Same here, buying an ST license is probably the single best SW-related purchase that I've ever done. ST3 works so flawlessly, it's just ironic that it's still technically a beta version. It is actually much less buggy than many "final version" competitors ;-)

On a side note, it is notable how, despite being a closed-source program, ST was able to generate a large ecosystem of open-source plugins; that is not something that happens every day (Jeskola Buzz comes to mind as a similar case: also closed source and with a large open-source plugins ecosystem, but I'm not sure how many people on HN are familiar with tracker-style music software, LOL).

Even still, TextMate is a substantially more carefully designed tool. My impression is that the Sublime programmer didn’t really understand the underlying philosophy behind many of the features he cloned, and kind of screwed up a bunch of the subtler details. (This isn’t really surprising; I’d say it pretty much always happens when anyone just copies something that exists; they seldom perfectly understand the context or ideas of the original creator, so the copy is always at least a bit degraded/distorted, with less clarity of vision.)

Sublime does have the advantage of working on more platforms though.

Do people still actually use TextMate? Judging by their website [1], for example the screenshots taken under an ancient version of OS X, I thought it'd been abandoned years ago. The last post on the blog is in October 2014.

[1]: https://macromates.com

[2]: http://blog.macromates.com

It's constantly being updated.

Copying or not, "badly designed" or not, in the end Sublime Text is blazing fast even on a big files, extensible with the help of Package Control and has some native features (like multiple cursors) that make the difference.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again – the fact that ST saves buffers no matter what has saved my butt so many times I can't even count. The effort it would've taken to restore the lost data had those buffers not been stored would've costed way more than $70 every time. Even if ST was worse in every possible way than other editors (and it's not,) I'd still pay money for this (and I did.)

I don't know if my license will stop working when ST3 comes out of beta (I think I bought it for ST2, but it was so long ago at this point I don't even know) but if it does I'll happily shell out another $70. ST is one of the few tools I use that never, ever caused me any grief. Not once. It just works, works really well, and does all I need it to do.

I'm hopelessly tied to IntelliJ's amazing IDEs for any sort of programming, but Sublime is my EDIT.COM for all other writing, especially note-keeping. I used it in that capacity for around a year, guiltily enduring the nag-screen, before I got around to buying it. This free-but-nag approach (not Nagware - too negative) was unusual for the times, but it reminded me of the Shareware days when successful software like PKZip spread virally, but extracted commercial value only when the users felt like it.

I think the demise (in terms of active development) of TextMate should not be understated as a factor in ST's success. At the time Sublime Text 2 came out, a lot of TextMate users were frustrated with the lack of progress on TextMate and hopped on the ST bandwagon.

Ironically, ST had the same fate for a while. But it's good to see that there is some movement again.

I bought it on day one when I discovered that Sublime supports Windows, Linux & Mac.

I wanted a "modern editor" after vim, which works the same way across platforms, easy to install and configure, supports proportional fonts and does save on focus lost, yet still neither a memory hog nor a snail.

I never would have paid just for getting rid of the nag screen, but I was so impressed with its quality, I just had to express my gratitude by paying. :)

Also, when Sublime Text has a reasonable amount of popularity within Google, they could just purchase a site license for N users.

It was great when it came out, but now Atom is better.

I've been using the beta of ST2 for years and the dev of ST3 for years after that, and have seen hardly ANY bugs. (on OS X). I use with it SublimeLinter (Python, JS, PHP), a Shell linter plugin, GoSublime, JSONFormatter, Vintageous, and a few other plugins.

>who don't listen to users (I posted a few feature requests in their site and was banned)

Maybe it was the tone that got you banned? The forum is chock-full of feature requests. I've posted some and didn't get banned. Whether they are implemented or not depends on the roadmap and their popularity/feasibility. Obviously not all will be.

>and with a crazy architecture (try and change the highlight colour of brackets in BracketHighlighter and see what I mean).

BracketHighlighter is a third party plugin, so nothing to prove some ST3's supposed "crazy architecture".

>It was great when it came out, but now Atom is better.

Atom was, is, and due to its architecture, will always be, slow. It has been slow every time I've tried it, and it's the common complaint of every Atom user whenever Atom is on HN.

> BracketHighlighter is a third party plugin, so nothing to prove some ST3's supposed "crazy architecture". BracketHighlighter is forced to do things in a certain ways by ST3's crazy architectura.

https://github.com/facelessuser/BracketHighlighter

And is it crazy overall, or just when it comes to handling brackets from a plugin, in which case, it might just be a corner case that was not originally catered for?

Highlight colors should be the responsibility of highlight themes, and users should be able to change them by changing the theme they use or adjusting it to their taste, not by ...hacking into a plugin that hardcodes them.

At best you could argue that the plugin could be allowed to hardcode a color, and themes could optionally override it -- but even that breaks separation of concerns.

Even if it was crazy (which it is not) it's a tiny part of ST (just how the syntax highlighting works), and wouldn't be proof of any general "crazy architecture" of the editor.

However great Atom is though, it's unbelievably slow and nearly unusable because of that. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a better alternative since.

Have you given emacs a shot? While once upon a time it was derided as eight megabytes and constantly swapping, it's extremely fast after forty years of Moore's Law.

It's cross-platform: if you run an OS, odds are emacs runs on it. It runs in both the terminal (convenient for remote sessions) and in the X/Cocoa/Windows GUIs.

It has modes for just about every programming language in use, and then some.

It has a plethora of keybindings for dealing with code semantically, e.g. navigation by expressions or blocks. If you prefer, it also has vi keybindings.

It's extraordinarily extensible, so much so that web browsers (three that I can think of), mail readers, news readers, process browsers and shells have been implemented in it.

Indeed, for many people emacs can become more of an OS than their OS.

It's pretty awesome.

I just recently looked at my old .emacs file to discover that the majority of code in there was to get the features that come out of the box with Atom. Of course Emacs does allow you to configure and program way more than Atom, but the downside is that you have to do it because the defaults come from computer history museum - it's great fun though if you like to learn about the history of the field.

I've been pleasantly surprised just how easy it is to extend Atom. It invites you to configure it, with very approachable docs and built-in tooling, but it doesn't force you to.

>buggy software and the unresponsive devs

I mainly use VS Code for that reason. It does feel a bit more polished and Atom is missing some much requested features, most notably a list of open files in the sidebar (the plugins that offer this are all terrible).

And why should you need that kind of machine to do text-editing?

If a text editor can't open a big file unless you are on a beast of a machine, it isn't a very good text editor.

When you regularly work on such files, Atom is the wrong tool for the job. For regular programming however, I'd argue it's far better than Sublime Text by now.