*.x will appear as [].x for some reason.
[0] (Build 4180, out of date...)
Thanks for the software
I also want to thank you for having such a reasonable licensing model, I'm launching my own desktop app in the next week or so, and I plan to have a very similar model to Sublime (free to use with nags, license is good for any personal usage, inclusive of updates for X period of time).
I've things I'd like to see with sublime:
- I'd like to have all menu entries accessible from command palette.
- I dont use files tabs (always hidden). I'd like to have a special mode that only tracks saved/unsaved status on files, no opened status, or something like auto close on file switch. I've just no use for the opened status, I'm not even sure why it exists besides being a relic of the past (good old) times where "goto file" did not exist.
- I like sublime to be aware of git branches changes, eg having heuristic for auto closing or revert saved files are not present in FS after branch switch. The feature is partially here with the reload suggestion. (this partially overlaps the no-open status)
- Goto default file listing should be last opened file present on fs, and then alnum sorted listing
I suspect there are roadblocks for these suggestions, sorry if I overlooked obvious issues.
As a result, Sublime ist the only commercial (locally installed) software I still use, and it is always open.
There are situations, where I use macros, regex substitutions, or browsing the file system (using the keyboard only for speed) when I prefer to use my other editor, Emacs.
I recently played with Zed, which looks cute, but I immediately lost an important file, so back I was in the Sublime buffer. (Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything.)
I tend to have many Windows open (several dozens), some of them for several years, others for five minutes. The only two features I would like are: - search across all open files and - a list of edit buffers that is itself an editable buffer that you can walk around using cursor key and select a file by hitting RETURN like Emacs has it.
Generally, I prefer that I doesn't become a feature overloaded big monster of a program that can do everything (that's Emacs already, but I like both, I just want them to stay different).
Although for longer-term programming of bigger projects I prefer IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or PyCharm CE, in recent time, I had to write mostly small programs, and both Emacs or Sublime fit that bill (no need for language servers for me for two screens full of a Python script as I also teach that stuff).
My main request is to add a tool similar to Cursor Composer and Chat. Thank you again!
I love ST (my last blog post is https://blog.separateconcerns.com/2025-01-04-teal-lsp-sublim...) and I think the main thing lacking compared to the competition is the remote development experience.
I work in AI so we typically work over SSH on machines with big GPUs. Most of my colleagues use VSCode because it has a very good Remote Development extension.
Zed has an "autosave" setting, it's just off by default.
I think part of it was because it sat between using neovim vs. using vscode, and if I had to reach out for vscode I probably wanted to use remote code editing, code intelligence or AI integration which a default sublime setup wasn't quite offering, and the plugin game seemed stale. Maybe there were also some Wayland issues, don't remember.
Maybe I'll try again and see what you have been up to. Using a proprietary text editor in ${current_year} feels a bit weird though.
I haven't done it in years since with every customer from the last few years the only official way to get to prod is a CI-pipeline, but I think I remember using sfpt or ssh-based file systems even a decade back?
Where Sublime shines for me is opening large files, and opening pretty much any file. So many times MacOS wants me to open a json file in Xcode, or a txt file in TextEdit, when all i want to do is open it in Sublime! And I know that i can open files that are multiple GB without issues, just takes a few seconds :P
And the Ctrl-D shortcut and multi-cursor in general is so neat. I know other editors have it too now, but when I showed my wife how useful it was for simple tasks like formatting a list of emails...she ended up making her company buy her a license and teaching others how to use it.
- Color virtual calls differently from direct calls to tell them at a glance
- Class members in a different color than regular variables
- Arguments in a different color than locals, in a different color than statics
- Consts in red, mutable variables in orange
makes a huge difference in effortlessly reading the code.
It's not supported in Sublime (though you can hack a kludge to make a basic version of it work).
[1] https://gist.github.com/swarn/fb37d9eefe1bc616c2a7e476c0bc03...
I've paid for my licence but is there a tip jar anywhere?
The only reason I moved away from subl is that I got access to a big ass machine and I needed to work remotely. The performance of VS code here is so good that often times I forget that the code and terminal is not my local machine.
All thoughts, meeting notes, journals, blog post drafts... everything is jotted down in ST first. I even went as far as writing my own to-do list syntax highlighter[1] which is the main reason ST is always open, at home and at work, even though I mostly use VSCode and IntelliJ for coding nowadays.
Notepad++ has had that feature (persisting temporary text buffers) before Sublime Text even existed.
Unless, of course, you accidentally press "delete folder" instead of "remove folder from project" in the sidebar context menu.
Edit, I suspect what I wanted was the "after delay" setting here https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#autosave
That said, it seems like in 2025 AD the LSP client should come baked in and integrated, with configurations for how to start individual LSP servers possibly shipping on the side. I liked how the whole Go shebang was accessible in Zed in one click, same in VSCode.
That all said, I still use Sublime Text whenever I can.
* GPU rendering
* Apple & Linux arm64 support
* Tab multi-select
* context-aware auto-complete
* TypeScript, TSX and JSX syntax support
* Much more powerful syntax engine
* Adding python 3.8 for plugins
* Syntax-aware code folding
* Mixed-indentation highlighting ("draw_white_space" setting)
* Kinetic scrolling on Linux
* Preserved undo history
* Change-aware white-space trimming
* Asynchronous file saving
* Find result highlighting in the scroll bar
* Find-in-files filtering by gitignoreI use PlainTasks [0] which is very similar to your plugin but also has a few keyboard shortcuts to toggle the item state. Using this with a watered down GTD setup has really brought a lot of peace in both my personal and professional life.
The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.
Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.
Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?
Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.
1. Solid coding AI integration with frequent improvements. Sublime Text at best gives you an option to plug an LSP with modest capabilities. It's behind the times.
2. Small community, infrequent extension updates.
3. Limited UI capabilities. Extensions have to contort hard to fit into available extension points.
What's your vision of ST future?
I still love sublime text, but there is no way i'm going back to it.
One question: is there going to be another 3.x release? The popup takes you to a 4.x release, which is great if you are on 4.x. If it hit EOL, it makes it easy for us to force the update. Right now, it is in a bit of a weird in between.
I really really appreciate how few regressions, amazing low latency and always refining everything. And I’ve def had positive interactions with everyone who is working on the sublime sublime software since it’s been out. So like 10-15 years ish I’m going to guess without looking stuff up
Regardless of the above experience, Sublime Text is still my daily driver since 2012. Nothing has come close to it.
Great product, thank you for being awesome :-).
I really wish Sublime would develop a more solid plugin system and have some sane built-ins such as a terminal.
It’s all preference. I think it’s insane that people use the terminal in their editors.
ST user who is on it still mostly just by inertia (learning tools is my least favorite part of the job) but really not getting the features I want/need from it. This'll help!
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/choose-an-app-to-op...
(There's also prob some way to do it from terminal, but I do it the above way)
The latest build (4192), says it was released in "2024" when I think you mean to say "2025".
That’s the point behind an IDE - integrated developer environment.
Have you also considered offering ST and SM as a bundle price with a discount? I'd be interested just because of my lopsided use of the two apps.
The only debugger I'm happy with right now (in terms of performance/features) is RemedyBG, but it's windows only and compiled languages only. In general, I mostly live with painfully slow debugging in VSCode.
I would really love to see RemedyBG's dedicated debugging UI/UX approach refined by some group like SublimeHQ. A group who knows how to turn the UX up to 11.
I'm mostly interested in UI so would love to know how is the custom UI code structured?
Would also be very nice if you could talk a bit about interesting text editor programming/challenges you encountered.
Thanks for the product.
If we're doing feature requests: a "recently closed windows" alongside the "recently closed files" would be amazing, for when I misclick and close a window containing a bunch of open files and a folder or two :)
If you're talking about the built-in goto-definition then it's definitely not a tab, it's a popup similar to goto-anything and the command palette. You can type to filter, use the arrow keys, press enter, ctrl+enter for side-by-side, etc.
If you want to use the mouse you can hover over the symbol and get a list of definitions and references.
> it contains usages as well as definitions
That sounds like you've got a syntax that isn't classifying its symbols correctly. I vaguely remember Microsoft's Typescript package doing this. All the built-in syntaxes properly classify definitions so you won't have references show up in that list. It's possibly simply removing a package will fix this for you.
> When you click on a result, it opens the file, but doesn't quite scroll to the definition, although it's in view (but not highlighted! So you have to scan for it again!)
Not scrolling to the definition is odd, it's working fine for me. I agree we could highlight the definition better; by default the line is highlighted though. You can enable line highlighting if that's too subtle.
> The little pseudo terminal that pops up at the bottom when you press ctrl+b (build) is also highly annoying. Why does it not accept keyboard input? I keep having to open a separate terminal where I can compile and test my TUI apps. If I just use ctrlB, then my app hangs waiting for stdin that I can never provide. And that waiting process never gets removed by ST either when I press ctrlB again.
We don't currently have a terminal, but the Terminus plugin is fairly popular if that's what you're looking for.
> Furthermore, ST isn't capable of recognizing my various Makefile build commands. ST only shows make clean and make when I press ctrl shift B.
We generally don't integrate that tightly with build systems; doing so effectively requires a plugin per external build system. Though I don't know if you'd actually want to have all targets listed for Make, since virtually everything is a target (and apparently this wasn't possible until --print-targets was added last year).
> Farthestmost, why does ST not recognize when I'm in a different directory, that it should use a different build system? Why do I have to manually tell it to use python instead of C when I am editing a python file?
If you have the build system set to "Automatic", then ST will automatically pick which ones to make available. For Make it'll check for a Makefile for instance. You can then use Build With… to select the one you want to use. If you've manually picked a different build system then that's what ST will use.
> Ok last one. Setting up a "replace occurances within selection" is highly unintuitive. When you enter the search term, that RESETS your selection. And you have to start over. Ugh. I want to select my search area, then tell it what to look for, then tell it what to replace with, then replace all within that area.
The behavior you want it to have sounds like how I remember it being, but that's clearly not the case; I'll have to look into that, thanks.
For a long time I would get paranoid about accepting Mac updates which would require a reboot because then I'd lose my undo history and then I discovered that this is all I would need to do.
Guake is a great terminal for quick access too.
I have a hot key for opening kitty as well.
Vscode attaching the debugger automatically is a really nice feature, though.
Nothing you couldn’t do with a few shell scripts, but it’s nice that it does it automatically.
Like I said, it’s all personal preference.
I mainly code in neovim, I do a lot of work ssh-ing into other machines (sometimes with multiple hops.)
I live in the terminal and sometimes cat very very large log files and would like an experience that is terminal centric.
It very much surprised me to learn how many devs there are nowadays who aren’t terminal centric (outside of windows land)
Also I use my text editor to edit database records (via a plugin) as well. Editing DB rows in vim is the kind of crazy I like.
Or at least an IDE platform where plugins provide the language integration.
https://github.com/spencerchristensen/sublime-open-in-cursor
It isn't on Package Control yet as I just submitted the PR.
I made this as I love Sublime Text as a text editor and do not want to pollute it with AI garbage. However, there are times where I want to quickly open the same file in Cursor to hash out some their agents. Workflow is:
- lovely text editing in Sublime
- encounter something I would like AI assistance for
- quickly pop open the thing in Cursor and do the AI stuff
- hop back to Sublime to continue my lovely editing
I know all text editors need some degree of config to be comfortable but sublime is nearly immediately usable. Vs code is the only thing I need to configure to remove flair and features vs extend them.
Basically I just feel guilty that I'm not using a "proper" note taking application when so many of them exist.
That was not my experience with sublime because it'd just spontaneously lose a session along with all unsaved data. Some other people would have similar problems too (just look up 'sublime lost session', and apparently people are still having these kinds of problems with them complaining even quite recently).
After I initially switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text, I used Terminus [1], which I used to swear by. But then I made an effort to strip back the amount of plugins I used, and just bound a hotkey to focus my default terminal (Konsole on KDE), and I don't really miss the integrated terminal anymore.
Also, I think you should open-source `minihtml`.
Most of note taking applications I tried attempt to convince all my text is important and must be stored and if possible classified and that's just not how my relationship with physical notes is.
Is it completely removed from Sublime Text?
I love merge, but the simplest controls like stage/unstage/commit/indicate file status seem kind of essential.
Having said that, Merge is far and away the best git UI I've used. It has saved my bacon a few times. I'm not terrible with git in the terminal (I use it there 98% of the time), but sometimes... I really don't want to be doing things without a decent visual representation of the mess and chaos, and intuitive access to the tools available. I get why they wanted to create Merge.
Of course, this is all opinion in a very subjective context. Some people do best-in-class work with terrible tools.
- The ability to scroll or search my clipboard history
- The ability to pin/favorite individual entries, which would then show up in the pinned/favorited tab
That thing was practically my extra brain before the database corrupted itself... (that threw me so off that I don't even remember anymore most of the time from back when I had it.)
- revamped project system so i don't have to store extra files in my root directory, there is a plugin for it, but this should be working out of the box imo
- drag&drop panels to create layout with the mouse
- tabs in output/temporary panels
- UI API for status panel, side panel and in the views
- a proper built-in terminal, i know there is Terminus, but color support is lacking, tabs support is lacking, doesn't work well with tmux, overall it's very janky (wrt to scrolling)
- sticky scrolling (the thing that pins the scope name) or - the thingy that says where in the code we are, i forgot how it's called: [MyStruct > my_function]
I'd be willing to pay extra for a proper terminal for ST
There are two pieces of software I would love you to implement, and I would buy both:
1. Spreadsheet App 2. An AI aware editor like Cursor that uses DeepSeek or equivalent. You could sell a subscription to it like Cursor also.
I think you could make both of these sing.
Some notetaking app would be amazing
Maybe I should consider using their IDEs.
> Personal licenses are a once off purchase, and come with 3 years of updates. After 3 years, an upgrade will be required to receive further updates.[0]
Tbh I think this is fair, but it surprises me every 3 years when I have to pay up again xD
You must be a remarkable person and I wish you nothing but success.
AI is Rashomon. It's just an association engine of immense scope. We're not talking to an alien intelligence; we're talking to ourselves. It's an existential mirror, and each person's experience will vary. Some people can control the dance of the campfire flames. Some people just aren't cut out to be shamans.
Evolution is always making failed experiments, as a hedge against catastrophic ecosystem change. I'm convinced that neurodivergents are better suited to becoming AI Centaurs, in the sense Gary Kasparov promoted after he came to terms with his chess loss to IBM's Big Blue.
I made my career by computerizing a branch of mathematics that did not want to cooperate. Now in retirement, I see AI as the key to achieving my dreams before my father's dementia arrives. It has radically transformed my past month.
My preferred language is Lean 4, and AI has as hard a time coding in it as people. This morning's retooling has been distilling the Lean 4 website down to fit well within a 200K token context window. I prefer AI chat at arms length so I make the mistakes not it, but with enough editor integration that we can both see what we're doing.
I loved Sublime Text when I used it. And AI coding doesn't primarily accelerate one's original spec, it encourages tool scopes one might never have dared attempt. So writing a Sublime Text plugin that interfaces with an Anthropic API key is something any of us could probably knock off.
I don't have the resources, so please add support for the ACPUL programming language. If Sublime had a good debugger, it would be even more powerful.
For Linux and macOS, you can mount ssh directly.
Unfortunatley, Windows makes it a little more complicated.
But there's hope. You can use yasfw with dokany (dokan fork).
https://github.com/DDoSolitary/yasfw
https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
Or mount from inside WSL.
Today when I tried goto-definition, it worked as expected. I'm not sure why it didn't before. This was for a C project. I do have various Package Control packages installed:
"Golang Build",
"Package Control",
"PackageResourceViewer",
"SublimeLinter",
"SublimeLinter-clang",
"Theme - One",
What I meant by "terminal" is the output monitoring pane. Whenever I build "C - single file" or "Python - single file", a pane with <textarea> behavior appears in the bottom, showing the program output. But if said program is interactive, there's no way to send it any input. Nor to stop the program. Building it again leads to a new instance of the program being spawned, but the old one stays running.
It's one of my favorite piece of software. Obsidian being another one.
Firstly, thanks for using it and supporting us!
If you haven't already, it would help immensely to get a bug report here: https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_merge/issues/new/choose
I'll definitely look into this further and get it sorted
1. There are several plugins that allow AI integration 2. There is an active community on https://discord.sublimetext.io
3. From what I can perceive based on Sublime HQ's responses, it's main focus for Sublime Text is simplicity and to be a text editor. You can notice this if you look at the banner text in the website; it says "Text Editing, Done Right". And while it is mainly used for code and most of its users are developers, it tries not to be. However, it does provide people the ability to extend it however they please.
Overall, Sublime Text is indeed not as fully featured as VSCode because it is not supposed to.
You can see the feature under "Find > Find in Files" You can see the "navigation" under "Find > Find Results"
For more help, head over to https://discord.sublimetext.io (and tag me, I'll reply when I can)
It could both be an indicator of what the community is doing, and who your users are, and also a way to promote some new features people might have missed (like the survey "state of CSS").
I enjoy both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge almost everyday, thank you very much for making them!
Some annoyances, though:
- the way plugins are displayed inside ST while browsing for them is limited. Other editors usually provide a much better UI. The web version of package control is required in the end.
- Ctrl-P does not the same thing in ST and SM, and it always tricks me. I wished they would be more aligned by default, but that ship has sailed I guess. I should rebind them.
- SM UI can be slow / be unresponsive for a while like when a tool has run and 20k files were created but not part of git ignore yet. It makes deleting them quite difficult from the UI.
- I wish SM would allow me to pick up patch files from the diff UI and import them from there more easily.
- I wish Mac OS dictation would be more native in SM, and allow me to change language like in other Mac OS apps.
And the solution to getting it synced is to back up your computer, which you should definitely be doing.
Of course not. I was just describing 2 different levels of coolness.
Which plugin do you use for DBs?
But thank you for replying. I’ll hop into Discord eventually.
More broadly, though, I don't know that I consider whole-system backups as important as I might have once. All my local important docs are in Dropbox, and all the code I'm working on is regularly synced out to git hosts. Other than some unimportant Fusion/Bambu projects, most of what I'd lose is honestly that same kind of ephemeral context that unsaved Notepad++ files are: terminal history, browser bar completions, my downloads folder, etc.
I’m a hobbyist programmer but make my living as a doctor and use Sublime to write medical reports. It’s just so damn good for manipulating/shaping/crafting text.
Do you know how the LLM integration is? I heard it’s terrible, but that isn’t a deal breaker.
2. How are you able to maintain stability of the application? Do you have an extensive test suite? What QA do you have in place?
2a. How do you ensure that there is no regression in editor performance?
3. Sublime text is almost 2 decades old. How has the code based evolved since then? Does it have a lot of technical debt, or has the core of the editor aged well and remains relatively unchanged?