Will Bond (Package Control) Joins Sublime HQ
This is very good news, but I worry that it's too little, too late. For years, Sublime Text had no serious competitors. Then Atom came along. Don't get me wrong, Atom has significant drawbacks. But it also has advantages: it's open source, costs nothing, and has a couple dozen developers working on it. Sublime Text is closed source, costs $70 (totally worth it, IMO), and has two developers working on it.
The difference in staffing is the main reason I worry. I use Sublime Text far more than Atom, but the trend is unmistakable: Atom is improving faster than Sublime. The most recent stable release of Sublime Text is from 30 months ago. Atom was announced 22 months ago, and v1.0 was released 9 months ago. In those same 22 months, there have been zero updates to Sublime Text 2 and only four updates to Sublime Text 3 beta. That's some abysmally slow development. If these trends continue, there's simply no way that Sublime Text can stay in the lead.
Good news I love Sublime it's so fast and slick - I haven't used Atom because consensus seems to be that it's not as fast with multiple large files open. Why is everyone obsessed about open source, yes nice to have but at the end of the day this is just a (very sharp) tool - what's your priority tinkering with your tools or getting the job done? 70$ is peanuts, speed and productivity gains way outweigh this. ST is multi-talented, brilliant for SQL, runs huge Postgres queries directly and lightning fast with full feed back ( error messages line numbers etc) even multi million row result sets don't phase it , any other editor would just gind to a spluttering halt.
Wow, thanks everyone! I'm thrilled to be working with Jon and Kari and to be helping with Sublime Text.
This is very nice to see. Just last week Sublime started releasing new dev builds after close to a year of silence. Sublime is my favorite text editor and it seemed like it was going to drift off into obscurity but this will definitely inject new life into it. Sublime didn't just make a hire, they hired the guy responsible for an arguably large part of sublime's success.
Love Sublime, and honestly feel like if there was more financial support from developers it would have even more marketshare.
Congratulations Will, check out his super useful sftp package as well: https://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp.
Woo! I worked with Will for a couple years and this is going to be a great pick up for Sublime. Nice guy, great developer.
They also replaced their awful old forums with Discourse (which Atom also uses): https://forum.sublimetext.com.
Sublime Text user here, who switched to Atom a year ago and never looked back. Never had any of the issues others described having with Atom such as slowness, etc. What I love about Atom is that it's under active, fast-paced development, that it's super-easy to customize (first thing was to increase the font-size of the left-hand folder pane), and the available plugins are fantastic. It probably also helps that extending Atom is much more approachable given that it's all Javascript, rather than Python with ST. Furthermore, as others commented, the plugins have much more reach into the editor and can do a lot more.
For example, the new block decorations coming in 1.6 are going to be an awesome API for plugin authors! http://blog.atom.io/2016/02/03/introducing-block-decorations...
This and the fact that they just released a new version is very good news! I've tried several other editors over the last 2 years or so, but I keep coming back to Sublime. I love many things about Atom, but janky scrolling on a 2 year old MacBook Pro is just unacceptable. Another big advantage that isn't mentioned a lot is that Sublime is a lot lighter on CPU. Just for all the folks that are developing on battery power.
The title is somewhat like a garden path sentence [1], when I started reading this I thought it was a question about the future of a package manager called Bond. The title case doesn't make it any easier.
Very amazing news! I loved sublime text and kept holding onto it while everyone else was switching.
At some point I got really frustrated with the plugin API. Stuff like only 1 thing can write into the gutter at a time and that relative line numbers is close to impossible to implement (the package that exists is garbage) is just ridiculous.
That was the moment when I switched to atom and ported my sublimious plugin to atom (proton). I've since been using atom and am quite happy with it but now and then look back at the ST3 days and the incredible performance that ST3 offers.
I hope with Will on board, development will finally pick up again. ST3 needs excited developers that want to push it further and Will seems like that kind of person. I'd love to grab my old license out of the cellar and give it another spin.
FYI Build 3103 was just released [1]
[1] https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-bui...
As others mention, these are amazing news. The last months were void of communication from Jon and the forums were in a constant state of spam+complains, so hopefully this (and the recent updates) signals something is changing :)
This is fantastic news!
Very glad to hear such a staunch supporter of Sublime Text joining their team. Congrats and good luck, Will!
Congrats Will! :)
Or more like, Congrats Sublime HQ.
There's a single feature that made me an Atom user over Sublime — and that's support for excluding files and folders in gitignore from the quick open.
i really like Sublime. i've used it personally and professionally for years. but it's also the only piece of software that i use, the source code of which i don't have access to. i definitely would prefer something i can hack on for my own pleasure and profit, and my appreciation for FLOSS software has only grown and grown throughout my career.
how's atom doing these days? can Sublime HQ really compete in the long run?
but no SSL... :(
Anyway I love sublime, and really hope the API keeps growing! It's also nice to see Will Bond becoming "official" :) congratulations!
I'm curious if any one remembers SlickEdit. Circa 2000 I had an internship and SlickEdit was the Sublime Text at that time.
SlickEdit for some reason went into complete obscurity though and I can't recall why. I'm not saying this will happen to Sublime (as I'm not even sure what happend to Slick) but I do wonder if it will as TextMate seems to be going down the path of long term obscurity.
Congrats to Will and Sublime, great everyone involved!
Congrats Will! I'm really excited to see what you'll be bringing to Sublime!
I wish you all the best!
== slow clap ==
Great hire.
Of course Will Bond will bond