Sublime Forum

Updates for the stable Sublime Text

#10

Perhaps that’s the case, but it still doesn’t change the fact that ST2 hasn’t received an update for a very long time. It’ll be 12 months since the last update in a few months. The fact that he was releasing new builds quickly is indeed admirable, but that’s needed when building a new version of a piece of software.

It wouldn’t be such a big deal to release an update every 2-3 months to fix a few bugs. Some people have already said they wouldn’t buy ST3 and any future version because he’s not supporting the stable version - AT ALL.
I don’t know what other people expect from what they pay for, but I expect to have bugs fixed in the current stable version of a piece of software, not in the version to be released 3 years from now after paying for 3 more upgrades. Then I have to pay for 3 more years to get rid of the bugs introduced in those versions and so on. The problem wouldn’t be the money, but the time. Otherwise we’d all write our own ST like editors.

At the time when I’ve bought ST2, it was in BETA and I really thought some of the bugs would be fixed. Instead, they never got fixed. I’ve got it to crash on me a couple of times without any kind of explanation. I get messages that a plugin took too long to execute from time to time, even though this problem wasn’t occurring in a previous beta for me.

I’ve gone through the plugins and the set of enabled plugins didn’t seem to make a difference.

0 Likes

#11

While I think you’re right to be upset that the stable branch of ST2 hasn’t been updated in quite a while, and that Jon might not be the most responsive developer in the world, if you’ve purchased a copy of ST2, why not try out the latest dev or nightly build? In my experience, both branches have been rock solid (I run exclusively nightly builds of ST2 and I’ve never had an issue), and while Jon was working on ST2, the nightly branch received bug fixes every few days. If you’re willing to give it a try, ST3 also gets updates very few days, and for now, your ST2 license will work. Just a suggestion. :smile:

0 Likes

#12

No, thank you, I don’t wish to run into the same bugs everyone is running into. I don’t want to repeat the experience I’ve had and I’m still having with ST2.
I wish to receive updates after the BETA is done and I’m not looking to trade the problems I’m having with ST2 for problems I’d have with ST3.

Furthermore, I have a very small number of plugins, but I really need those plugins, so I won’t be giving up on ST2 to switch to the extremely unstable and buggy ST3.

0 Likes

#13

While ST3 beta has been stable for me, I agree that the lack of updates for ST2 is hugely disappointing, especially as ST2 was crashing on me several times a day (not due to plugins) and there was a period of ~6 months where pretty much nothing at all was communicated to users reporting problems. This is making me doubt whether I should pay for the ST3 upgrade when it’s finally released.

0 Likes

#14

Agree.

It was the same with the transition from ST1 to ST2, but ST2 was so much better and as I didn’t invest too much time in configuring ST1, I didn’t think twice before using ST2 Beta and forgot ST1.

Today it’s different.

Even if ST3 has some nice features, I don’t feel in urge to start using it.
I spend a lot of time configuring ST2, and I don’t want to do it again before a stable release of ST3 with all my needed plugins available.

There’s few bugs in ST2 (some are resolved in ST3) that I like to see fixed.
And maybe a few things could be done to facilitate the compatibility of plugins between ST2 and ST3 (like automatically calling plugin_loaded() in ST2).
But it looks like ST2 development is dead.

I really expect an answer from jps too.

0 Likes

#15

[quote=“bizoo”]

Agree.

It was the same with the transition from ST1 to ST2, but ST2 was so much better and as I didn’t invest too much time in configuring ST1, I didn’t think twice before using ST2 Beta and forgot ST1.

Today it’s different.

Even if ST3 has some nice features, I don’t feel in urge to start using it.
I spend a lot of time configuring ST2, and I don’t want to do it again before a stable release of ST3 with all my needed plugins available.

There’s few bugs in ST2 (some are resolved in ST3) that I like to see fixed.
And maybe a few things could be done to facilitate the compatibility of plugins between ST2 and ST3 (like automatically calling plugin_loaded() in ST2).
But it looks like ST2 development is dead.

I really expect an answer from jps too.[/quote]

I have started to add images of errors to my original post. Perhaps this will help get some attention.

0 Likes

#16

And how it’s ST fault that you are using invalid config files? (on a package that it’s not even built in into ST!)

0 Likes

#17

I didn’t add anything to the configuration of that package… the eror doesn’t even show up all the time…even though I used the package all the time…

I see that you’re a hardcore fan of ST2. Perhaps you could ignore this thread so you don’t get offended.

Oh, yeah, without those few basic packages, using this editor isn’t really worth the effort, nor the money.

0 Likes

#18

It seems that you mix packages support with the editor support. While first are community packages (which, btw, you can contribute to!), the second has fairly good support (most real bug reports has replies and fixes)

There are some stuff that i consider annoying (like lack of tooltips, sidebar customization, code folding based on indentation only and so on), but bugs on the editor itself? Not that much.

Out of curiosity: name few bugs of the editor.

0 Likes

#19

[quote=“iamntz”]

It seems that you mix packages support with the editor support. While first are community packages (which, btw, you can contribute to!), the second has fairly good support (most real bug reports has replies and fixes)

There are some stuff that i consider annoying (like lack of tooltips, sidebar customization, code folding based on indentation only and so on), but bugs on the editor itself? Not that much.

Out of curiosity: name few bugs of the editor.[/quote]

I’m not confusing anything with anything else. I get this error from time to time and it’s completely random. I’ve edited sass files for hours and never got this error. However, it simply pops up after running ST2 for some hours.

It’s not possible for bugs to have been fixed in ST2 since there haven’t been any updates to the stable version since last year.

Furthermore, I will take screenshots for each and every error from now on, so you’ll probably get to see those bugs you’ve asked for.

I encourage everyone else who’s running into bugs in ST2 to post in this thread. Maybe people will understand this thing REALLY needs some support from the developer.

0 Likes

#20

Why don’t you just delete that file?

0 Likes

#21

I think @iamntz is right. I think think your config file error is specific to your system (you’ve got some flaky plugin or you need to revert to clean install).

0 Likes

#22

I don’t consider 6 months of silence as good support.

Crashes/freezes:



Usability issues:
sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/8 … -be-wider/


0 Likes

#23

Oh, and github.com/sublimehq/Vintage/issues

0 Likes

#24

I think it’s pretty safe to say you’re not going to see any updates for the “Stable Sublime Text”.

It’s true, as someone else pointed out, that the labeling of beta and stable for the product has been unfortunate. Since the beta period for 2 was so long, it was like having a stable version that had very frequent updates despite the beta label.

My guess would be there are some things that weren’t working as they should (although I have never run into any serious bugs with 2 personally) and to improve the product the developer figured that a major update was the way to go, hence the 3 beta. Sometimes that’s what’s needed to fix things. I have NO way of knowing of course, just a guess.

So instead of the continuous outrage over the lack of updates for 2 (which I would guess are not forthcoming) either deal with it or write to the developer for a refund if you’re so unhappy with the product.

FWIW, I have been using 3 since it came out and have only run into a handful of crashes. I have more crashes in Dreamweaver.

0 Likes

#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.

0 Likes

#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.

0 Likes

#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:

0 Likes

#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.

0 Likes