The community aspect of ST is a result of the product being somewhat unique in its positioning as commercial product, but also one that is 'free' for use as long as you can put up with the random nag window. The community aspect represents all the people who have never paid a cent for the product finding a different way to give back. Even paying for it costs a fraction of similar commercial software (although this is admittedly a harder argument to make).

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 changed my mind and just bought a license. Bringing multi-cursor editing into the world is easily worth $70 (I think Sublime was the first?). And it's not just Sublime Users that benefited from this.

I just exported a text file that looked like this:

  Col1 title|Col2 title|Col3 title|...
  1||asdf|...

With multi-cursor editing it almost trivial to transform it into this:

  Col1 title: 1
  Col2 title: 
  Col3 title: asdf
  ...

That may be possible in VIM using macros, but would require way more fiddling.

> I consider the license an investment in Sublime's future.

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.

Completely agree. What is there today is well worth the license fee even if there's never another update -- though this isn't one of my concerns as Sublime is so much more usable / lightweight / snappy vs Atom. [For it to be sunset, there would have to be a better alternative out there, and for the general case of multiple languages, I don't believe there is.]

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.

> The time spans between updates, blog posts, or even tweets are simply way too long.

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.

Integrated debugger similar to VSCode.

Sublime Text is just my text editor. If I want an IDE, I use an IDE (Visual Studio and PyCharm).

IMHO, Sublime Text should fight feature creep.

Are you aware that the unofficial docs site was created in 2014?

There's an official docs site as well now that's actually pretty good. I haven't referenced the unofficial docs in some time.

https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/

The official site says at the top

> 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.

Certainly true. My intent was to say that after a year or so of using Sublime the need to consult the unofficial docs was minimal. The unofficial docs are more like training wheels than a necessary reference in my experience.

To take the opposite position: I'd _happily_ pay $100/year to ensure Sublime continues as an ongoing business.

I've already bought my ST2 and ST3 licences and honestly just looking for a way to pay more if it would ensure continuity.