Converting from e

[skaet]

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' (http://www.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:

1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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

[tgkeul]

I'm comming from e, too. I bought a licence for e at the begining of 2008 - and bought a licence for sublime text a year later.
The main reason is, sublime text is reliable. Since I use sublime text it crashed rarely (not more than ten times since I use it - and this were beta releases).
The second was to get rid of cygwin and ruby.

1. To me, the development state is mature. New features are well thought out. Many of them are hidden behind the clean interface. I think its worth the money even if develpment would stop right now. Most of the betas released in between are reliable. If issues are detected, they will be fixed a short time. This is the most valuable difference to e.

2.I use sublime text 20 month now and what I payed is less than 20 glass of beer will cost me. This is low-priced!
Maybe our requirements to an editor differ. I want to do my work, the editor must be reliable and "out of my way". You seem to prefer a lot of releases with new features. But new features bear the risk of unreliablity. As I understand, this is not the sublime way.
I use notepad++ rarely - only if I need to print.

3. Yes, and more as Alexander. Although there are times where Jon is not answering. Hopefully he uses his time to develop and not to answer simple questions. Latter is done by the community.

[guillermooo]

We ex e-users should found a club.

To add to what tgkeul's said, to which I fully subscribe:

1. In my experience, Sublime is very stable and new bugs are squashed quite rapidly.

2. The license is per user, not install; that's quite generous compared to other scheme's out there. Also, the trial period is quite long. The developer might have indeed been on drugs when he made these decisions.

3. The developer has been releasing new versions periodically, so the commitment is there. As for features, personally I'm against of bolting them on in a haphazard way. That's what plugins are for! I'm fine with the core evolving slower in a well thought-out way.

[skaet]

Thanks guys, great responses!

You both mentioned new features and I'm ok with a mature and stable set of core features, and extensibility provided through plugins. New versions don't need to be released every 3 months and add epic new features, but they should provide a substantial difference that assures me the software is continuing to evolve in a direction that benefits users. A paid upgrade especially (such as v1.x -> v2.x) should provide enough changes/fixes/additions to warrant repurchase of a license. This was not the case for e and the reason why I'm here

I'll keep lurking around here and using the trial until it prompts me to purchase before I take the plunge

Edit: I propose the new ex e-users club adopt the tag [EX-E]! ^_^

[n00ge]

Just wanted to chime in... [EX-E]+1. Loving Sublime.

[PinnacleWebDesign]

Another [EX-E]+1 here too

I purchased a license for E in May 2008 and one for Sublime in Dec 2009. I'm glad I did; I find Sublime to be a great application and use it all the time. I've tried loads of different text editors (Ultraedit, EmEditor, Notepad++ etc etc) and Sublime is the one that suits how I work. In fact, this post was written using it in conjunction with the Firefox 'It's All Text' extension!! With regards to the cost of a license, if Sublime increases your productivity then it'll pay for itself in no time.

I was a little disappointed with the lack of communication from Alexander and the fact that longstanding bugs in E never seemed to be fixed, such as problems in editing large files. I'm a big fan of portable apps and run Sublime from my Dropbox but E's reliance on Cygwin means we'd never be likely to see a portable version.

Cheers,
Mick