Greetings from Australia!
I am in the process of trying to find a new editor to call home and currently trialling Sublime. I have been using ‘e’ (e-texteditor.com) for the last 2 years and the rate of development has been disappointing. I understand that e is developed by only one man with real life commitments, and this appears to be the same for Sublime. However there had been no active development on e since the start of 2010 with very little news, when suddenly v2 was released without warning. The features of v2 left many feeling unsatisfied (myself included) as a number of bugs were left unresolved, and early purchasers (like myself) were told to pay additional fees to continue using what amounted to a minor feature version (along with a 30% increase in the base price of the license!). Amusingly, there is a bug in v2 which gave me over 10 million trial days remaining
I’ve looked through Sublime’s development history and can see that there is a similar theme of long periods of time between releases. My main issue with the direction of e was that with such little progress in development, almost no developer presence on the forums with news or support, and an apparent disconnection between feature-focus, bug fixes, and user-desires.
What I’d like to know is:
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What is the current state of development of Sublime and is a license going to be worth purchasing - can I expect one or two significant releases every year, with bug fix/tweak/polish minor point releases in between? I need to feel comfortable that my investment will be rewarding, without being told to repurchase if v1.5 is released more than a year after v1.4
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Why such an inflated cost for a license (compared to other editors) when there are significant periods of time between releases, and free options which are (almost) as good like Notepad++. How does the current release schedule justify the price? What do license fees go to? I understand this may be a sensitive topic but it’s important to distinguish from arbitrary prices used to fuel a coke habit. Not saying this is the case, just using an extreme example.
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Is the developer actively engaged in his community and project? Is he accountable for the product he expects us to pay for? I don’t want to support something that is left to stagnate and eventually alienate users.
Sublime is a very attractive and promising product that I would like to support. I hope I like what I see here and can be a constructive member of the community.
skt