I agree with SteveCooperOrg. Jon has the freedom to concentrate developement using the operating system of his choice.
After years of programming in Unix and now randomly using Linux I prefer ST in Windows as my main editor. I imagine a Linux port of ST will not feel as good to my fingertips as the origin does.
I understood Sublime Text 2.0 for windows to also count. I think you get all the V.1* and V1 betas, but if Jon moves up and does a major update, then you need to pay to move to V2.
If thatās the case, Jonās resale turnover is based on a user making a decision, every 12 months: would they like to move up one version (say, V1.2 to V2.0)? If, after a year there is no version 2.0, Jon gets no money from resales. Now, if Jon makes ST1.2 for Linux, As a windows user, I wonāt even have the opportunity to buy V2.0 for windows, because it wonāt be there to buy; or if it is, it wonāt have enough new stuff to be tempting. So Jon wonāt get my money, because thereās nothing for me to buy.
This is why I canāt agree with a sideways move ā one that doesnāt push towards 2.0. It doesnāt benefit any of his existing customers, or most of his potential customers. Until Jonās saturated the Windows market (which heās nowhere near doing) I think itās better to concentrate on the one market.
I did my best not to introduce any kind of religious dogma into my argument. My problem isnāt with the linux platform. My problem is in wondering how Jonās time could possibly be used like this and not impact heavily on his current market. And selfishly, on my favourite text editor.
Jonās in a sweet spot in Windows; ST is the prettiest editor on the platform. Itās also extremely extensible. It appeals to a whole class of developers. I think itās ready for the big time, and he only needs to crack one market to do very well. Of course, thereās stuff missing; people are evaulating ST right now and holding off buying it for that reason. If jon develops more features, more users cross over that threshold and choose to buy. But as I said at the start of my first post; this isnāt a feature. If jon works on it, STās feature set stays static. While itās static, those people out there evaluating ST are going to find that the product has halted, and not buy. Equally, Jon gets no closer to his V2.0 and to new licence income from existing customers.
A question is, how long would a port like this take? My intuition says that itās a great deal of work. Almost the entire core of ST would need to be rewritten. AFAIK, ST is a pure Windows beast; built on MFC and DirectX and targetted at file systems like NTFS. My guess is, itād take about a year to port everything to one platform.
So, if Iām right, ST would get no new features for about a year. Thatās a year of reduced income, and a year in which competitors like āeā and textmate make advances while ST stays still. In my book, thatās a bad idea.
[quote=āsublimatorā]
Seriously? Puh-lease.[/quote]
I said this because Iāve had my fair share of problems with scripts and packages that could easily have worked on windows, but contained little assumptions of linux. Just little things, like perl scripts assuming I had a HOME directory. Things that make the script fail.
Assumptions work both ways, of course; assuming that āā is the directory separator, or that there will be a registry, or that symbolic links exist, or that your āalt-xā keybinding will work when you donāt have an āaltā key.
However, it happens, it happens all the time, and it means that there will be addins that just donāt work on your chosen platform.
I agree. How will a linux version not hinder Jonās effort to get these things in place?
Itās enough that almost no-one does it. If it were cheap, TextMate would be available on Windows, and Photoshop on Linux.
Those products that do tend to build, not on Windows or Linux, but on another platfrom like the JVM or Mozillaās XUL. ST isnāt a java product, so porting is just going to be hard. Porting MFC to Cocoa, or MFC to Gnome, is expensive and hard.
Thereās a nice article in Joel Spolskyās āBest Software Writingā book, on the cost of porting Word 6.0 from Windows to Mac. It gives a bit on insight into the cost of moving pure windows app to pure mac apps. Have a read. Itās almost directly applicable to this situation, and tellingly, itās an article that starts āMom always said, āthe best thing about beating your head against the wall is that it feels good when you stopāā
Nick, youāre not addressing the important parts of the argument. Youāre picking short, trivial phrases out of long posts and ignoring the big objections;
If cross-platform development were profitable for small companies, ISVs producing mac software would also produce for windows, and they arenāt. See textmate, omnifocus, scrivener, tinderbox.
Each new platform slows down all feature development ad infinitum, and immediately halts production of features for current customers.
It will hurt STās financials. There are startup costs ($1500 for mac development.) There are short- and medium-term costs as fewer customers buy or upgrade as fewer features appear. Lastly, the long-term benefits are unclear; there is little reason to suppose that serving new, small markets (mac and Linux) would be a better strategy than addressing the large, underexploited Windows market.
Thatās the core of my argument. Iām happy (really) to be proved wrong on any of these points, to hear counter-evidence and solid arguments. If there are small companies out there doing well straddling over three platforms, thatās counter-evidence. If thereās reason to suppose that Jon has maxed out the windows market, Iād love to hear it. If it can be shown that mac or linux users are much more generous when it comes to buying software, thatās good evidence, too.
Not to inflate the price of sublime or anything. But I would pay for two licenses if it meant I had subby on both windows and linux. Besides, Currently I do about 90% of development on linux so having sublime run on linux would be huge for me.
p.s.
the only competing product (as far as I can tell) would be slickedit.
I got meself a mac recently and like it pretty well, but I seriously mourn the loss of Sublime. Thereās simply no 1:1 replacement for it on OSX. Port it to mac and Iāll throw some more money at you
[quote=āIncendiumā]Sublime works pretty well with Crossover (commercial version of wine), might try giving it a shot if you are dying to have it back.
I use Crossover Linux + Sublime at work and it works great aside from having to reload the program on config changes, but that is just a minor quirk.[/quote]
Oh, excellent! Iāll do that until thereās an official version cough
The project management for starters. Since I work in Symfony (and Apostrophe Now) projects a lot, itās very handy to have the project consist of a bunch of files matching a certain criterion. Furthermore, the search and replace is a time saver, for sure. Other than that, the general keyboard centric behaviour is very ergonomic in the long run (albeit with a learning curve, as Iām sure you are aware).
Iām using Espresso right now (on the Mac). Itās quite good, but still feels sort of like driving around in a Ford Escort when you have a Tesla at home in the garage.
Its almost disturbing to hear people talk about how companies dont do cross-platform, i can think of alot of cross platform applications in the commercial enviroment.
just about all of AutoDeskās software. not to mention even Valve is going to linux to expand there client tell. Not to start a flame war,
but when it comes to developers not all of us use windows.
I currently use Sublime for part of my development due to one of the two machines i use is Windows but my main development is on Linux systems.
Only have Linux servers so it makes sense to use the same platform as my deployment enviroment. I would pay extra to get a better editor in Linux
the closest application i can compare it to is VIM in console
Just following up. Sublime Text X (cross-platform Sublime) is available to all registered user in supoer-alpha format at: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1336&start=0
Pretty minimal so far, but DEFINITELY alive and on its wayā¦
All I have to say isā¦THANK YOU JON! Iāve been using Sublime X for a couple of days now, and am using it for most of my editing on both Ubuntu and OSX. Iām looking forward to seeing sublime rapidly becoming the most used text editor out there!
Best of luckā¦youāve got a tremendous opportunity here, and tremendous software to back it up!
EDIT: Just want to mention since it was not clear in the post, that Sublime X is still in alpha, and doesnāt have full feature parity with Sublime proper atm. That said its very stable and currently rocks!