from Hacker News

Is it time to open source SublimeText?

by rukshn on 3/30/23, 2:39 PM with 82 comments

  • by johnfonesca on 3/30/23, 3:23 PM

    "I feel that open sourcing SublimeText is the only way for SubmlineText to be relevant and compete against VSCode."

    The SublimeText people make a living by developing and selling a honest product (and they're probably happy doing that).

    There's nothing wrong with not competing with VSCode.

  • by xnorswap on 3/30/23, 3:24 PM

    I assumed this was a blog post from the author of Sublime Text until I opened it.

    This is the most entitled article I've read for a very long time.

    It also asserts with no evidence that VSCode is popular because "it is open source" rather than the more obvious, "It has the backing of Microsoft".

    There are thousands of less popular open source editors out there. And yet Sublime is one of the few pieces of software I've actually paid for (admittedly not since ST2).

  • by VWWHFSfQ on 3/30/23, 3:07 PM

    Hey I don't want to pay for your thing. You should make it free and also give me the source code.

  • by Springtime on 3/30/23, 3:31 PM

    > When it comes to making money, the SublimeText developers can offer the core version of SublimeText for free, while they can sell a pro version with more advanced features targeted towards more advanced users and developers.

    Sublime has been known for years for its generous trialware, where a countless number of users just click past the popup suggesting buying. Such users have already decided they want all the features of Sublime just for free and the devs have allowed for that without restriction. The suggested scenario would ironically make the available free version worse.

    Plus there has already been a healthy plugin community for Sublime. I wouldn't doubt it might receive a boost from being open source but if we contrast with Atom editor, which recently officially EoL'd and was open source, it didn't make it a superior experience to Sublime ime, despite how much functionality the community was eager to replicate.

    Which isn't to say I would be against them going open source, just that I don't feel the reasoning is persuasive in the article.

  • by drinchev on 3/30/23, 3:24 PM

    Sublime Text editor is my day-dreaming destination when I feel depressed of work. It makes me really happy that 2-3 people can actually build something, sell a piece of it in an non-disturbing way, and do this for a living.

    It's also one of the best shareware models ( Is this even a word these days? ), that I've ever stumbled upon.

    Keep up the good work, folks!

  • by indymike on 3/30/23, 3:44 PM

    Lots of people have pointed out how entitled this article is. There's another problem with this article.

    The author assumes that his plans for the future are in alignment with or superior to the vision of the authors / ip owners of Sublime.

    There's plenty of room for great free and open source tools and great proprietary development tools. Always has been... Emacs, Eclipse and VS Code haven't killed off the paid IDEs. Sublime's niche has a long tradition of paid and free tools. What is good is that Sublime has found a way to survive, and hopefully prosper. That should be celebrated... and maybe the lesson is why they are able to survive in spite of great free competition. (this also applies to JetBrains, WingIDE and many other commercial development tools, all of which are great values for developers)

    Honestly, I don't see competing with VS Code as much of a goal: it takes a world-beating development effort, and you will likely not have a self-sustaining organization in the end. For Microsoft, they get a way to distribute Copilot, Azure, Github and proprietary add-ons. For a smaller company, you may not have a way to create a sustainable team to maintain the product.

  • by rs999gti on 3/30/23, 3:21 PM

    Aren't most of you 1337 h4x0r making 300K USD as developers in start ups?

    99 USD should be in your couch cushions, Tesla cupholder, or the bottom of your messenger bag.

  • by crop_rotation on 3/30/23, 3:28 PM

    Sublime is an awesome piece of software written with so much effort put into performance. I don't see why the author should open source it. People who like open source editors only have many options. Open sourcing Sublime text would just mean the amount of paying users would drop to a much lower number, and the authors would be forced to write CRUD apps in some company. Once it goes open source there would be a new free open source distribution and all corporate money would drop I think.

    On HN the sentiment for many things that everyone else can make enough money via donations/patreon and do some consulting or merchandising. However, very few HN developers would choose that over their well paying jobs writing closed source software.

  • by spyremeown on 3/30/23, 3:13 PM

    Honestly I'd rather Sublime had taken over instead of VSCode. It's just really good software. Sublime to me is up there with OpenBSD and the Golang standard library in terms of well written, "just works" software.

  • by kaladin_1 on 3/30/23, 3:13 PM

    If any Sublime Team member comes by just know that you guys have a solid software that many of us used when we left Notepad++ and still use.

    Even though, currently, I use it more for note taking and text editing. I really love it. Well done guys!

  • by willidiots on 3/30/23, 3:07 PM

    I always find myself coming back to ST for "powerful text editor" needs. It works, it does what I need. I was able to use it for a long time before paying for it. Not sure why it needs to be explicitly compared to VSCode and treated with the same expectations.

  • by stephc_int13 on 3/30/23, 3:39 PM

    I don't think this is a good idea.

    Sublime Text is already a very good text editor. It could be even better, but I am not convinced than changing its distribution model would change anything at this stage.

    The cost of the license is peanuts compared to the time I spend using it.

    Of course there are many free and good alternatives, but Sublime is just a bit more polished and focused, it is near perfect for my use case.

  • by drcongo on 3/30/23, 3:09 PM

    No. I'm happy paying for the software that I spend most of my time in. The claim in the article that Sublime is "overshadowed" by VSCode simply doesn't ring true to any regular Sublime user, especially if they can type faster than VSCode can render to screen, which is basically everyone.

  • by smaccona on 3/30/23, 8:12 PM

    This article finally made me do today what I've been putting off for no good reason: buy Sublime Text licenses for all our devs that use it. We've been talking about switching to VS Code for ages, and indeed I tried switching myself several times, but always found myself back in Sublime Text for one reason or another. It really is a great editor. My thanks to the (small!) team that develops it!

  • by faefox on 3/30/23, 3:30 PM

    Or -- hear me out -- support the small business trying to make a living selling a good product at a reasonable price rather than insisting it be open-sourced, stripped for parts by the big-tech machine and inevitably left for dead.

  • by 000ooo000 on 3/30/23, 11:13 PM

    Gonna ruffle some feathers here, but I suspect devs who spend more of the time with their hands on the KB and less of the time with their hand on the mouse will always have a place in their toolbox for software like ST. When you are heavily invested in KB-based workflows, e.g. CLI, shortcuts etc, software that doesn't feel slow and shit is a pleasure to use. VSCode is very featured, but it doesn't even approach ST in the 'pleasure to use' category. So is it fair to say that they're for different users and then is it fair to say that ST needing to compete with VSCode isn't accurate?

  • by gaws on 3/30/23, 3:31 PM

    > I had to do some text editing and was in need of a text editor that was better than Notepad, and with muscle memory

    This embarrassing post could've been avoided if he'd use Vim.

  • by haspok on 3/30/23, 3:26 PM

    Wondering if the OP hasn't heard of Notepad++ - if they are using Windows? It has a GPL license and does text editing rather well.

  • by ilrwbwrkhv on 3/30/23, 10:40 PM

    Sublime text is one of the best pieces of software ever written and is regularly updated. Stop being a cheapskate and just pay for it if it is valuable. Making it free and open source is a bizarre thing to ask.

  • by whalesalad on 3/30/23, 3:25 PM

    If you could merge the ecosystem and extensibility of vscode with the editing performance, color rendering etc of subl it would be the perfect editor.

  • by inportb on 3/30/23, 3:23 PM

    What about CudaText? https://cudatext.github.io/

  • by WhereIsTheTruth on 3/30/23, 3:03 PM

    I always find it frustrating having to wait for an update (of an already super slow release schedule) to get a simple bug/usability fix..

    ST uses python, with the boom of AI stuff, i feel like they are missing out.. it should have been a heaven for that crowd.. Blender profits from it quite a lot these days!

    That's unfortunate..

  • by oliwarner on 3/30/23, 6:15 PM

    By that logic, it's well past time to open source Windows, Office and the Adobe Creative Suite.

    I'm trying to read this charitably but that convenience of a small binary is perhaps the sort of USP you're paying for in a $99 text editor.

    Sometimes we can't have the moon on a stick. And that's okay.

  • by gjsman-1000 on 3/30/23, 3:26 PM

    No. The market already has an open-source code editor. If it was great, who needs another? This is more of an indictment of Visual Studio Code being a bloated Electron mess and needing a better open-source project than that, than a request to make Sublime open-source.

  • by alrlroipsp on 3/30/23, 4:00 PM

    Come on, just pay for good software.

  • by thefz on 3/30/23, 5:50 PM

    No! Its authors deserve every penny.

    And Sublime Merge is good, too.

  • by antisthenes on 3/30/23, 6:07 PM

    "It's time to open source this software, because I can't afford $99 the author is asking for it"

  • by chunk_waffle on 3/30/23, 3:01 PM

    The only reason I no longer pay for a license to Sublime Text is that it's not available on my OS. Them either supporting more OSes (a lot of work!) or making it open source would at least cause _me_ to buy a license again.

    They don't even have to make it "open source", keeping a proprietary license such that it's just "source available" would be fine with me too.

    Edit: Hilarious to get down voted for this comment.