Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses

[EJ12N]

Sublime is *great*, pretty much rock solid, almost never crashes and the times it does ( usually while developing a dodgy plugin *cough* ) you are extremely unlikely to actually have lost anything thanks to sessions and auto-saving. Superlatives! Etc etc. I could go on but you get the point and it would be preaching to the choir.

However, it doesn't seem to have as many users as it deserves. How did an editor like TextMate explode in popularity? Right place, right time? At one point I did some reading about the history of TextMate and I got the impression that, as well as being a nifty little editor, at the time there were many users with no `home`. Lot's of little niches for TextMate to flow into.

Where are the users with no `home` on windows? What's the right place at this time?

Users of CJK fonts seem to be having a rough time of it. That seems like an untapped well worth targeting.

Users will come no worries, they will then wonder why in hell they didn't find sublime before

[SteveCooperOrg]

However, it doesn't seem to have as many users as it deserves.

Odd, isn't it? I'm not sure why more people aren't picking up on it. It does deserve it. I've always searched around for new text editors, but I've stuck with Sublime since I found it. It seems to me that it may be a marketing thing - just getting uder enough noses.

It may be that the 1.2 release is a good pause point for new features, and the right time for a bit of promotion. How, I dunno.

[jhawk28]

Cost, marketing, and general ignorance.

Cost:
59 is a bit much for a year's worth of upgrades on a text editor. Granted, it is good but TM is only $56 with a promise to 2.0 upgrade. TM2 is supposed to solve world hunger so it should be worth it Until recently, TM had all the bundles exclusively which adds a certain amount of value. With the recent version of Sublime, this is not so much a difference.

Marketing:
TM gets a lot of free advertising from the Rails 15min demo. People see it and it sells Rails just as much as it sells TM. Get a popular video showing off a cool new framework with Sublime. Everyone that sees it will ask what that cool looking editor was. Upvoting sublime in places where devs read are good places. For example, why are there only 1 votes for sublime: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14155/text-editors

General Ignorance:
Most software engineers I know still use Notepad. They are not interested in becoming more productive, just getting the job done. If they really cared, they probably would not be working on Windows.

Just my 2 cents.

[SteveCooperOrg]

Sublime's release has just appeared on the front page of Hacker news -- pop over there and upvote it, and leave a nice comment.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=669567

[SteveCooperOrg]

TM gets a lot of free advertising from the Rails 15min demo. People see it and it sells Rails just as much as it sells TM. Get a popular video showing off a cool new framework with Sublime. Everyone that sees it will ask what that cool looking editor was.

That would be very sweet, yeah. Possibly something new and buzzy, like an AJAX library. Something like a series of 'how-to' videos on jQuery. The benefits there are that the kind of people who use jQuery are likely to be aethetically-sensitive, and so interested in the user experience of a pretty editor like ST.

[jps]

59 is a bit much for a year's worth of upgrades on a text editor.

To be honest, I don't feel this is an issue. Firstly, the years worth of upgrades is a minimum, to ensure that in the face of a paid 2.x version, everyone who purchased in the past year gets a free upgrade. In practise, upgrades have been, and will continue to be free. I do not foresee any paid upgrades at this point in time. Secondly, Sublime Text has a fully functional, un-timed demonstration version. I would hope price isn't a barrier preventing people from using the editor.

[jps]

Buy page has been updated to make the free upgrades more explicit.

[EJ12N]

>>> *un-timed* demonstration version.

So some one could in effect demo the software for `60 days` ( or longer) with full function? When I got my first versions it used to nag the crap out of me LOL

I think how the `one years upgrades` works really needs to be made clearer on the `Buy` page. I was always under the impression that for 60 bucks you got a years upgrades. I was actually wondering about this the other day as I realized I have been using Sublime for almost 18 months and my license hasn't expired.

It would be much better restated somehow to make it clear that upgrades to the same major version are free into perpetuity.

Yes you can use it more than 60 days and is fully functional. I love that because it doesn't force you to buy it yet you can still use it to its full potential. I think this is a good move, eventually potential customers would buy it, people that just want the editor (and has no intention of buying) would still use it but they don't feel the need to either buy or "find a cracked" version of it... win, win situation.

Shame I haven't bought mine yet but I will VERY soon!
I think the price is very suitable and fair, granted textmate is 3 bucks cheaper, but guess what? textmate doesn't work on windows (and never will according to the author)

P.S. The only nag you get is the message telling you to register (when you save *NOT ALWAYS*) and the message comes once in a blue moon lol, I still haven't count it to see if it's random or not, but I know it doesn't bug me at all. It would be annoying if it would be there *every* time you save, but is not.

[SteveCooperOrg]

Just found an interesting video that might serve as a useful example of a Sublime Text demo video. It is the video in which Microsoft demo the changes going in to Visual Studio 2010 to make for faster HTML editing.

https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/timeline.aspx, click 'asp.net', then video number PC33. At 24 minutes in, the presenter demonstrates how much faster it is to develop html with snippets over hand-typing.

It reminds me very much of the screencasts we've been seeing for Sublime Text. I think these videos serve as excellent demonstrations of what Sublime will do for you.