However, my ST4 license recently expired, and that caused me to look back at the previous 3 years to see what my money was actually buying me, and it turns out it was mostly bugfixes. There have been, rather consistently, 2 releases per year (november and august), and the last major feature was in 2022 with syntax code folding and recent files integration, and those are the only "new features" added since ST4 was released in 2021.
Don't get me wrong, i don't mind paying for software, especially software i use every day, but ST4 more or less feels like it's on the backburner, with nothing much going on, so i let my "subscription" (ST4 licensing is more or less a subscription for 3 years) lapse.
I've instead switched to Zed (zed.dev) as my "main and fast" editor. Yes it has some rough edges, but feature wise it's very much like Sublime Text.
It doesn't support Windows (yet), which is not a problem for me, but i can see how that could be a dealbreaker for some.
Sometimes boring is good, especially for your core toolkit. It can free up your energy to spend it on more interesting things, like actual coding.
I agree, but considering the "editor space" has progressed a lot in the past decade or so, i would hardly call Sublime Text "done".
It has it's strengths and weaknesses, and while it was a great editor 15 years ago, and had it's share of innovative features, things have stagnated quite a bit in recent years. ST4 felt more like a minor update to ST3, and ST3 was probably also just a minor update to ST2 (i forgot which one was the big rewrite, but i think it was ST2).
Compare that to what has been going on with VSCode and Zed in recent years, which far surpass Sublime Text in many ways, and doing it for free.
So, in the end, for me, it turned out to be a subscription based "slightly better than average" editor. Yes, i still love it, and i would love for it to get a revival and spring to life again, and i would switch back in a heartbeat, but sadly the "maintenance mode" has been going on for almost a decade now.
I'm assuming "license expired" means losing just access to newer versions. Which you explicitly said that you don't need.
Why change the tool then?
I'll give zed a look. One thing I miss with ST is remote editing.
Without it, you have to use so much glue for a good experience. So, look at the very popular extensions and see if they can become native.
I posted in the ST forum that achieving a stable configuration of plugins in ST4 seems more difficult than it should be, but they declined to take this on as a problem.
Meanwhile Zed made it pretty easy to achieve a stable set of plugins very quickly, particularly around language services, shell integration, etc. That's what prompted me to switch; however Zed has taken a few steps backwards in that department since they started spinning out language extensions into plugins that require more configuration and are more prone to breaking.
Sublime has become my refuge from the crap that other editors are trying to cram in to every available nook and cranny. Zed was pleasant at first blush, but the way that AI is central to the platform was a huge turn-off and disabling that (and a few other things) was not intuitive. Same goes for many other editors I've tried over the years.
I would like to see more activity in plugin development and maintenance, but always peripheral to the core Sublime experience. Give me a stable, quiet, boring platform and let me choose the features and noise!
I've already ditched Music (macOS: Cog; iOS: Decoupled), I'm holding off upgrading for Photos' sake, Home on macOS is an absolute nightmare, Mail is meh but ok (fingers crossed they won't accidentally break it), and I'm hoping they will never go after Notes - it's central to so many things in my life.
Meanwhile, I'm still using Emacs, because despite its many shortcomings (mostly the legacy architecture), ELisp makes writing simple plugins simple, and the few that I use are too excellent to get me to switch.
And that suits me just fine, gives me more time to code stuff that interests me in my spare time.