We don't, however, make blog posts or tweets saying "we're still working on the next build." However, whenever anyone asks on the forum (twitter, etc) I'll be happy to tell you we are still working on the next build! :-)
Yeah, it's the blog posts/tweets stuff that might be needed.
Because most devs don't bother checking the forums (much less irc).
In fact, and this is 100% true, I just spoke to a guy in the next office asked him enthusiastically "did you get the new ST update?", and he looked at me quizzically: apparently he still uses ST2 (which has bought 2 years ago or so) and didn't even know there was a ST3 out at all.
(which motivated me to post this thread on HN)
I used ST2 for years after everyone else was using ST3, before I realized that ST3 was basically what everyone else is using -- which I mostly only realized as more and more packages were available only for ST3 and not ST2.
I have no idea why the author still calls ST3 beta, but I am curious.
It is however "major" in features.
I don't even really see the problem with the demand for new updates. If ST3 stopped now, it's still got an awesome set of plugins and it will remain an awesome editor.
I had one issue with a recent release, that was answered quickly via the Github and dealt with in a day or so. So I can verify that @wbond is true with what he says.
Why not? I think it would definitely be in ST's best interest to be more engaged with the community. It's only natural for users to worry that ST will go the way of TM, and nipping those concerns in the bud seems to make eminent business sense.
I also understand that time spent convincing people all over the internet that you're still working on the next build may be better spent... well, working on the next build :)! What I had in mind was more along the lines of "what's happening to Sublime Text in the long term", though that may not even be relevant.
I also consider the existence of http://docs.sublimetext.info a bad sign. The way I perceive this: At some point, an enthusiastic user was so fed up with the sub-par documentation that they decided to take matters into their own hands, and create a better documentation. But instead of working with the community, the Sublime project people/person just... did nothing? Was there any communication? I don't know. Why not provide the documentation on github and accept PRs? The Sublime project should push for docs.sublimetext.info to be merged into the official documentation.
Same with https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues. Why is the bug tracker "community run"? What does that even mean, considering the "community" can't fix any bugs? I absolutely cannot understand why the author of the software doesn't seem to participate at all in the bug tracker. Here's a quote from https://github.com/SublimeTextIssues/Core/issues/594 (from 2014, so I don't know whether it is still true) > Unfortunately, the only thing I can say is it'll get fixed if Jon Skinner sees it as a big enough priority. Our intent in creating this unofficial Issues page was to have a curated place where known issues can be collected together and triaged, and he can use it as he sees fit to fix bugs in upcoming releases. Without a more direct feedback mechanism, this is the best we can do, at the moment.
What I'd also like to see is a road map for the future with regular (2-4 weeks) status updates.
Sounds like you want to reward PR over progress and development work. Writing PR and responding to the same questions over and over sucks time away from actual work.
If your point was that they don't respond to questions or are hard to reach, it would make more sense to me, but they seem very responsive.
The trend in software is definitely towards a lot of tooting one's own horn over substance. I don't think that's a good thing that we should be rewarding.
I just exported a text file that looked like this:
Col1 title|Col2 title|Col3 title|...
1||asdf|...
Col1 title: 1
Col2 title:
Col3 title: asdf
...
I'm exactly the opposite. I consider the license as compensation for work already done, I operate under the assumption that the vendor will have made enough to not care to work on it further.
Also packages are well separated from the Sublime releases so even in the case that there isn't another update, the ecosystem is still active. That said, I do wish the internal Python for plugins would receive a version bump though.
Is there a lot that you think ST still needs? As long as bugs are fixed, I'm happy with the functionality of the software today. The software feels done to me.
IMHO, Sublime Text should fight feature creep.
There's an official docs site as well now that's actually pretty good. I haven't referenced the unofficial docs in some time.
> The following pages contain the official documentation for Sublime Text 3. The Sublime Text Unofficial Documentation is an excellent supplementary resource, with a huge amount of information not covered in the official documentation.
I've already bought my ST2 and ST3 licences and honestly just looking for a way to pay more if it would ensure continuity.
With ST we see slow but constant development, personally I don't care if the author is not a Twitter addict.
I think Chrome and Firefox has the right idea, with updates every 6 weeks.
Most commercial desktop software, and even web services like Gmail, go on for years on end without an update.
Browsers are always adding crap (like Firefox's nth cosmetic update), they should be stabler too. Once every 6 months or so at worst.
The approach, in my mind, has had mixed success, but has been a net positive overall. The biggest weakness is that it can be hard to maintain large architectural changes on a branch, which means there's still pressure to ship them in some form. (Though ideally with a configuration option to disable them by default.) Most things aren't like that, though, and for changes with a more controlled scope the six week cadence works very well.
Yes, and I'm saying that's too long. I don't like waiting months or years for fixes or new features.
I also stated that this is my personal opinion. Not sure why people are downvoting.
Sublime seems to have a well-defined aim and to be resistant to feature creep. It's doing a good job of meeting that aim, so I'm happy with it only changing as needed to keep up with like, high DPI monitor support or other things that would actually make it unusable.
I imagine the introduction of something like "Sublime Text distros" in package control, which would provide ST users something akin to the different Eclipse flavors (or the various .vimrc settings available online) could be quite useful. While the package control setup is already pretty straightforward, it is still rather confusing for new users that they have to manually install such a 'basic' feature (and Atom, for example, is much more polished in that regard).
If that confuses you, why bother trying to code at all?
Of course, it's up to the author himself to choose how he communicates, most likely the current method is working out just fine for him :). And the editor works very well, and the updates eventually return. Just saying that some occasional communication regarding the future of the project, or the current development model ("I spend half the year perpetually wasted in Ibiza, radio silence expected"), would be nice!