: great API for creating own plugins.
Same. I tried zed but it doesn't come close.
Zed tries too hard to be magical, plus their license terms are not the best.
Before anyone asks any further. See the CLA [0] and the Privacy Policy [1].
[0]: https://zed.dev/cla
[1]: https://zed.dev/privacy-policy
I may see your first point, but how is GPL3 worse than a closed source software?
The code might be GPLv3, which is my favorite license BTW, but they have a "nice" CLA [0] and Privacy Policy [1] which doesn't inspire confidence.
I think CLA is a nuanced thing, since Eclipse also has one and didn't rugpull anyone ever, but their Privacy Policy states that the tool is chockful with telemetry and can collect any personal and non-personal data as they see fit.
When somebody tells that you can opt-out of this, I have a hard time believing that the switches are connected to anything.
[0]: https://zed.dev/cla
[1]: https://zed.dev/privacy-policy
Corps usually have problems with gpl software being used.
It's not the GPLv3 license, it's the attached CLA and Privacy Policy.
Everyone knows if you touch GPL you get cooties
Yet the whole world runs on Linux with no issues :shrugs:
Thanks for the info! I might be immune then. I swim in that thing.
It's GPL. How is the license not the best?
See the attached CLA [0] and Privacy Policy [1].
[0]: https://zed.dev/cla
[1]: https://zed.dev/privacy-policy
And yet, ST is closed source. Still a wild comparison.
This isn’t just license preference either. I would imagine the efforts of the sublime lsp people would be greatly eased if they had access to the source.
But nah zed bad because cla.
No it's not. I mostly find closed source application with clear lines more trustworthy than openwashed software.
I'm a big Free Software supporter. For my personal projects, I only use (A)GPLv3 or later.
However, I have a problem with software which comes with "GPLv3 BUT..." licenses. We have seen how CLAs weaponized against their contributors with rugpull license changes.
Also, Zed was closed source at first. I had beta access to that thing. Then they pivoted to "Open source with closed source collaboration servers" thing, and they claimed rights on anything passing through their servers (collaboration / zed-ai).
When software stops being local-only, being Free Software loses half the meaning, because you can do all the nefarious things on the backend, without people seeing them. "We only send harmless usage data" you may say, but you don't say how you process and which other signals you mix into that data from other sources or data brokers. That's a problem.
Remember Go's opt-out telemetry debacle. The math was solid, it was anonymous, yes. However it was forced opt-out via an environment variable, so the burden was continuously on us, the users.
If the Go team didn't change it to opt-in, I was ready to drop Go as a programming language, like many individuals and companies. Now the telemetry is opt-in, and users have better control.
These things are nuanced. We should be diligent. For example, Eclipse (my favorite IDE for the last two decades) has CLA, but they never abused the power they have, plus that thing is Apache 2.0 licensed. However, Zed's actions, combined with their privacy policy, doesn't inspire confidence, so I don't use it, and share my view about Zed.
If you don't agree that's fine, but pointing fingers like that is not.
As I said, I have chosen BBEdit over sublime 15 years ago, and still use that, and if BBEdit can detect and run any supported LSP OOTB, like magic, Sublime can do the same technically. So they should barrage the bug tracker. It's on Sublime to make it better. It's closed source, so the developer has forced themselves to fix it by making it closed source.
> Then they pivoted to "Open source with closed source collaboration servers" thing, and they claimed rights on anything passing through their servers (collaboration / zed-ai).
Does this apply if you use it same as Sublime? That is without collaboration / ai.
In my eyes, yes.
In Zed's case, it's already dependent on "Magik". It constantly downloads something to provide some functionality. I can't vet, follow, verify that thing all day long.
Moreover, if it wasn't doing that, again yes.
If they didn't provide the functionality to begin with, then they can move on to "let's evaluate whether it's acceptable" phase.
You can use whatever editor you like .. some weirdos even use vim.
Love how lightweight and fast it is. Use it every day!
I recall a few times accidentally opening GB-sized files and sublime having no perceptable performance impact. Sublime is stupendously performant.
I use neovim, but I also pay for sublime text because it's just good.
> If you thought Sublime was dead, well you couldn't be more wrong! The latest build of Sublime as of this post is "4192" and was released 20th January 2025.
Since a huge chunk of value here is in the plugins (hello, there isn't even a built-in plugin manager, it's 3rd party and still haven't fully transitioned to 3.8 - and this isn’t a nitpick, the fact that it’s not part of the core, and the author went MIA is part of the problem), the release date of the editor itself doesn't determine the state of Schrödinger
> I think the thing to consider is how Sublime is basically "done" software.
Or, you know, take a look at the issue tracker, pick up a couple of dozen issues that impact you (directly or via the plugins that are blocked by these), and realize how far from reality this statement is. Or just look at your own wishlist…
> Sublime is fast. It starts instantly.
But it’s not usable instantly because a lot of functionality is in the slower loading Python plugins, so if you have some shortcut that depends on a plugin, you can’t use it right away…
> But I prefer authoring snippets in XML rather than JSON. > Obviously, I'm twisted.
Obviously
> have tried Helix and I think it is a lot closer to what I would want from a modern editor
Indeed, operation after selection is much more intuitive, especially when limited to the viewport, but then unfortunately Sublime doesn’t have great modal editing support, and none that would mimic Helix visual-first paradigm
> The key and mouse bindings are what you would expect from a modern editor.
That’s what you’d expect from a pre-modern editor, a modern one should have much more sophisticated keybinding support, for example, you’d be able to pick that great modal Helix or Spacemacs keybinding scheme. And have great searchable help for that instead of having to look into the void trying to understand where exactly that `` contextual javascript keybinding was set and how to disable it.
It sounds like you've had some unfortunate issues with Sublime in the past. Maybe it's just the different types of projects that we're both working on or what plugins we have installed. I haven't encountered any day-destroying bugs since at least version 3 came out. I think the most recent bug I came across was that a language-specific syntax broke, but that was because I updated Sublime and the syntax wasn't updated for it. I don't really know who's to blame in that scenario, though.
So do I. Thank you devs.
So, uh, the author mentions the "command palette" as being a killer feature, and links to an article about them, that has zero images of this GUI feature. I can't even ... what?
I found [1] which at least shows what it looks like, for those of us who haven't had the pleasure to test Sublime Text. I gather that the search that is integrated in the palette is an important aspect of their use, so perhaps it's hard to show actual UX in a still image.
[1]: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sublime_text/sublime_text_com...
They finally fixed some syntax highlighting issues.
But yeah, it's the best editor out there, I still uses it.
I wish I could have more tab rows.
Still a bit expensive, in my view.
I tried sublime text projects/workspace once, but they are not that great.
I use Sublime everyday and pay for it for more than 10 years. It’s hands down the best piece of proprietary software I ever bought. I heavily customize Sublime and supercharge it with a few high quality plugins. I also contribute to the ecosystem. To another 10 sublime years.
I definitely still use Sublime. It's not my go-to for everything now, but my job has drifted in a way that means I don't DO those kinds of tasks that often anymore. For writing I've gravitated towards tools with better innate outlining and/or Markdown support (Obsidian); my work notes are still mostly in emacs/orgmode.
But if I need to open a big-ass text file, or process something in a pure text environment without anything helping me or trying to preserve formatting... yeah, it's probably still Sublime.
I'm a Sublime fanboy, but have been using VSCode for years as I like the Github Copilot integration
:-(
There's a, community supported, Copilot LSP plugin for Sublime. It can be rough around the edges - but I tried it and it was enough to get me to buy a 1yr Copilot seat (at current pricing).
Completely understand if Copilot is enough to make people want to switch over - but for me it wasn't, and I don't feel like I'm missing out with this setup.
I was 100% with you... until 3 days ago I tried [Zed](https://zed.dev) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There is a lot to like about Zed. But I still can't get past how it doesn't feel as snappy as Sublime. As I mentioned in the post, their snippet solution is not ideal for my needs. Something I didn't mention, though, was that I find the LSP configuration to be really frustrating in Zed. Their configuration/settings file is kind of a mess. They've clearly gone through a couple different versions of how to configure things because every couple of releases. They have changed the way that LSP formatting is configured at least twice.
Kernel, compiler, text editor: all must be free software, with full source code and permissive licenses.
I will die on this hill.
Closed source editors (including VS Code) are simply nonstarters for me.
This is my toolchain, my job, my life, my hobby, my passion. The legal prohibition on modifying it is against every single thing I sit down at a computer to do.
It might sound snobbish, but if you can’t (or don’t) modify your #1 tool (your editor), are you really a hacker? What are you hacking on, and why, then?
Are you really a hacker if you haven't soldered you CPU and RAM yourself? Is your electricity coming from a OSS treadmill? I question your dedication.
Not remotely the same, false equivalence. I don’t regularly need to add CPU instructions; I do regularly need to amend my tools.
Yes.
I'm going to comment on sublime merge since I see others have.
(I'm a paid user and paid again for the latest year or whatever the term of support is).
To be honest, I'm not sure what this product does or does better than all the other similar apps. VSCode has git tools. There's gitlens add on. There's also github's git UI app and some other ones. https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis
In all of them I see diffs. I can stash/stage/commit. I'm not sure what "amazing" features one has over the other.
What I can't do
* I can't copy text from anywhere in the UI. I might be looking at a diff, a path appears, I want to open that path in my editor, so, I want to be able to copy the path from Sublime Merge and paste the path into my editor or shell. Sorry, S.O.L.
* It puts headings on diff sections. I want to copy text that from Sublime Merge and search for the identifier in my editor. Sorry, S.O.L.
* I want to search for things across changes - sorry, S.O.L. - "someIdenifier" doesn't exist in the current code. When was it deleted? Let me search.
Also a minor nit. I hate that it doesn't respect platform conventions. The default folder to open should not be root, it should be my user folder (or something) but definitely not root. No other app on my Mac does this. If you want yours to be root find, add a pref, but by default it should do what other apps do.
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As for Sublime Text - Of course you can use whatever you want. I used SlickEdit since ~1994 through ~2015 (forgot when I switched to VSCode). The thing is, you should at least know what you're missing.
In VSCode I use it's SSH remote feature to connect to my linux machine. This is not simple SSH file sharing (Slickedit had that and FTP even). VSCode starts a custom server on the remote machine and uses it to coordinate. Examples:
* open remote /usr/my/project1
VSCode loads that project remotely. It edits the files locally (meaning when you open a file, it copies it from my linux box back to the mac in the local editor. IIUC, it proxies the language server stuff so it launches language server support on linux remotely. This means all the TS/C++/Rust etc intellisense stuff is being indexed on Linux in that project's environment.
VSCode opens a terminal to /usr/my/project1 in VSCode. I can start running shell commands. I used to use separate terminals, external to VSCode, and I still do. But the nice thing about the VS code ones is they're per project. If I switch over the a different project (multiple projects at once), each one has it's own terminal, relevant to that project
VSCode monitors and forwards servers from that terminal. If I type `python3 -m http.server 9000` in the VSCode terminal, it will launch python3 and then VSCode will automatically forward that port to my mac. I can open http://locahost:9000 on my mac and access the server running on linux (yes I can do that manually. It's nice that it's zero effort)
VSCode debugs remotely. If I launch the debugger it will debugger (gdb/llvm) on linux but the UI will be local (mac). I can set breakpoints in VSCode in mac, it will set them remotely on linux. I can view data etc.
VScode opens local UIs remotely. If, in the terminal for /usr/me/project1 I `cd ../project2 && code .` or `code ../project2` (so these commands are running on linux), it spawns a new window on Mac connected via SSH automatically to /usr/me/project2
VSCode's terminal is using an editor window and keeping it synchronized with the remote shell. This means it's more responsive than SSH from a normal terminal. In a normal terminal IIUC. I type 'x' on my keyboard. It's sent to the remote server over SSH. The shell over there emits an 'x' which is sent back to my local machine. In VSCode. I type 'x', the 'x' is put in the editor control that's shadowing the terminal. It's assumed the remote machine will return 'x' but it doesn't wait for it. Rather, you're typing locally, and it's catching up. So, even and a slow connection you can type faster in VSCode's terminal than you could in a standard SSH terminal. I'm sure there are places where this is not perfect but the general experience is it's way more responsive .
This is a short list of some of the things that VSCode is doing that AFAIK, most other editors are not (yet?). There's lot of other features though.
I have lots of issues with VSCode. I wish it had keyboard macros. I wish it it's undo system didn't suck. I wish it did auto backups like Slickedit did. I wish it had search and replace across a folder tree with undo like Slickedit did. I wish it had column select (different than multi-cursor as a column can go into virtual space and multi-cursor can't)
All that said, the pluses outweigh the minuses and I can't go back.
apparently I can't edit that previous comment so to add
sublime merge
* I want to see blame and modified dates for folders and files. This lets me look at folders and find the one that has a recent change and then glance at the files and see which ones changed recently. Maybe that feature is in there but "View Tree" is not it. That shows a plain tree. No modified dates, no people
VSCode
VSCode loads that project remotely. It edits the files locally (meaning when you open a file, it copies it from my linux box back to the mac in the local editor. IIUC, it proxies the language server stuff so it launches language server support on linux remotely. This means all the TS/C++/Rust etc intellisense stuff is being indexed on Linux in that project's environment and then that info is proxied back to the Mac and shows up in VSCode on the mac as info/completions/docs
G'day, I head up the Sublime Merge team.
Thank you for taking the time to share all this feedback - I genuinely appreciate it and will be looking into this further.
A couple of things to note:
> It puts headings on diff sections. I want to copy text that from Sublime Merge and search for the identifier in my editor. Sorry, S.O.L.
I've just added support for this internally, thank you for the feedback!
> I want to search for things across changes - sorry, S.O.L. - "someIdenifier" doesn't exist in the current code. When was it deleted? Let me search.
You can use the search tool (Ctrl + F) and add the query `contents: someIdentifier`. It will return every commit which contains that term within the changes.
Thanks again for the feedback!
thanks! to be clear tho. searching the commit comment is one thing. I want to search the file contents across history. which files used to contain the word "foo"
also, the tree based folder and file blame. GitHub, the website, shows this info by default. It would be nice if sublime merge had a similar view. The code view on github, the default view for any project, shows a line for each file and folder, followed by the commit msg summary in the middle, and a commit date on the right
They need to enhance their plugin API asap, i remember wanting to make a small assistant panel, the only choice was to use a pseudo mini-HTML api, it's not good for anything dynamic.. a shame
I'd love an Immediate Mode API, give me full control, or give me access to your OpenGL context, i'll write my own UI
They also need to improve the layout system for their panels, Origami is good, but sometimes using your mouse is better
And i agree about getting stuff to Package Control, it's unnecessary painful
Other than that, it's the perfect editor, but that plugin API holds it back, lots of missed opportunity, specially with the advent of AI stuff
there can only be one true editor
Careful, the ed fans are not to be trifled with
About 10 years ago, I was working with a much younger team (I'm 61 now), and we had a Sun box that was broken in a co-lo.
The guy sent down there had a laptop and a serial cable.
I talked him through how to use one of the serial comms programs (miniterm?) to connect, but of course, there was no ncurses or equivalent, so not even vi would work to edit a file.
So I got him to use "ed". It was hilarious that he thought I was, in some way, a magician. He and the others I was working with (all at least 2 decades younger than me) didn't understand why you'd want a "line editor" or how you could possibly write code using a DECwriter or, even worse, an ASR-33.
It was then that I started feeling "old" in this industry.
How dare you.
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There's dozens of us. Dozens! Seriously though, having a lightweight text editor like Sublime that I use is an interesting comparison when I see people immediately reach for tools like VS Code. Especially my juniors.
The thing about VS Code is not that it's bad, it's just, like everything and the kitchen sink? Sublime Text just feels like a really nice tool bench that your craft for yourself.
I'm really happy to hear there are others out there.
(And yes, I totally bought the license, but never enter it in)
Maybe Sublime Text is good, but I refuse to pay for something as profane as a text editor. A decent editor (syntax highlighting, LSP, regex search, keybindings for the 21st century etc) needs to be part of every operarting system.
For me nowadays, Lapce is quickly growing on me.
I have actually tried Lapce because I like Lua and I thought it would be a nice alternative to building plugins in Lua rather than Python. But I can't get over how clunky the UI is in Lapce. I also find it will randomly crash on me and I can't really tell why. There's also no easy way to add additional LSPs. You have to look at these extensions, and there is a very limited number of them. I wish they would just allow you to configure the LSP through a JSON object like Sublime does.
Agreed, it has rough edges. But the UI got improved with the last update to 0.4.2. Havent had crashes on Linux, had some on Windows through. But still, its Beta quality Software and better than most other editors already. And its cross platform and really fast
You can essentially use Sublime for free indefinitely. It shows you a prompt to buy a license for every few saves you make but that’s about it. Not invasive in my book. I also think people underestimate the amount of work that goes into building a good text editor and keeping it up to date over the years.
I cannot use Sublime without license in my work setting without violating License terms. That's a huge deal breaker
That’s a good point. I think if you really like the editor it might be something your employer could pay for. At least ST only offers a one-time fee for each major version. Of course that depends on where you work and their policies. So I see how it’s not so easy and my comment definitely missed that part.
You can, but then the license explicitly forbids you from using it for commercial purposes.
Which is basically anything that is done on company hardware. Also there is a compliance factor, at least at my company.