> With these latest changes, Sublime Text 3 is almost
> ready to graduate out of beta, and into a 3.0 version.
Wow, Finally! I have been using ST3 for several years (wow, years) and always wondered what is keeping the developer from labeling that version as stable. From all the issues reported here [1] I have never encountered one while using the editor for pretty much all my work. Those $70 are definitely worth every penny. Sometimes I cringe from videos featuring ST while using a non-registered license, this week it happened with a course from Google engineers via Udacity, Google engineers!!! As if they don't have miserable $70 to buy a license, I assumed they were in a rush and didn't have time to set the license which I hope they bought.
Anyway, thanks for all the hard work Jon, and recently Will.
> Those $70 are definitely worth every penny.
Same here, buying an ST license is probably the single best SW-related purchase that I've ever done. ST3 works so flawlessly, it's just ironic that it's still technically a beta version. It is actually much less buggy than many "final version" competitors ;-)
On a side note, it is notable how, despite being a closed-source program, ST was able to generate a large ecosystem of open-source plugins; that is not something that happens every day (Jeskola Buzz comes to mind as a similar case: also closed source and with a large open-source plugins ecosystem, but I'm not sure how many people on HN are familiar with tracker-style music software, LOL).
ST bootstrapped its ecosystem by directly and shamelessly cloning every one of its original features from the TextMate editor, and just copy/pasting its entire ecosystem, without contributing anything back. For years there was no special support for actually working on custom features from within Sublime Text, so if you wanted to create new language grammars or syntax highlighting modes etc. you needed to do it from within TextMate. Sublime users would come to the TextMate IRC channel to complain about particular language bundle features that were buggy in the not-quite-compatible environment of ST, and ask TM users to fix it for them. Kind of comical really.
Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool. My impression is that the Sublime programmer didn’t really understand the underlying philosophy behind many of the features he cloned, and kind of screwed up a bunch of the subtler details. (This isn’t really surprising; I’d say it pretty much always happens when anyone just copies something that exists; they seldom perfectly understand the context or ideas of the original creator, so the copy is always at least a bit degraded/distorted, with less clarity of vision.)
Sublime does have the advantage of working on more platforms though.
> Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool.
Do people still actually use TextMate? Judging by their website [1], for example the screenshots taken under an ancient version of OS X, I thought it'd been abandoned years ago. The last post on the blog is in October 2014.
It's constantly being updated.