Sublime Forum

Updates for the stable Sublime Text

#25

Being at the mercy of a Nice-But-Closed-Source editor is a phenomenon that was well established by TextMate.

It’s situations like this that give open source advocates justification to point and laugh.

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#26

[quote=“frou”]Being at the mercy of a Nice-But-Closed-Source editor is a phenomenon that was well established by TextMate.

It’s situations like this that give open source advocates justification to point and laugh.[/quote]

It keeps going on even after it’s been open sourced. They’ve disabled issues on github for textmate 2.

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#27

This is an interesting issue that I run into myself with the packages that I sell. Once you get to the scale the Sublime Text has, there will always be edge cases and systems that things crash weirdly on. At a certain point, you just can’t support everyone. I can even keep up with email support issues for my packages, and I know that a small fraction of ST users use SFTP or SVN. This is hugely magnified with Sublime Text.

There are over 1.3M unique IPs that have performed package install or upgrade operations with Package Control. The most popular package has over 300,000 install operations. Let’s presume 10% of people reinstall. There are probably at least 250k unique Zen Coding users. Not everyone who uses Sublime Text installs Zen Coding. So there are probably at least 400k+ users using Sublime Text.

At this scale, it gets really hard to keep your head above water. Jon has clearly been working on the issue - he’s hired at least two people recently. But hiring good people takes time, and everyone wants their pet issue addresses with the editor. Sometimes those issues are people bending the intended functionality. Sometimes it is because someone has a corrupted library on their machine, or they are running an unstable graphics driver. Or some graphics vendor released a buggy version that interacts with the usage of OpenGL in a weird way. Or people are running in on an operating system that is 12 years old (Windows XP).

So one of the loudest voices in the community is the package maintainers and the users push them for more features. Sublime Text needed a number of architectural changes to fix lots of the issues. ST3 fixed all sort of little things that aren’t worth my time reporting, but were slightly broken. On Arch Linux resizing ST2 could result in small black pixel corruption during the resize operation in the sidebar. Similarly, the empty space on the right edge of the editor when resizing would have a mozaic of colors as it was being re-drawn. These are both fixed in ST3. The Python API was updated to a version that will be supported beyond October of this year. Oh, and he had to wait until Python 3.3 was released or otherwise it would have been much more difficult to get packages working on both ST2 and ST3. Lots of people use SublimeCodeIntel (130k), so people clearly want to be able to have better insight into their code and to jump around it better. To be able to accomplish that, it is likely he had to change some of the architecture of the editor.

So, there are tons of issues going on. As a software author, should he sacrifice what hundreds of thousands of users want and instead spend his time personally responding to every user who is pushing the limits of what Sublime Text can or would do? From a business standpoint, probably not. I know it can be frustrating as an end user. There have been times where it has taken me months to get an email response about questions.

Let’s then take a step back and think about this $70 worth of software ($59 + $15 if you bought ST2 before a month or so ago). Does the software save you the time to be worth $74? Can you get a better editing experience elsewhere for less or more money? My guess is that if you are taking the time to post here, you like Sublime Text 2 and see benefits from it, but obviously it is lacking in a few areas. Are you really upset over paying another $15 (three coffees) for a years worth of updates? Do the economics of the exchange make sense? Have you spent more than $15 of your time posting on this issue about how you don’t want to pay for updates that are clearly fixing bugs?

I am not saying you are wrong to expect support, and I have a strong feeling that Jon (like myself) wants to provide the best support he can. It may just be that Jon is working on trying to scale out his company to provide that, while keeping his head above water and not losing the commercial opportunity he has with Sublime Text. As someone providing support, I know it constantly weighs on me that I can’t provide perfect support and fix the issues everyone has with my open source and commercial software. Unfortunately we are all human and can only accomplish so much.

So yeah, we should have this conversation, but we should also take a hard look at the details of the issues and see if our expectations are reasonable and if our response is reasonable. Does your decision to not use ST3 make sense for you? Probably? Does the decision for Jon to forge ahead with ST3 make sense? Seems like it does. Make this just isn’t the right fit for now. Perhaps when ST3 is more stable and Jon has managed to scale his company out more, it will be a better time and you will feel comfortable with the financial exchange and committing your time and effort with the editor.

I also want to make it clear that I don’t have any insight into Jon’s business, and this is all conjecture on my part. The issue just spoke to me because I feel like I am headed down the same path due to a lack of resources and time. I don’t want to reach the point where most users don’t get email support, but I am still trying to figure out how to do it all. Right now my current course of sleeping 4 hours a night keeping up with my day job, community work and commercial packages is not sustainable. But I will figure it out one way or another. :smile:

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#28

[quote=“davejones”]

[quote=“frou”]Being at the mercy of a Nice-But-Closed-Source editor is a phenomenon that was well established by TextMate.

It’s situations like this that give open source advocates justification to point and laugh.[/quote]

It keeps going on even after it’s been open sourced. They’ve disabled issues on github for textmate 2.[/quote]

I don’t get your point. A venue to plead to be heard is nothing compared to being empowered to make progress yourself.

All I’m saying is that us ST2 owners can be annoyed but we shouldn’t be surprised. There’s tons of precedent for this phenomenon in software, and the balance of power is worth factoring in to all present and future decisions.

0 Likes

#29

[quote=“wbond”]This is an interesting issue that I run into myself with the packages that I sell. Once you get to the scale the Sublime Text has, there will always be edge cases and systems that things crash weirdly on. At a certain point, you just can’t support everyone. I can even keep up with email support issues for my packages, and I know that a small fraction of ST users use SFTP or SVN. This is hugely magnified with Sublime Text.

There are over 1.3M unique IPs that have performed package install or upgrade operations with Package Control. The most popular package has over 300,000 install operations. Let’s presume 10% of people reinstall. There are probably at least 250k unique Zen Coding users. Not everyone who uses Sublime Text installs Zen Coding. So there are probably at least 400k+ users using Sublime Text.

At this scale, it gets really hard to keep your head above water. Jon has clearly been working on the issue - he’s hired at least two people recently. But hiring good people takes time, and everyone wants their pet issue addresses with the editor. Sometimes those issues are people bending the intended functionality. Sometimes it is because someone has a corrupted library on their machine, or they are running an unstable graphics driver. Or some graphics vendor released a buggy version that interacts with the usage of OpenGL in a weird way. Or people are running in on an operating system that is 12 years old (Windows XP).

So one of the loudest voices in the community is the package maintainers and the users push them for more features. Sublime Text needed a number of architectural changes to fix lots of the issues. ST3 fixed all sort of little things that aren’t worth my time reporting, but were slightly broken. On Arch Linux resizing ST2 could result in small black pixel corruption during the resize operation in the sidebar. Similarly, the empty space on the right edge of the editor when resizing would have a mozaic of colors as it was being re-drawn. These are both fixed in ST3. The Python API was updated to a version that will be supported beyond October of this year. Oh, and he had to wait until Python 3.3 was released or otherwise it would have been much more difficult to get packages working on both ST2 and ST3. Lots of people use SublimeCodeIntel (130k), so people clearly want to be able to have better insight into their code and to jump around it better. To be able to accomplish that, it is likely he had to change some of the architecture of the editor.

So, there are tons of issues going on. As a software author, should he sacrifice what hundreds of thousands of users want and instead spend his time personally responding to every user who is pushing the limits of what Sublime Text can or would do? From a business standpoint, probably not. I know it can be frustrating as an end user. There have been times where it has taken me months to get an email response about questions.

Let’s then take a step back and think about this $70 worth of software ($59 + $15 if you bought ST2 before a month or so ago). Does the software save you the time to be worth $74? Can you get a better editing experience elsewhere for less or more money? My guess is that if you are taking the time to post here, you like Sublime Text 2 and see benefits from it, but obviously it is lacking in a few areas. Are you really upset over paying another $15 (three coffees) for a years worth of updates? Do the economics of the exchange make sense? Have you spent more than $15 of your time posting on this issue about how you don’t want to pay for updates that are clearly fixing bugs?

I am not saying you are wrong to expect support, and I have a strong feeling that Jon (like myself) wants to provide the best support he can. It may just be that Jon is working on trying to scale out his company to provide that, while keeping his head above water and not losing the commercial opportunity he has with Sublime Text. As someone providing support, I know it constantly weighs on me that I can’t provide perfect support and fix the issues everyone has with my open source and commercial software. Unfortunately we are all human and can only accomplish so much.

So yeah, we should have this conversation, but we should also take a hard look at the details of the issues and see if our expectations are reasonable and if our response is reasonable. Does your decision to not use ST3 make sense for you? Probably? Does the decision for Jon to forge ahead with ST3 make sense? Seems like it does. Make this just isn’t the right fit for now. Perhaps when ST3 is more stable and Jon has managed to scale his company out more, it will be a better time and you will feel comfortable with the financial exchange and committing your time and effort with the editor.

I also want to make it clear that I don’t have any insight into Jon’s business, and this is all conjecture on my part. The issue just spoke to me because I feel like I am headed down the same path due to a lack of resources and time. I don’t want to reach the point where most users don’t get email support, but I am still trying to figure out how to do it all. Right now my current course of sleeping 4 hours a night keeping up with my day job, community work and commercial packages is not sustainable. But I will figure it out one way or another. :smile:[/quote]

Thank you for the detailed response and for taking the time to write such a reply.

I can certainly understand that a person can’t scale to such a large number of users. Email will kill you one way or another, but the decision to stop updating ST2 isn’t something I agree with. Even if I pay for the ST3 update, I still don’t have an ST version without the bugs of ST2 and without the current bugs of ST3. I don’t want to hope that ST3 will come in and be 100% bug free. That’s because it’s absolutely certain it won’t and those bugs which aren’t fixed when ST3 final is released will only get fixed in ST4 and so on.

Let’s say I’m selling Foo Bar. I’ve sold 1 million copies of Foo Bar. Then people started to report some bugs. I ignore most of these people and go on to build Foo Bar 2.0. Foo Bar 2.0 is the next best thing, better than anything on the planet. BUT, I don’t offer any updates to those 1 million people who’ve bought 1.0. They do run into bugs which they don’t encounter with any other software. I decide to ignore them and just march on with my Foo Bar 2.0.

People will start trying to get in touch with me. “Hey, dude, what’s going on with Foo Bar 1.1 / 1.01? I’m having this problem and it’s totally ruining my day” They have absolutely no idea I’ve sold 1 million copies. I didn’t tell anyone. Every single person waits forever for a reply. They just don’t care about the product any more and start looking for alternatives. People start saying “yeah, forget about Foo Bar, the developer never answers their email and support is NULL”. Then people start talking about how bad I am and that I don’t offer support. It’s enough to have 10000 people annoyed because I didn’t provide them with support in less than 4 months to lose a lot of sales in the future - when people switch, they usually wish you good riddance and never look back.
It wouldn’t be their problem that I’m not capable to hire people to work for me and to provide support and other services. They’ve paid for something and they wish to have bugs fixed. Otherwise we’d all be using disposable phones, computers and all sorts of devices - these are things meant to be maintained and kept around for a while.

Personally, I’m starting to hate ST2 and everything about it. I’ve lost data because it can’t handle a lot of output - it insists on keeping all output data in its buffer. Obviously, this kills it after a while and your processes might crash.
All the problems I’ve run into were variations and combinations of slow unresponsive interface when having a large number of files in the editor, crashes, various errors and many others I’ve forgotten about.

I don’t care about those bloody 15/20/30 USD or whatever. Everybody keeps mentioning the money for the upgrade. The real problem is that the stable version of ST gets NO SUPPORT AT ALL, ZERO, NOTHING.

If I pay right now for ST3 and I get a license for ST2 and ST3, I run into a bug I can always reproduce with the STABLE ST2 and ST3 keeps crashing for me like for others, how exactly does the fact that I’ve paid that amount of money make a difference?
Also, as a paying customer, what else am I getting over the pirate who downloaded ST2 / ST3 beta from somewhere? I’m getting nothing more - I get the exact same software with 0 updates.

So, the problem is the lack of updates. Even if I pay to get the new version, I still don’t get a piece of software without that many bugs right now.

ST3 will suffer the exact same fate as ST2. jps will release ST4 beta in January-February next year and ST3 will be dead forever, just like ST2 is now.

As for the hardware problems you’ve brought up just like other people before, I’ve tested ST2 on many configurations. I’ve tried it out on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. You can bet I’ve had pretty much the exact same problems. It’s quite absurd that 3 operating systems would all have the exact same flaws or that the hardware would be broken to cause the exact same problem only for a single piece of software.

I honestly hope someone will start working on an open source ST alternative. It’s really sad that there’s no good open source alternative and people have to live with BUGS and DEFECTS. Everybody is at the mercy of a single guy who might get bitten by a venomous snake, hit by a bus or slip on his bathroom floor…

[quote=“frou”]

It keeps going on even after it’s been open sourced. They’ve disabled issues on github for textmate 2.
I don’t get your point. A venue to plead to be heard is nothing compared to being empowered to make progress yourself.

All I’m saying is that us ST2 owners can be annoyed but we shouldn’t be surprised. There’s tons of precedent for this phenomenon in software, and the balance of power is worth factoring in to all present and future decisions.[/quote]

I certainly hope an open source alternative comes up. I’d gladly support it financially and in any other possible way.

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#30

I am sorry that you have stabilities issues with st2 davejones.

[quote=“davejones”]As for the hardware problems you’ve brought up just like other people before, I’ve tested ST2 on many configurations. I’ve tried it out on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. You can bet I’ve had pretty much the exact same problems. It’s quite absurd that 3 operating systems would all have the exact same flaws or that the hardware would be broken to cause the exact same problem only for a single piece of software.
[/quote]

On my part, i use st2 since 5 months with about 12 plugins on 3 differents Windows computers and got no real issues and/or crashes so far, so i can’t really complain that st2 is not stable on Windows.

Secondly, the main reason why i bought st2 is to encourage jon great work. So my own opinion is that, i don’t want to be rude but, purchased softwares for hoping they will fix every bugs for everyones is totally absurd and utopic.

Sure, technical supports is sometimes something we really need, but the fact is that, from what i see on this forum, is that only small portion of st2 users seems to have big issues/crashes.

There are already plently of other great editors out there, so i’m sure you will find one that will fit your needs and expectations.

Good luck and sad to see you leaving.

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#31

wbond, Your work is really appreciated. Your work actually make the use of sublimetext more pleasant.

Personally, I don’t mind to actually have ST2 discontinued and everyone has to pay (less if you are on ST2 already) for a ST3 upgrade when ST3 comes out as stable. It will be a lot less headache for plugin writers like wbond, so they only have to maintain one version. I am actually ok to pay something like $19 or $29 YEARLY fee to get the updates. It’s not like I am rich, and obviously, it will be great if it can be free. But, hey, every one gotta live, although the recently price hike does seem a little too high… And I feel nervous about how much the paid upgrade will be. If I got pay another $79 for ST3 from ST2 (I just bought this in last December…) I’ll probably have to ditch ST3 and go back to use different free editors for different languages.

I think “davejones”'s point is valid, but it’s hard to do. Not every software can be maintained like you are supported by a company like Apple or Microsoft, and you are doing a software like the operating system where you constantly provide supports.

[quote=“wbond”]This is an interesting issue that I run into myself with the packages that I sell. Once you get to the scale the Sublime Text has, there will always be edge cases and systems that things crash weirdly on. At a certain point, you just can’t support everyone. I can even keep up with email support issues for my packages, and I know that a small fraction of ST users use SFTP or SVN. This is hugely magnified with Sublime Text.

There are over 1.3M unique IPs that have performed package install or upgrade operations with Package Control. The most popular package has over 300,000 install operations. Let’s presume 10% of people reinstall. There are probably at least 250k unique Zen Coding users. Not everyone who uses Sublime Text installs Zen Coding. So there are probably at least 400k+ users using Sublime Text.

At this scale, it gets really hard to keep your head above water. Jon has clearly been working on the issue - he’s hired at least two people recently. But hiring good people takes time, and everyone wants their pet issue addresses with the editor. Sometimes those issues are people bending the intended functionality. Sometimes it is because someone has a corrupted library on their machine, or they are running an unstable graphics driver. Or some graphics vendor released a buggy version that interacts with the usage of OpenGL in a weird way. Or people are running in on an operating system that is 12 years old (Windows XP).

So one of the loudest voices in the community is the package maintainers and the users push them for more features. Sublime Text needed a number of architectural changes to fix lots of the issues. ST3 fixed all sort of little things that aren’t worth my time reporting, but were slightly broken. On Arch Linux resizing ST2 could result in small black pixel corruption during the resize operation in the sidebar. Similarly, the empty space on the right edge of the editor when resizing would have a mozaic of colors as it was being re-drawn. These are both fixed in ST3. The Python API was updated to a version that will be supported beyond October of this year. Oh, and he had to wait until Python 3.3 was released or otherwise it would have been much more difficult to get packages working on both ST2 and ST3. Lots of people use SublimeCodeIntel (130k), so people clearly want to be able to have better insight into their code and to jump around it better. To be able to accomplish that, it is likely he had to change some of the architecture of the editor.

So, there are tons of issues going on. As a software author, should he sacrifice what hundreds of thousands of users want and instead spend his time personally responding to every user who is pushing the limits of what Sublime Text can or would do? From a business standpoint, probably not. I know it can be frustrating as an end user. There have been times where it has taken me months to get an email response about questions.

Let’s then take a step back and think about this $70 worth of software ($59 + $15 if you bought ST2 before a month or so ago). Does the software save you the time to be worth $74? Can you get a better editing experience elsewhere for less or more money? My guess is that if you are taking the time to post here, you like Sublime Text 2 and see benefits from it, but obviously it is lacking in a few areas. Are you really upset over paying another $15 (three coffees) for a years worth of updates? Do the economics of the exchange make sense? Have you spent more than $15 of your time posting on this issue about how you don’t want to pay for updates that are clearly fixing bugs?

I am not saying you are wrong to expect support, and I have a strong feeling that Jon (like myself) wants to provide the best support he can. It may just be that Jon is working on trying to scale out his company to provide that, while keeping his head above water and not losing the commercial opportunity he has with Sublime Text. As someone providing support, I know it constantly weighs on me that I can’t provide perfect support and fix the issues everyone has with my open source and commercial software. Unfortunately we are all human and can only accomplish so much.

So yeah, we should have this conversation, but we should also take a hard look at the details of the issues and see if our expectations are reasonable and if our response is reasonable. Does your decision to not use ST3 make sense for you? Probably? Does the decision for Jon to forge ahead with ST3 make sense? Seems like it does. Make this just isn’t the right fit for now. Perhaps when ST3 is more stable and Jon has managed to scale his company out more, it will be a better time and you will feel comfortable with the financial exchange and committing your time and effort with the editor.

I also want to make it clear that I don’t have any insight into Jon’s business, and this is all conjecture on my part. The issue just spoke to me because I feel like I am headed down the same path due to a lack of resources and time. I don’t want to reach the point where most users don’t get email support, but I am still trying to figure out how to do it all. Right now my current course of sleeping 4 hours a night keeping up with my day job, community work and commercial packages is not sustainable. But I will figure it out one way or another. :smile:[/quote]

0 Likes

#32

[quote=“bianjiang”]wbond, Your work is really appreciated. Your work actually make the use of sublimetext more pleasant.

Personally, I don’t mind to actually have ST2 discontinued and everyone has to pay (less if you are on ST2 already) for a ST3 upgrade when ST3 comes out as stable. It will be a lot less headache for plugin writers like wbond, so they only have to maintain one version. I am actually ok to pay something like $19 or $29 YEARLY fee to get the updates. It’s not like I am rich, and obviously, it will be great if it can be free. But, hey, every one gotta live, although the recently price hike does seem a little too high… And I feel nervous about how much the paid upgrade will be. If I got pay another $79 for ST3 from ST2 (I just bought this in last December…) I’ll probably have to ditch ST3 and go back to use different free editors for different languages.

I think “davejones”'s point is valid, but it’s hard to do. Not every software can be maintained like you are supported by a company like Apple or Microsoft, and you are doing a software like the operating system where you constantly provide supports.

[quote=“wbond”]This is an interesting issue that I run into myself with the packages that I sell. Once you get to the scale the Sublime Text has, there will always be edge cases and systems that things crash weirdly on. At a certain point, you just can’t support everyone. I can even keep up with email support issues for my packages, and I know that a small fraction of ST users use SFTP or SVN. This is hugely magnified with Sublime Text.

There are over 1.3M unique IPs that have performed package install or upgrade operations with Package Control. The most popular package has over 300,000 install operations. Let’s presume 10% of people reinstall. There are probably at least 250k unique Zen Coding users. Not everyone who uses Sublime Text installs Zen Coding. So there are probably at least 400k+ users using Sublime Text.

At this scale, it gets really hard to keep your head above water. Jon has clearly been working on the issue - he’s hired at least two people recently. But hiring good people takes time, and everyone wants their pet issue addresses with the editor. Sometimes those issues are people bending the intended functionality. Sometimes it is because someone has a corrupted library on their machine, or they are running an unstable graphics driver. Or some graphics vendor released a buggy version that interacts with the usage of OpenGL in a weird way. Or people are running in on an operating system that is 12 years old (Windows XP).

So one of the loudest voices in the community is the package maintainers and the users push them for more features. Sublime Text needed a number of architectural changes to fix lots of the issues. ST3 fixed all sort of little things that aren’t worth my time reporting, but were slightly broken. On Arch Linux resizing ST2 could result in small black pixel corruption during the resize operation in the sidebar. Similarly, the empty space on the right edge of the editor when resizing would have a mozaic of colors as it was being re-drawn. These are both fixed in ST3. The Python API was updated to a version that will be supported beyond October of this year. Oh, and he had to wait until Python 3.3 was released or otherwise it would have been much more difficult to get packages working on both ST2 and ST3. Lots of people use SublimeCodeIntel (130k), so people clearly want to be able to have better insight into their code and to jump around it better. To be able to accomplish that, it is likely he had to change some of the architecture of the editor.

So, there are tons of issues going on. As a software author, should he sacrifice what hundreds of thousands of users want and instead spend his time personally responding to every user who is pushing the limits of what Sublime Text can or would do? From a business standpoint, probably not. I know it can be frustrating as an end user. There have been times where it has taken me months to get an email response about questions.

Let’s then take a step back and think about this $70 worth of software ($59 + $15 if you bought ST2 before a month or so ago). Does the software save you the time to be worth $74? Can you get a better editing experience elsewhere for less or more money? My guess is that if you are taking the time to post here, you like Sublime Text 2 and see benefits from it, but obviously it is lacking in a few areas. Are you really upset over paying another $15 (three coffees) for a years worth of updates? Do the economics of the exchange make sense? Have you spent more than $15 of your time posting on this issue about how you don’t want to pay for updates that are clearly fixing bugs?

I am not saying you are wrong to expect support, and I have a strong feeling that Jon (like myself) wants to provide the best support he can. It may just be that Jon is working on trying to scale out his company to provide that, while keeping his head above water and not losing the commercial opportunity he has with Sublime Text. As someone providing support, I know it constantly weighs on me that I can’t provide perfect support and fix the issues everyone has with my open source and commercial software. Unfortunately we are all human and can only accomplish so much.

So yeah, we should have this conversation, but we should also take a hard look at the details of the issues and see if our expectations are reasonable and if our response is reasonable. Does your decision to not use ST3 make sense for you? Probably? Does the decision for Jon to forge ahead with ST3 make sense? Seems like it does. Make this just isn’t the right fit for now. Perhaps when ST3 is more stable and Jon has managed to scale his company out more, it will be a better time and you will feel comfortable with the financial exchange and committing your time and effort with the editor.

I also want to make it clear that I don’t have any insight into Jon’s business, and this is all conjecture on my part. The issue just spoke to me because I feel like I am headed down the same path due to a lack of resources and time. I don’t want to reach the point where most users don’t get email support, but I am still trying to figure out how to do it all. Right now my current course of sleeping 4 hours a night keeping up with my day job, community work and commercial packages is not sustainable. But I will figure it out one way or another. :smile:[/quote]

[/quote]

Updating your software to provide 2-5 fixes every 2-3 months isn’t a big deal. There are bugs people have reported a few times, but NO UPDATES OF ANY KIND WERE PROVIDED.

Perhaps jps doesn’t have the time to talk to people, but there’s absolutely NO EXCUSE to not provide updated software. I don’t care how busy he is, people have reported bugs on the forum and 0 updates and 0 fixes were given.

Also, being able to get ST3 beta now ISN’T A SOLUTION. As soon as jps says ST3 is out, all the people who are complaining about problems with ST2 will lose the right to use ST3 and they have to pony up money to get bug fixes.

I don’t know about what anybody else thinks, but it’s not so difficult to sue him right now.

This looks like an attempt to make more money after already getting quite some money from an extremely large number of customers. I wonder how many people bought ST2, are having problems with it and didn’t drop by to try to get some support, either from the community or from the man himself?

0 Likes

#33

There are so many alternatives for you to use. If you don’t like the company model or the product, just use one you do like.

There is a FAQ that explains every thing very clear sublimetext.com/sales_faq. We have all purchased things in the past and with certain expectations only to be let down. I have done it with plenty of software. Complained about certain features with other software and never seen them updated. I usually move to an alternative if I feel there is something better out. No one is forcing you to spend money here, if you want a refund, send Jon an email and see what he says.

I personally like sublime text. I read was I was getting before I purchased; and I wasn’t blindsided. I have read how much an upgrade costs and I feel it is reasonable. I have evaluated whether I want to use an alternative at this time, and I have chosen to stick with Sublime Text because it is something I work very well with, and at this time, I like supporting this editor. If I was coming to Sublime Text for the first time, $70 bucks would probably give me some pause, maybe not. I greatly enjoy the plugin system for Sublime Text which gives me fantastic flexibility. To be honest, it is the simple plugin system (which has gotten even better) that has kept me here.

There are others who in some way are trying to emulate Sublime Text like TextAdapt. If you are unhappy with Sublime Text and want a free, open source, multi-platform editor that is trying to emulate Sublime Text, maybe you should try it: Here, foicica.com/textadept/01_Introduction.html.

There is nothing wrong with you expressing your opinion, but you seem very unhappy, why not just move on to something that makes you happy?

0 Likes

#34

[quote=“facelessuser”]There are so many alternatives for you to use. If you don’t like the company model or the product, just use one you do like.

There is a FAQ that explains every thing very clear sublimetext.com/sales_faq. We have all purchased things in the past and with certain expectations only to be let down. I have done it with plenty of software. Complained about certain features with other software and never seen them updated. I usually move to an alternative if I feel there is something better out. No one is forcing you to spend money here, if you want a refund, send Jon an email and see what he says.

I personally like sublime text. I read was I was getting before I purchased; and I wasn’t blindsided. I have read how much an upgrade costs and I feel it is reasonable. I have evaluated whether I want to use an alternative at this time, and I have chosen to stick with Sublime Text because it is something I work very well with, and at this time, I like supporting this editor. If I was coming to Sublime Text for the first time, $70 bucks would probably give me some pause, maybe not. I greatly enjoy the plugin system for Sublime Text which gives me fantastic flexibility. To be honest, it is the simple plugin system (which has gotten even better) that has kept me here.

There are others who in some way are trying to emulate Sublime Text like TextAdapt. If you are unhappy with Sublime Text and want a free, open source, multi-platform editor that is trying to emulate Sublime Text, maybe you should try it: Here, foicica.com/textadept/01_Introduction.html.

There is nothing wrong with you expressing your opinion, but you seem very unhappy, why not just move on to something that makes you happy?[/quote]

The plugin system is also what made me buy ST2 last year. Given that it was in beta at the time, I really had no idea I shouldn’t expect to receive any update at all after the final release is out.
The lack of updates is becoming a serious problem for commercial software.

The amount of effort needed to get some bug fixes to the extremely large number of customers would really build trust and would make a very large number of clients happy - hey, look, this guy didn’t forget about his customers.
Furthermore, given that fixing a bug would fix it for all customers at once, the return on that investment would be quite high.

Also, I can understand that he’s just one individual, but I’ve received much better support from some folks who’ve sold me software for 10-15 USD. It only took one email and my problem was fixed.

TextAdept seems to be a nice editor. I’ll look into it. Thank you for recommending it, I really appreciate it.

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#35

IMO that is not the issue. The issue I have is the lack of communication with regards to any sort of a roadmap and thus I have no idea what to expect. If there was a proper bug tracker where bugs/features are prioritized (by SublimeHQ, not the users), put into milestones and closed as “will not fix” I’d have a much better idea of how my money is invested and my expectations would be managed.

As others have said in other threads the feature delta between ST2 and ST3 is much smaller than it was between ST1 and ST2. Some users chimed in to say that ST2 was in beta a long time with many, many features added after the initial announcement and that the same thing would probably happen with ST3 too. That is just pure speculation.

I’d like to know what exactly can be expected of ST2 and when, what exactly can be expected of ST3 and when, what will not make it for ST3 but absolutely in a future version, what will never be fixed and what is under consideration.

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#36

Don’t understand the total silence from Sublime Text staff on this topic…

Well I suppose that ST2 will not receive any update anymore, but, from a commercially viewpoint, it’s not good to report that officially.

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#37

[quote=“bizoo”]Don’t understand the total silence from Sublime Text staff on this topic…

Well I suppose that ST2 will not receive any update anymore, but, from a commercially viewpoint, it’s not good to report that officially.[/quote]

There is no such thing as the ST staff. There’s just one guy.

Also, I don’t understand either why they’re not offering support. After all, he sold a lot of copies for this editor, so it should make sense to support it.

I don’t know what other people do, but I usually want to keep in touch with my clients to make sure they’re happy and that they keep working with me. So it would make sense for jps to be more responsive and listen to his customers…

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#38

I presume they just don’t care. :smile:

As for the situation itself, davejones is absolutely right. It’s a nonsense that there were no updates for the “stable” branch while it definitely has bugs. When I pay for some software I expect it to be supported. ST2 is not supported at all. The author does not even respond here.

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#39

I think what a people just don’t understand is that (a) sublime is developed by one person who I think now hired two more people and (b) support is incredible time consuming. 90% of bug reports are based on user errors. The original poster, for example, reported a bug about a parsing error as an example and it was pretty clear that the “bug” was either a user error or a bug in a package. Now, you can argue that support means to solve the problems people have. But ST is not able to do that and I really hope will try. Instead, I hope the developers focus on making ST a better text editor, which they are clearly doing!

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#40

The error I’ve posted was meant to be the start of a list of weird and dumb errors ST2 likes to spit out for no reason sometimes… It’s always another file and another thing.

The guy is doing nothing to offer support to the customers, no offense. There are REAL DEFECTS AND REAL BUGS which he’s not fixing and they’re all over these forums. I’ve bought ST2, NOT ST3. I expect to GET SUPPORT FOR ST2, not be told to wait for ST3, nor be told by people on the forum “hey, dude, it’s REALLY cheap, just pay a few bucks when ST3 is out to get the new ST and get rid of the bugs”. I really expect to receive actual SUPPORT from the actual legal entity (firm, company, whatever) which is providing that software.

The fact that he was just a single person isn’t our problem. We’ve paid money for that software and we really deserve support. We don’t have the source code - we can’t fix it ourselves. So we’re left at the mercy of this guy who seems to have vanished or to be ignoring everyone…and I really don’t care what his problem is as long as he all but completely evaporated and then suddenly released ST3 beta.
If he’s just one single person, it’s his problem. I believe he’s sold over 100000 copies of ST2. That means we’re talking about 5900000 USD. I don’t know about you, but with that kind of money I could hire enough people to build a corporation around a product.

Given how much money he’s been paid for the licenses he’s sold, I really don’t think it’s a financial problem. People live off of far smaller amounts of money in this world and he has certainly received a lot of it since he released the ST2 beta. If he’s really earned at least 5 million USD, you could say he may have had 200k-400k USD of debts to pay, 1-2 millions to pay in taxes and so on. He’d still have more than enough to afford himself to hire a team to: a) run a community, b) maintain an issue tracker and get feedback from customers, c) handle some project management tasks and d) answer emails from customers.

So him being just him and 2 guys in his organization is entirely his problem and it’s his concern.

If that’s too difficult for people to understand, please let me know so I can just forget about it.

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#41

I have bought a lot of software in the past with poor (or almost non-existent) support and I didn’t expect Sublime to be better at this point. I’m using Sublime everyday for the last 2 years and didn’t have any serious bug.

I’m sorry if you guys are experiencing so much trouble. As other people said, you can try to get a refund.

Also, there are lots of great alternatives.

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#42

[quote=“davejones”]

The error I’ve posted was meant to be the start of a list of weird and dumb errors ST2 likes to spit out for no reason sometimes… It’s always another file and another thing.

The guy is doing nothing to offer support to the customers, no offense. There are REAL DEFECTS AND REAL BUGS which he’s not fixing and they’re all over these forums. I’ve bought ST2, NOT ST3. I expect to GET SUPPORT FOR ST2, not be told to wait for ST3, nor be told by people on the forum “hey, dude, it’s REALLY cheap, just pay a few bucks when ST3 is out to get the new ST and get rid of the bugs”. I really expect to receive actual SUPPORT from the actual legal entity (firm, company, whatever) which is providing that software.

The fact that he was just a single person isn’t our problem. We’ve paid money for that software and we really deserve support. We don’t have the source code - we can’t fix it ourselves. So we’re left at the mercy of this guy who seems to have vanished or to be ignoring everyone…and I really don’t care what his problem is as long as he all but completely evaporated and then suddenly released ST3 beta.
If he’s just one single person, it’s his problem. I believe he’s sold over 100000 copies of ST2. That means we’re talking about 5900000 USD. I don’t know about you, but with that kind of money I could hire enough people to build a corporation around a product.

Given how much money he’s been paid for the licenses he’s sold, I really don’t think it’s a financial problem. People live off of far smaller amounts of money in this world and he has certainly received a lot of it since he released the ST2 beta. If he’s really earned at least 5 million USD, you could say he may have had 200k-400k USD of debts to pay, 1-2 millions to pay in taxes and so on. He’d still have more than enough to afford himself to hire a team to: a) run a community, b) maintain an issue tracker and get feedback from customers, c) handle some project management tasks and d) answer emails from customers.

So him being just him and 2 guys in his organization is entirely his problem and it’s his concern.

If that’s too difficult for people to understand, please let me know so I can just forget about it.[/quote]

Keep cool please, do not speculate on something that nobody knows.

As a fairly long ST user, I can testify that there’s some kind of support from jps.
In the past during ST2 development and now with ST3 development, reported bugs are often fixed in a very short time, unfortunately often without any kind of feedback in the forum: you have to check the changelog or try yourself the new build to see if your bug is fixed.

I have great respect for jps, he’s brilliant and very efficient. But communication doesn’t look like his strong point.
I’ll not throw the first stone, it’s not mine either.
And everybody know that it’s a very time consuming task, and that must not slow down development of new features too much.

But I think there’s some kind of compromise to find to make everybody happy.
Why not spending at most one hour a day to give some help and feedback to users and eventually fix issues in past version (read ST2).

My 2¢.

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#43

[quote=“weslly”]I have bought a lot of software in the past with poor (or almost non-existent) support and I didn’t expect Sublime to be better at this point. I’m using Sublime everyday for the last 2 years and didn’t have any serious bug.

I’m sorry if you guys are experiencing so much trouble. As other people said, you can try to get a refund.

Also, there are lots of great alternatives.[/quote]

Agreed.

I use ST2 at work for … almost 2 years? It’s been rock solid for at least a year—a little rough in the early stages of beta, but stable for a very long time for me.

At home I’ve been using ST3 which has also been solid (much more so than early ST2 betas) and works with all my essential plugins. And every (minor) bug I’ve reported has been fixed in short order.

That to me is very much worth the $59 I paid in Apr of 2011. I’ve spent thousands of hours using ST2 and love it. Makes coding a joy.

I sympathize with having issues with the stable branch of software you’re purchased, I use other programs with lingering bugs that I run into just about every day (Forklift, I’m looking at you). But it sure doesn’t seem to be the norm with ST2. Definitely not my experience.

Instead of pouring so much anger into the forum, it seems to make more sense to try another editor, another community, see if you can find one that fits better. As with browsers, we live in a golden age. So many great choices!

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#44

Hello, I do support this editor and the developer, but I have some doubts… this is my opinion don’t take it personally.

Does not matter for which languages I use sublime text, IT matter most if the API can work correctly, every function as expected, because this way, we will be able to create and share packages that will “fix” or accommodate, to the infinite different usages(workflows, etc) , that we do when using ST. {2cents}

For example, this API bug is still reproducible in ST3 viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6237&start=0

I can’t believe ST3 added the following, which is already done via the package “Tag”, Instead of putting efforts into fixing API things.

And is not even implemented correctly, for example, look at the ST3 completion:

<mega> <?php $value = '<div>'; echo '<meta src="">'; $end = '</mega>
It should have written there instead of “”.

I want you John please, to think if you are doing good, by adding features that are already implemented by packages, instead of fixing core things. I believe you should concentrate into providing a strong and full featured API. Look at Firefox and chrome, chrome almost stay the same since the beginning, Firefox introduced so many changes, and have broken so many add-ons, that I switched of browser.
The package system and it’s community is not something to subestimate… they add value to your software.

I don’t want to disable things on every update. Today I installed ST3 to give a try, and I noticed I can’t edit the “Preferences.sublime-settings”, I wanted to do a quick hack, I just closed the window and continue to use ST2.

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