To each their own, but I find funny that people shell out an absurd amount of money for games they will play exactly once but feel robbed when paying for software that they use every single day.
The licensing from sublime is very amenable, I believe, far from what companies like Adobe force on their end users, IMO.
European Rails dev here, working for a startup with a cozy atmosphere, friendly team, not job hopping or playing the Leetcode and 100+ interviews game, I’m looking at something like $50k, which is very nice in my country, but sometimes the numbers getting thrown around here make me feel kind of uncomfortable.
I live in Budapest, my salary is around $53K. My wife doesn't work (although she does get maternity benefits which come to around 650USD/mo.
I live a comfortable life. I rent a flat in the city centre which is big enough for me, my wife, and my son. We eat out. We travel abroad about once per quarter (UK, Switzerland mostly). I wouldn't call Budapest 'bumfuck nowhere', and I don't think there are many significant compromises on my quality of life. The one concession I would make is that we don't have a car, it's just unnecessary.
We could easily get by on my salary alone just by reducing the frequency of our travels to three times a year, but as my family lives outside Hungary, we don't. There aren't many folks anywhere in the world who could say that they can support a family on a single income.
I'd imagine it being fairly sad. I live in the Czech republic and it's a lively scene, but just leagues away from a place like London or SV. Small country, bubble universe effect, small thinking, for the most part. Many founders aim at the local market, which is tiny, because they can't imagine competing with western companies (when they totally could).
The average (take-home) pay in the Czech Republic is a little over $18k. A little more in Prague, but $50k still puts you firmly above most of your friends and family.
Sorry but it sounds like “gets you far” to you means nothing less than “you can buy the whole town”. $50k is roughly two times the average salary in Prague. If you make twice as much as most normal people, you’re “getting far” by definition. Yes, real estate is expensive in Prague, that I agree with.
Thank you for sharing that. It is too easy to forget about the economic disparities in the world. There are talented developers all over the world making vastly different salaries for the same quality of work.
In the US, especially in NY, 120k or so is starting salary at a startup. Maybe 110k at some. Normal pay for a Sr engineer is 170k -> 220k.
Now if we go into FAANG numbers, double or tripple that as total comp.
But to be fair, there's a lot that your society gives you that we don't get. I currently pay 2k a month for health insurance for myself and my daughter, 3k for me, daughter, and fiance. Companies do better with insurance as they get better. And even with insurance we often pay for many services out of pocket. I pay 2.6k for an apartment and it _IS CHEAP_ because I live an hour away from manhattan, most people pay 4-5k a month for a 1 bedroom, or room with many people.
Also where I live a car is not mandatory but incredibly convenient. Which means another 166/mo for insurance + whatever you pay for the car which can easily end up in the $1000 a month for the car (because parking is not great)
The pay is high, but the cost is high too, it just makes certain things cheap by comparison.
Brutal. To compare: I live in the Czech capital, in a 45 sq.m. apartment in a quiet, green neighborhood, the rent is $920, healthcare is free, my expensive car insurance (cheap car but every-checkbox-checked insurance) and parking is < $100 a month.
$50k can provide for a small family here, but cars and MacBooks are much more expensive for us.
As a programmer for a bank, I'm in the ballpark after benefits/yearly bonus (humble brag) but having been on the lookout for remote work in my line of specialty, for me to get a good remote position I will probably have to take a pay/benefits cut. (Long commute before covid. remote during. "hybrid" after. Looking to get back to no commute with rising prices of everything)
Programmers with experience do make a good living but FAANG style jobs vastly skew what people think the average programmer makes. Just like unicorn companies make people forget that the vast majority of companies fail.
I sometimes forgot that there even are programmers anywhere in the world that are making 150k; maybe one day I will fly to the States just to meet you guys.
Some of the comments on HN have a vibe of "Let them eat cake" - they are out of touch with how most of us plebs in the rest of the world are living.
And then I realize that the rich influence all the decision making that affects the poor - and it scares me.
(BTW: I assume this number is yearly; $12.5K/mo. Which is multiple times the average dev pay out where I live. Even in the States, I assume no one pulls $150K/monthly, amiright?)
In new york with even a remotely small amount of looking for seed startups, an engineer with 1 year of experience can easily get 120k. 150k would be maybe 4 years of experience. As a senior engineer you can get 170-220k easily at a series A startup.
This number is doubled or trippled for one of the big boys because of directly tradable equity.
It's not about the dollar amount. $2000 can be a justified payment for a text editor and $1 can be too much. It all depends on how much value you get out of it.
Sublime is personally worth $0 to me because I wouldn't use it at all regardless of what I paid for it. And I say that as someone who bought every new version starting from the first one up until ~2018. VS Code is just that much better.
The trouble here is that "better" comes at a cost that the community has yet to truly realize, and Microsoft is very good at playing the long, slow bleed game; if strategic fractures[1] come to fruition, that debt will be repaid and it's going to be very expensive.
The reasoning put forward in that link are weak. A large part of it hinges on forks of vscode being unable to use the marketplace, and assuming worst intent in all other areas, and not balancing any other movements with the good that has been done over the past few years.
While reading this I realized I could easily say that cncf/k8s has fractured the container community.
> The trouble here is that "better" comes at a cost that the community has yet to truly realize,
Is there actually a cost, though? I mean, I understand the argument over the strategic aspect of adopting a tool that may or may not continue with acceptable terms, but is that risk really significant?
By now vscode is already 8 years old and there is no concrete hint that licensing will change. Even so it's hardly irreplaceable.
Isn't this one of those problems where it only makes sense to worry about them if they really happen?
The question is how many people would pay for alternatives instead of using VS Code.
I don't think usage alone does amount for anything. Other free offering will not go away and if something would happen, many (including me, a casual Code user) would simply switch back to what we used before, or a new thing.
MS will not manage to extuingish the "competition" because the competition doesn't even compete, they release their editors and IDEs and simply exist.
That you so readily conflate the editor itself as a terminal end rather than a cleverly disguised means to an end hiding in plain sight is what makes Microsoft's strategy so scary; they're so effective at steering even knowledgable users into completely missing the forest for the trees as you've clearly demonstrated.
Please enlighten me. I'd accept "taking away people who would write extensions for FLOSS editors", I'd accept "taking people away who would buy an editor" but I really don't see how me using VS Code for a few hobby projects instead of vim (what I still do half of the time) changes anything.
Recommend revisiting Huntley's blog post for the insight that he so charitably and concisely conveys. As for derived enlightenment, the onus is entirely on you; I have no interest in bartering an appeal to conditional short-sightedness.
I've never found anything about VSCode to be better - it's janky and unpredictable, with large files you can often watch the syntax highlighting happening, and input lag is way behind Sublime. VSCode is the Internet Explorer of text editors.
My experience is unlike yours: VSCode with a couple of small files open uses >200MB of RAM--Sublime Text uses 11MB. ST also loads much faster, opens large data files without delay, and does search/find in the blink of an eye--which VSCode cannot match. My time and the RAM usage are both of value to me, so I have no difficulty accepting that those benefits (among others) cost me $80 upgrade every three or four years.
VSCode is perfectly quick; it's not like they don't optimize it. It's not Sublime-level (it takes a second or two to start up, and tokenize the current file, etc.) but really it stays out of your way quite well.
People don't pay for software because of some sort of editor version of the labor theory of value, they pay for software if its a differentiated product they can't find a cheaper alternative for. This is true for most games. There's no GNU Elden Ring yet.
When it comes to Sublime these days it's hard to see why I'd pay for proprietary software, likely more than once when there's everything from Vim to Emacs, to VsCode and a dozen others.
In professions where tooling is very important, this is somewhat unique to tech; carpenters, machinists, plumbers, etc are definitely spending a lot of money on their tools.
I agree with your point here, but I think the discussion is usually more nuanced.
The things you use every day for quite a bit plus one time purchase - sure.
But let's take some hypothetical note-taking tool I access 2 times per day for one minute. Am I willing to pay a subscription for 60 minutes of use per month? nope.
And the same is true for development tools I purely use for my fun projects. I kinda like IDEA but 170€ per year? No way, I regularly don't need an IDE for months at a time. Their one-time purchase (was it like 300?) wasn't much better. I don't personally like Sublime, but if I did, 99€ one time sounds absolutely fair.
The problem arises when there are a dozen tools.
So yeah, my main gripe is with subscriptions, but no, I can't simply justify those purchases to feel more productive in my spare time. I don't really care if I theoretically would need twice as much time to code a feature for a few hours a week. Games are fun, and sometimes art - I enjoy them and so I am willing to pay.
In work settings I'm mostly a tool developer myself, so it might sound weird, but I wouldn't want to work for a company that sells a product to end users that does something I can get done 90% with FLOSS tools and fix the bugs I encounter.
It's 170e/year if you keep paying for it. You can stop and get to keep the latest version you payed.
Example:
IDEA 1.0 is out now and you pay 170e.
12 months later IDEA 1.9 is out .. if you pay another 170e you get to use 1.9+
If you don't pay you stay on IDEA 1.0.
If you cancel earlier than 12 months you don't get to keep anything.
I've paid for all of the Sublime versions since 2. I even paid for Sublime merge. I like supporting the team because they have consistent patches and really have built an excellent tool that I used for hours a day.
There are a lot of people talking about the VSCode plugin ecosystem but I've never lacked any plugins from Sublime. I just prefer the experience.
Once you have LSP setup it sings. There are also some underutilized features like workspaces and build systems that are really handy when you set them up. The snippets and macros system is also really nice.
I should also add that it is easy to build plugins for. The docs on plugins are a bit rough but there are lots of examples out there.
I love Sublime Text. It is actually Microsoft who should've paid for it, because they adopted what was done in Atom and Atom is direct attempt at opensource rewrite of Sublime Text. Sublime showed what a fast editor could look like, and it basically brought to the GUI world the long-overdue search-in-all-menus functionality which is really everywhere these days. Yeah, sure vim does it for ages with commands, no disrespect, but only 1% of baby devs would land vim in their first years.
Even though I appreciate opensource for many of its benefits (not quality, but mostly the community), there are dark sides to opensource that few mention. And one of it is the absolutely insanely negative view of anything that is closed-source software and needs to be paid for. Totally disregarding the qualities of product. This is so wrong on so many levels.
Whats more - a company which builds its services on opensource very seldom open sources its own code. What a hypocrisy! I'm not even going to go into this discussion of Amazon vs Elastic. It is shameful that users of opensource so much under-appreciate the authors' work while doing thousands, if not millions, on top of it. But then it is even more shameful to deny the right of authors of great software such as Sublime Text to proudly collect money for their work. After all - these service companies which are 99% opensource based, do whatever they do, for a profit, right?
And if we put this in perspective - whats the combined that you pay for Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Google Drive... whatever? Why not pay for the editor you are using on a daily basis, when its created by a hard-working professional. I'm not saying you have to pay for VSCode - its a marketing thing, very different. But people actually pay for Visual Studio, right?
So nothing shameless in buying Sublime Text, in fact - it is commendable.
Curious, why Sublime Text in this day and age of VS Code dominance?
Sublime text was my first "in the middle" text editor, more featured than vim/emacs, but lighter weight than IntelliJ. I somehow got my internship company
to buy me a license, which I ended up using for several years after leaving.
But then VS Code came along. I was a skeptic for years, as it was based on Atom/Electron, which I found really sluggish, and it was Microsoft.
The thing that converted me was the "it just works" extensions system. Most coding languages have syntax highlighting and intelligent code navigation out of the box, and if not, it's a few clicks away to install very well written extensions. Comparatively, it was a nightmare installing Sublime Text extensions.
And over the years, Microsoft has poured immense amounts of money into developing features for VS Code.
I still like Sublime Text better for most day-to-day text editing. It's snappier, something about the text rendering just looks better to me, and it has more features w/r/t text manipulation, or at least I haven't been able to find equivalents for certain things in VSCode when I've tried to look in the past.
I like the Python support that Anaconda provides in Sublime better than the VSCode alternative I've tried.
I still use VSCode for Rust dev though, and merge conflict resolution, and certain kinds of debugging.
This time I used VSCode for nearly 2 months. Thought it's the end of an era, I'm not coming back to Sublime Text. I decided to push through and customize the configs just right for me, it was really becoming comfortable. Main reason why I wanted to switch is more active dev, more active extension community, and well integrated modern (some ML-backed) code writing and navigation tools.
I was wrong. After all the painstaking customization to bring it close to my ideal experience, while also getting used to things I didn't want to fight, I still had a bad time.
For one, the tab/cursor focus keeps going into weird places. I press a button, like ESC to switch to normal vim mode, and instead it does nothing, or something different, because turns out I'm not in the editor anymore. Keeps happening, maybe my own fault. The nifty AI tools integration is more of a nuisance — they jump in at bad times (with a delay), and their tab/enter functionality is weird, can never get it right. Most of my autocompletes have been unintentional. Maybe my own fault again, but felt super awkward. There is still no good vertical align plugin, despite such an active community (Sublime doesn't have one either, although they have one that gets me a bit closer). The language server stuff that worked badly in Sublime for my language also works badly in VSCode. The extensions, while numerous, are of questionable quality. I tried to stick to just a few well known ones.
After all the effort, I slowly came to realization that I'm back to not really using anything unique to VSCode, sacrificing more than I gained, being surrounded by lots of small moving details everywhere in the UI that make my experience more awkward than helpful, and occasionally getting my cursor stuck in weird parts of UI. I went back to Sublime.
I switched from Sublime to VS Code, but man, I find VS Code pretty ugly.
It's not the colors, because obviously there are a near infinite number of themes. It's just a mishmash of text of varying style, size, and spacing and it realllllly all runs together visually for me.
I know some of it is tweakable but a lot isn't and I'm not sure it can be fixed...
For me it's the opposite. I literally can't use another editor for any extended period of time since I started using Shade Of Purple in vscode. I usually hate flashy stuff but man, pycharm is weirdly hard to use without it
It's such a stupid detail and ideally irrelevant to actual development too, but my brain just likes it too much.
Just tried Shade Of Purple and while it looks nice for TS code when I switch to HTML the fact that attribute names are italicised and a bright orangey-yellow while tag names, attribute values and text content all have neutral or darker colours to me makes it look like a case of not being able to see the forest for all the trees - the least interesting part of the document grabs my attention and makes the whole thing harder to visually parse. And it's even worse when attribute values contain expressions because some parts (property and function names) get the same bright orangey-yellow colour as the attribute name.
I think you can tweak it. I'm not sure since I use it mainly for python and C++ but when I used it for html (very very rarely) I didn't notice it. I'll check again, maybe it's not optimized for web!
I wonder if it's something that I changed, since with settings sync it's hard to know what's the "default" in any extension even after reinstalling :')
Ive stuck with sublime text because it feels good when I use it, everything is fast and there is no clutter. For lack of a better comparison it feels like when you had just reinstalled windows XP back in the day. Fresh and snappy and clean. I’ve tried vscode but it felt like Windows Vista, a bit slower, a bit more bloaty, a bit less familiar.
As a paid license Sublime user, years back, my biggest annoyance with VSCode was that regex pattern matching hit a limit to the matches it could find. At the time I believe it was around 1k, from some quick Google searching it looks like they may have increased the limit to 10k, which would have been right on the cusp of my use case at the time.
I could see giving VSCode another go in the future, but it's the 'if it aint broke' adage at this point.
I personally use VS Code 98% of the time or something but I want companies like Sublime to continue competing and making better stuff. I also paid for Nova from Panic. I really, really want all of these guys to succeed and keep trying to innovate. I also want options that aren’t tied to Microsoft.
Not Sublime Text, but I prefer BBEdit these days. It's way more responsive that VSCode, trivially easily to extend with shell scripts, Python, or whatever other language you want to write, and has fine LSP support so it can do most of the magic stuff that VSCode can.
I used VSCode for quite a while. I like it. I just strongly prefer truly native apps with native user interfaces. Not having to build a JavaScript package to add any little bit of extra functionality is also pretty sweet.
The "it just works" factor for extensions varies a lot depending on the language/ecosystem in question. For some things the store is littered with old broken extensions and figuring out which ones are "right" (if any are) can be a task.
I also think it tries to do a little too much and has too much in the way of modern UI-isms going on. Sublime Text is basically cross-platform TextMate, and I found TextMate more or less perfect in those regards.
The emacs out-of-box experience is notoriously poor, as evidenced by the rise and popularity of emacs starter packs, some of which have been on the hn front page of late.
I've been using emacs since 2002 or so and until very recently it needed a ton of third party config to approximate the ux and utility of what was available in other tools built in.
AFAIU this is a discoverability problem, not that emacs isn't featureful ootb. Some of emacs's built-in features (e.g. undo in region) are even not supported at all by other editors.
So just use a starter kit. Why do people put so much importance on "out of the box experience"? Who actually cares? Out of the box only matters if you can't change what you get from the box. But you can. That's the entire point of emacs.
Emacs is the way it is because it's almost 40 year old software that still tries not to break users' configs. Do VS Code users even have configs? Most of them seem to just lap up whatever is dished out to them.
Because the "out of box experience" turns lots of users away, including future potential contributors. Emacs could be so much better if it had a larger pool of users from which to draw developers. Read the mailing lists- it's plain to see that Eli and a few others are seriously burnt out. The project is not healthy, despite outward appearances.
There's a sizeable group of emacs users who are "it works for me" grognards and for whom any change to make emacs better constitutes an assault on them as a person.
If that's you, just down vote and move on and continue enjoying living in your ensconced world of mediocre software. I don't have energy to have this argument yet again.
It would certainly be good to ensure the future of emacs. I'm not sure the set of people who care about out of the box and the set of people who would be future maintainers is a very large intersection, but it's probably nonzero. Personally over the years I've come to think emacs just isn't for everyone. Not everyone wants to be free. The Matrix told us that. I've come to accept I'll always be part of a small group of weirdos who like this stuff and that's fine. But if there's a genuine move towards ensuring the future of emacs by changing defaults then I'm all for it.
Are there any recent practical discussions about this? What's the barrier to someone simply taking something like emacs bedrock and making a snap out of it? I just checked and VS Code simply offers a .deb or .rpm for Linux. Wouldn't including an init.el make everyone happy? Or is there more to it?
Also, what is a good out of the box experience for emacs? I don't think it's code completion or whatever VS Code does. I think it's being easy to hack. That's what makes emacs great. It's not about what it does, it's about what you can do with it.
>I'm not sure the set of people who care about out of the box and the set of people who would be future maintainers is a very large intersection ...
Yeah that's the common refrain. It's just gatekeeping in my experience. A certain demographic tends to view using the terminal or using bad UIs as some sort of badge of elite status, and sneers at people who want to spend their workday looking at visually-pleasing UIs.
>Also, what is a good out of the box experience for emacs?
Well, a GUI that doesn't look like it's stuck in 1997 for starters. Off the top of my head, handling long lines without chugging, being async/multithreaded so a network request doesn't lock up the entire fscking UI, offering CUA-mode by default for easier onboarding, fixing the often absurd terminology in the docs (frames/windows/panes/yank means paste/etc.), and probably a few others I can't think of.
That's just an immensely better UI, by default. To achieve even 80% of that in emacs you'd need to spend time configuring at a minimum treemacs, an lsp client, breadcrumb-mode, minimap, probably project.el or projectile, magit, one of the tab-bar modes, and a bunch of niceties like showing line numbers by default, to say nothing about a better theme.
All that stuff should be built in and there's no good reason other than "the emacs developers are overworked already" for them to not be included.
Imagine showing someone the editor above, and then showing them this. Which one do you think they'll choose?
I mean the VS Code one looks terrible to me. Fat icons on the left wasting space. Illegible text wasting space on the right. More wasted space in the bottom right. The text doesn't even fit in the buffers?! And this is their marketing shot?
I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.
Yeah, the Emacs one looks shit. They should definitely expunge those screenshots and replace them with ones that actually look good.
It's impossible to convey what makes Emacs great in screenshots, though. It's not the theme, it's not even magit or org-mode. I feel like someone with skills could make a good short video on what actually makes it great. Unfortunately most Emacs users are borderline autistic like me, though.
People will always be drawn to flash marketing, that's just the way it is.
I still don't get why someone (like you) doesn't just bundle a starter kit and make it easy to install standalone if you think this is the problem. Spacemacs has a shiny website but its installation instructions are `git clone spacemacs ~/.emacs.d` :/
> It just looks amateurish and unpolished. It looks like it's janky and doesn't work very well. It's just unappealing in any modern sense.
I was with you before but now I think I might be glad that people like you get ignored by emacs developers. Do you also think that Craigslist looks amateurish, unpolished, and unappealing in any modern sense?
I'm all for improving usability (I agree with all the other points you made in this post) but I don't want my software to look "modern", simply because in general, UI design has gotten worse over the last 20 years.
After the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub (including Atom/Electron), they really made immense efforts to speed it up! It's been years since I've used Sublime Text, but I imagine VS Code is as fast if not faster at this point.
As for "Microsoft". It's funny, I use to be a Windows/Microsoft fan in the 90s/2000s because that was the only way I was going to play computer games. Then they lost my trust during the Ballmer era, at the same time I started programming and appreciated linux/apple more.
But VS Code has singlehandedly reignited my love of Microsoft. Despite the name "Visual Studio Code", it does not at all try to shove Microsoft languages like Visual Basic or C# down your throat. Support for common open source languages like python and javascript are amazing.
It's as surprising to me as it is to you that I'm defending Microsoft in an online thread right now.
It's not surprising that you're defending Microsoft. They have had a very successful marketing campaign leaving the impression that "Microsoft changed".
But they are still the same company that threatened Linux with patents and FUD campaigns, that collects royalties from Android and that has turned Windows into ad-ridden spyware.
> They have had a very successful marketing campaign leaving the impression that "Microsoft changed".
No. It is their actions which have shown that they are a different entity now, and are much more friendly towards the open source community, which has left a good impression. They are still a large entity, they still perform evil or brain-dead actions. None of that is marketing, it is simply strategic shifts that happen in large companies. It isn't there ms of old that people like to keep dredging up, and it is unhelpful that a vociferous anti ms crowd on HN considers this "defending", all this does is create polarisation. It is observing. Many of us have observed their changes. That is all.
A marketing campaign example of the type you refer to would be apple's "privacy" campaigns which convince people that privacy means giving up their privacy to their ecosystem. They are actively promoted and defended on HN. No mention of past misdeeds are entertained.
I think you may be confusing marketing with advertising. And note that I'm no Apple or Google fan either.
Microsoft has always built excellent developer tools. Even before VS Code, Visual Studio for Windows has been one of the best, if not the best, IDE. And it wasn't open source, but nowadays, it's tough to compete in a world in which even IntelliJ IDEA has a FOSS "community edition".
The open-sourcing of .NET happened because they've lost the mobile, and .NET was dying due to Java's and JavaScript's dominance. But even today, the development of .NET Core has plenty of shenanigans behind closed doors; the difference in how Oracle (of all companies) treats the Java community as a partner in developing new stuff is appalling (see Project Loom).
So we've got VS Code, .NET Core, some inevitable Linux contributions due to Azure, and the acquisition of GitHub, which is now used for open-source laundering via Copilot, copyright licences be damned. What else?
The only thing that changed for Microsoft is their shift to Azure. They are still the same boring old corporation that wants to crush their competition by any means necessary, monopoly power included.
It's not the speed with VSCode for me, it's the RAM usage. VSCode uses about 3x as much memory as Sublime does, in my casual testing. From what I hear it's even worse if you're a plugin junkie (I'm not). I deplore software which wastes my system resources, so I stick to the lean and mean Sublime Text
VSCode has noticeable UI lag as compared to SublimeText.
I really don’t understand the love for VSC. I give it a good go from time to time, because I figure I must be missing something. But I end up back with ST.
> I use to be a Windows/Microsoft fan [...] Then they lost my trust during the Ballmer era [...] But VS Code has singlehandedly reignited my love of Microsoft
Maybe we could find products useful or not without a seesaw parasocial relationship with the vendor?
If Facebook released one that was VSCode but not electron tomorrow, I'd use that if major concerns didn't exist.
I just want the best tool for the job. Sometimes the best tools come from the worst companies, as I'm reminded of every month when Adobe take money from me.
I find Sublime useful because it doesn't try to be as "helpful" as some other text editors. It also makes problems stemming from non-printing character apparent. It works well for those one-off times when you need to view or edit some text outside of your normal IDE.
The Remote extensions in particular have changed how I do development. I use VSCode for coding in all languages now and have micro set to $EDITOR for quick stuff in the terminal. It's the comfiest setup I've had in my career.
> Curious, why Sublime Text in this day and age of VS Code dominance?
I don't know if it's still the case as I generally don't need to do it anymore but VS Code (and other Electron-based editors) used to struggle with large files.
I know it's not very common use case but I did need to open large log files (from 100MB to even gigabytes range) and such in the past and that's where ST really shined.
I guess I haven't explored it well enough, but I have not learned how to get VSCode to operate properly with virtual environments with python. Am I not supposed to create/manage venvs myself, and point VSCode to the path?
I like opening different files on different monitors for different tasks. Sometimes one window will have code while the other is markdown for taking notes.
If you're a fully employed professional of some means, which a huge amount of folk reading this are.
Pay for your shareware software. Usually with independent SaaS software, after I've used software for 6+ months or more, I pay for the lifetime license.
It isn’t a bad thing. The repo is sarcastic in a good way, making fun of how we take incredible software for granted.
It got me to pay for Sublime even though I haven’t used it in years. When I used it, though, it was the best thing since sliced bread and more than paid for itself.
I don't have a problem with paying for software I use and like if the price and their terms are reasonable, which Sublime mostly is.
However, my personal issue with Sublime is the fact some basic requested editor functionality hasn't been implemented in years. You can see multiple such issues opened against it.
And I'm not talking about IDE-like stuff, just basic editor features, like having multiple rows of tabs when you have many files open.
I paid for it (and merge) even after I started using neovim full time, because I used it for years to learn to code before I got a paid job. Their license terms were kind enough to let me do that, so I honored the spirit of it and paid them once I got paid.
As someone who almost always has a text editor open, I have paid for many over the years. In particular multiple versions of TextMate and multiple versions of Sublime Text. I have also been responsible for getting licenses for my team(s) at work.
I now find that the editor I am happiest with is VS Code, not because it's free but because of the extensibility and community support it brings. I'd happily pay for it - but I think the nature of it being free is what has brought so much community support to it.
I paid for sublime. Used it for years. Then VSCode overtook it on so many levels.
I even used it for notetaking because it opened faster than vscode but then that was fixed. Good stuff but hard to avoid a solid ecosystem that is constantly evolving with the backing of big companies. kinda sad actually.
Yeah, when your competitor is one of the biggest companies in the world who's willing to light millions on fire to offer a COMPLETELY FREE competitor for the sake of "developer mindshare", it's pretty easy to see the end result.
I was really a skeptic for years, but Microsoft really threw money at this until it won.
First thing I did in VScode was install/activate Vim mode.
So if VScode does go the way of Windows, then I'll "just" go back to another editor with vi bindings.
(yes yes, I remember some of my emacs bindings, wrote a thesis in latex on emacs, and learnt lisp as a result, but I realised that vi was more "portable")
They embraced open source software and open protocols like LSP to get as many programming languages working with VSCode as possible and then they licensed their own pylance language server so that you can’t use it outside of VSCode.
This. I absolutely love Sublime and wish I could go back to it, but the plugin ecosystem isn't the same. It's all community supported and feels like it's held together with tape. It doesn't "just work" like VSCode does.
And although I appreciate that Sublime is supposed to be a simple editor, not an IDE, it wouldn't hurt to add more IDE-like features. It's just too basic for development in 2023. Sublime has a really clean, performant, cross platform UI, why not take that and build the foundations of something more viable?
I wonder what's the last version you use? I do agree the plugin ecosystem is in shambles but they do have actively developed plugins. It's just not easy to discover.
The only significant thing that I think VSCode has over Sublime is the Live sharing stuff.
I evaluated Sublime vs VSC just for note taking, since I was on VSC for years but I felt the resource usage was too much for having some .md files open.
Sublime used far fewer resources yes, but as others have said the plugins just weren't the same. It also felt like a huge premium to pay just to take notes.
Tried Obsidian a few months ago, and it's roughly on par with VSC but much better geared towards my notes.
I've never had an issue with system resources since about ... 2003?
I think that argument is overblown. People don't LIKE seeing the resource bloat, but it has almost zero impact on today's systems. Maybe back when I was using a WD Fireball HDD for swap space, sure...
Many years ago I bought Sublime Text minutes after using the plugin system to install some support for the languages I use.
This was a decade before VSCode took over, and at the time I was a Vim user for most of my career. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the Stockholm syndrome I had built around VimScript, and I never looked back.
We (people like me) owe ST for opening the door for innovation in the general-purpose IDE space that created what is frankly a golden age compared to the century prior. Heck, the command palette has bled into tools well outside the scope of developer tools these days and it’s probably my favorite UX pattern in modern complex software.
To any Vim users preparing to inform me about how much better Vim is these days, I’d argue that we still owe ST for raising the expectations that developers have of their editors.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I find the process of developing/modifying an extension such a PITA on vscode. In sublime it's frictionless, all you have to do is to save some python files in your user folder, then sublime will find them automatically, and hot reload them when you modify them! In VSCode, I have go through a whole build process, generate some .vsx and then manually install it. The tiniest modification to the code requires me to go through this whole process again. Am I doing something wrong here?
Funny, I had the opposite experience. Typescript has perfect language server support, the vs code api docs are very good and you can always just look at the source. Plus debugging vs code extensions is easy.
Porting the same extension to sublime text was a nightmare. Python has poor language support in all ides, the docs were lacking, there was no good debugger and I couldn't just check the code.
I can certainly imagine developing a complex extension intended for publication in the marketplace can involve a very different experience.
I had in mind only the kind of extension a user might write for personal use, which may often involve adding some simple functionality (usually some event listener, e.g. intercepting auto-completion to do some filtering). I find it very convenient to be able to change the code and have the changes instantaneously reflected in the editor itself (rather than some sandboxed environment) and wish it were possible to do the same in VSCode
You didn't really answer their question, you really only said that you find it more comfortable working with Typescript than with Python. Are you aware of a way to install custom Typescript code as an extension without needing to go through the build and install process in VSCode, similar to the way a Python file can be pulled in by Sublime if placed in a specific folder?
If you like something you should probably pay to support it in some fashion. The meme of “it was free at some point so I shouldn’t ever pay for it” is many things including deeply limiting.
I think Sublime Merge is also deserving of the small chunk of cash they ask for it. I’m not embarrassed at all about it, sarcastically or otherwise. It’s great software and I hope they keep developing great things.
...#sublimeshame? I don't understand what is shameful. Nor do I see anything to be proud of either. It's a fantastic tool. I used Sublime Text for quite a while at version 2 and eventually bought a license. Later upgraded to 4. Still using it almost daily. It's a staple in my workflow and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Other tools would probably be just as good, but whatever, it is valuable to me.
Love it :) Sublime Text is exactly the type of company I can support. Honest business, making a good and honest product. Unfortunately it's not _quite_ good enough for me :(
I wish there was a viable alternative to VSCode. For a clue as to where that's headed, take a look at any free tool with heavy investment by a large corporation. Chrome is good case-study.
VSCodium is ... I can't put my finger on it, but it doesn't cut it. Maybe death by a thousand cuts, many small things that don't quite work as cleanly as they should.
As someone whose been on the other side, seeing money come in really obligates me to actually do something.
There's a deeper feeling of responsibility when someone's given you cash and I seem to prioritize things that otherwise I probably wouldn't have found the time for.
So you may think you "get" nothing, but what you might actually get is a developer to spend more time on it.
Now of course there's diminishing returns, but zero to non-zero obligates the honest person. Beyond that it's mostly headcount. I'd work more for 10 people that gave $1 than for 1 person that gave $10 because I've gone from having a sponsor to an audience.
Why is it shameful to pay to support something you use all the time?
I've paid for BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Sublime Text, and probably others over the years. VS Code is really the first editor I haven't felt compelled to pay for.
I paid for Sublime Text 3 while I was still using it. Even though I switched away (to Vim/Neovim, then Kakoune, then Helix), I don’t regret it at all. It was a fantastic tool I used for about two to three years, and it brought me far more value than the $70 it asked for in return.
In fact, I’ve since bought a ton of other software when it’s proven useful more than the free alternatives. I’m particularly happy when it’s sold by a small team, just like Sublime. Some favorites I currently have installed: Acorn, Fantastical, Ivory, Monodraw, Things, Transmit, and Tweetbot (RIP).
> Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that is designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is lean, fast and uncluttered. It starts up quickly, has a live word count, and is easy on the eyes. Also, Bean is available free of charge.
> Bean has some limitations: it doesn't do footnotes or use stylesheets and is only partially compatible with Word's file formats. Also, it allows in-line graphics, but not floating graphics.
I finally made an account just to say: I also bought Sublime Text, and I'm happy to do so. I'll pay for it again when my license runs up, most likely.
Lots of people saying they use VSCode, and I can't blame them. It has a lot going for it. But when I recently tried each for a while, Sublime does everything VSCode does just as well. Even plugins - there's nothing I want (with one exception) I can't get in Sublime. So the calculus basically comes down to this:
VSCode: the remoting feature is great, and Sublime currently can't match it (rsub is a poor substitute at best).
Sublime: it's not an Electron app, and therefore uses a fraction of the resources. Working with the same set of files open, VSCode uses hundreds of MB of memory while Sublime uses 100 or so.
So either way I have to give something up, but ultimately the massive bloat of VSCode bothers me more than the lack of good remoting functionality in Sublime. So I'm using Sublime for the foreseeable future.
btw, if you need help with issues or just curious whether Sublime is dead or not, head over to their unofficial Discord server -> https://discord.com/invite/D43Pecu
Over here on Linux, I tried Sublime this summer for a couple months. Compared to Kate (which has grown a lot over the years), it had a couple of better options, but about the same number of strange oddities. And then I saw what it takes to modify some of the theme choices... ay yay. Back to Kate's well-known oddities.
Absolutely not connecting with the message. I happily and proudly bought Sublime Text after some time because it's a tool I really like and use pretty much daily. Thanks to the devs for a solid product.
Sublime Text is a great text editor. It opens huge files quickly. It has all the features I need for programming via LSP packages. It just feels comfy to use.
btw, if you need help with issues or just curious whether Sublime is dead or not, head over to their unofficial Discord server -> https://discord.com/invite/D43Pecu
I paid for it earlier this month. I have a "charity" budget. I didn't get any dialog. But like OP, it's something I used since my first job (if you count ST2 as the same). So I figured this time instead of building wells in some remote location, the money should go into legally paying for something that's I use.
It was second choice - first was Fork, which is even more embarrassing as it means I don't use the git CLI. But Fork rejected my card so ST it was.
It does feel weird. There's no satisfaction. I don't use it that much these days; it's just a text editor that I paste logs into. It's pretty damn expensive for a text editor.
I feel a small amount of satisfaction every time I open Sublime to take a random note, knowing that 1) once upon a time my work depended on it, and 2) I did my part to support its development.
The main thing that actually convinced me to pay for Sublime a few years ago was a bug (or dark pattern?) in that very nag window: if it would pop up just as I clicked something, it would move to the background. Normally not an issue, but for some reason the area where the nag window is will block Sublime from registering scroll input. It was driving me crazy until I finally figured out what was causing it.
I'm not sure if it still does this, but I have experienced this on multiple systems at the time.
Happy I paid for it though, the sluggish VSCode bloatware is not doing it for me.
I don't use Sublime, but I have tried to get into the habit of donating "roughly how much I would pay at the store" for some of the open source software I use frequently, now that I make yuppie money. Stuff like ffmpeg or NeoVim or tmux are tools that I have become so dependent on, and they're all given away for free.
I have also tried to be in compliance with "free for personal use" licenses; I pay the fee for business use of Obsidian now, because I do use it a lot for work.
Been a paid user and happy customer since 2009. I have paid for every paid upgrade it asked. I've stopped coding for quite a while and now uses it to write mostly Markdown, and some others here and there. Sublimetext is worth it and (I believe), it is not even yearly but you pay once every 4th year (current license model).
I tend to open directories/folders of projects and Sublime text is the only one that I can zip around while still being visually informative and beautiful.
I paid for SublimeText and SublimeMerge and will happily pay another time, when my v3 license expires. While I'm mostly in the FOSS camp, Sublime software, together with Bitwig Studio (https://www.bitwig.com) and Reaper (https://www.reaper.fm), are the pinnacle of commercial products in their categories.
I have been using Sublime Text for about 8 years now, I have tried multiple different editors in the mean time including VS Code, Atom, Fleet and I always went back to Sublime Text.
After years of using ST for free, I finally bought a license about two years ago when ST 4 came out, I am also a paid user of Sublime Merge, which is the best git client I have tried.
Not a developer and I use Sublime Text everyday as a local note taking app. Is so so snappy, and the UI/colors are calm and attractive. I love Sublime Text.
I guess I don't get the license message as the op because I don't save the tabs, all catched.
I tryed obsidian for some time and was cool, but was miles behind in snappiness and wasn't worth it.
Once upon a time, I used Sublime Text, Sublime Merge, and paid for them.
But one day, I realized enough was enough. Sublime Text 2 was worth its cost, and so was Sublime Text 3. But when we were introduced to Sublime Text 4 and its license with an annual fee, we were told that it was to avoid holding back significant features for the next major release to boost its sales. The annual fee would allow them to release new features just after done - that's what they said. But where is it? Sublime Text, previously stagnant, continued to stagnate in its fourth version.
Ah that is unfortunate. If I can say one thing against Sublime HQ, it is that they are bad at communicating. I assume you are on a business license (thus the yearly) and you expected that there will be releases. Not as frequent but something that will signal you that they are active.
As a "dev" user (the unstable version), I can say that they are active. They have 6 builds just this year. 4 of which are large ones. Unfortunately, they just released those in "stable" last Aug 2.
Previous years are also bad. They released to "stable" mostly before the year ends while "dev" has builds almost every month.
If I were them, I would leverage the "we are so quiet" and provide exclusive access to frequent builds to paying customers. Sure they might be "unstable" but as a paying customer, I would rather have an unstable product than not hear from you the whole year.
Anyway, going back to my point, they are active. I can vouch for that. They are just really bad in doing "company" things. In my purely honest opinion, it is not enough for a business to have a great product if you can't appeal to your target market. They are lucky enough that there are people who fell in love with ST and stuck around.
What the heck, am I the only one who doesn't feel bad about paying for a text editor?!
I use it, it is nice and I enjoy, so I pay person some money. I figure I'm not buying some millionaire another boat.
I have definitely spent more on worse / dumber things.
Re: VSCode, I liked it more when MS stayed on their side of the fence, producing megacorper dev tools. This allowed smaller companies to flourish and create useful things and wild features. Now those same smallcos are relegated to the marketplace which is ruled by MS whim. I'm sure you can sideload etc, but I danno. Something about the freedom of Sublime plugs felt nice. Also what a great license scheme compared to all the other subscribeware we see anymore.
Maybe I'm just a sucker, I pay for my own JetBrains sub lol.
As much as I respect the authors and their opinions, it feels terribly wrong to put that on Github. This is not a personal blog. There are no codes, no licenses, no whatever contribution or forks ever possible for the lack of meanings.
Why?
It does not take a body part to host a server or buy a VPS, or you can even use wordpress parts. If the only thing they are looking for is opinions (or, mainly similar opinions), they could go subreddits or forums like HN. Why Github?
It is rarely good to have that much emotional investment in software (or in the money that would otherwise be spent on donations to software devs). Most of us are fairly uninvolved: you either pay or not.
This must be Sublime PR department psyop. A brilliant one, I must admit.
Just went back to sublime from Obsidian for note taking. Nothing beats the speed of sublime (aside from CLI text editors). Obsidian is cool but too slow and filled with micro-annoyances that I just dont experience with sublime.
Looks like I'm not the only one experiencing this with Obsidian. I have been trying to incorporate it with my flow but it feels clunky? I guess those are the micro-annoyances you are talking about?
I paid for it and feel no shame. The core editor still beats VS Code by far, even though its plugin ecosystem really died off in the mid-2010s when the devs went nearly silent, and sadly never recovered.
I've had a personal license, but barely used it, because vim & emacs. But in the end, the problem with license is that I can't use it @myWork. There is plenty of outstanding editors these days - neovim, emacs, vscode for those loving to click around so that it would be difficult for me to argue why I do need a license for sublime. But I've had no problems to get my employer to pay for JIdea Ultimate, because the value of an IDE to vscode is pretty obvious.
Not allowed, sadly, employee insists that all licenses used have to be bought ob their name. Legal something yada yada… I can’t just bring in my personal license.
That's unfortunate. Is it like they monitoring your laptop for software installed? I had this issue way back. I just said "Ah, Sublime Text is free. Sure, buy me a license if you want but if it's free, there are no legal issues, right?"
Sublime Text was the last piece of daily software that I really enjoy. Since then nothing else has given me that feeling. I bought it a long time back of course.
I bought a license a while ago, but I found myself using it less and less.. why? I couldn't tweak something that was bothering me (file preview as you fuzzy search your file, causing ton of screen flickering, and is quite slow on my raspberry..)
I now mostly use vim..
I'm pretty sure they'll never do it, but I think Sublime should embrace open source, or perhaps open more components of the editor..
The licensing used to be for a single major version. This was changed with Sublime Text 4: A license is permanently valid for any versions/builds released within 3 years of the purchase. See https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-4
The guilt-trip business model is a shitty one. How I miss the days of
shrink-wrapped diskettes when the software, and not the customer, was the
deliverable.
I hate that dialog box. It annoys me so much because I'm lazy and adding the key to a new install is always an afterthought. It's much worse with the Sublime SFTP plugin because I use it infrequently and so I only put in the license key after months or so of pestering.
It's not that I didnt want to buy it, Ive paid for Sublime twice now! I grumbled through the second payment. Something about the license only applying to major versions for 3 years? It is an indispensable pieces of software for me though, and I've paid more for other stuff (Backlink tracking subscription)
btw, if you need help with issues or just curious whether Sublime is dead or not, drop by their unofficial Discord server -> https://discord.com/invite/D43Pecu
On Sublime, it's a great editor, and being cross platform is really nice. They really do need to update the web site to reflect that it's not dead. The "see what's new" link is dated 2021.
I still do on occasions, but I can't at work. I miss it all the time, but in someways, and I hate saying it, but I have been more productive. I spent too much time changing my config, QoL improvements, and breaking things. The sick part is that I miss it sometimes. I thinks is due to Emacs being the only software I have worked[1] on that actually meant something to me.
[1] Worked on in the since of configurations, my own modes, packages, etc.. I have never contributed to Emacs the project.
Emacs has such a steep and long learning curve that I couldn’t justify learning it while doing actual work. Still attracted by it, any suggestion for a smoother adoption?
The learning curve is not so steep, as long as you don't try to learn ALL OF EMACS upfront. Just start using it for your basic editing, learn how to open/save files, how to navigate, buffer management, as you go. When you need something more specific, you can easily look it up in the great in-built documentation. You can also use something like Doom, which simplifies more advanced setups, and adds to discoverability (press the leader key, and you get a set of options for what else you can do from there).
It's the same with Vim, if you learn how to do basic editing, the rest comes along easily, as you need it. (remember "ESC :q!", though :) )
I like "emacs bedrock" config to start with. And use magit (can be enabled in bedrock). You'll save so much time using git which means a) you'll never go back and b) you can use the time saved to get better at emacs.
I won't lie to you, though. Emacs is the single greatest source of yak shaving there is. It becomes your passion project as you try to craft your ultimate editing experience. It's so cool to be able to use your own passion project for work every day.
The licensing from sublime is very amenable, I believe, far from what companies like Adobe force on their end users, IMO.