Sublime Text 3 Public Beta
I use Sublime Text every day. I love it. I paid for it. I even develop plugins for it.[1] But I don't recommend it to peers. Why? Because Sublime Text has a low bus factor.[2]<p>6 years ago, I bought TextMate. Like Sublime Text, I enjoyed using it. Sadly, TextMate became abandonware. The sole developer suffered burnout. Bugs were never fixed. Promised features never showed up. Users wanted to fix these issues themselves. They begged the developer to release the source code, but it never happened. TM 2.0 was open-sourced, but TM 1.5 remains proprietary.<p>Developers marry their editors. They spend years learning every aspect of them. They customize their configuration. They install and develop plugins and extensions. If an editor becomes abandonware, the users of that editor have wasted an <i>immense</i> amount of time. All of their knowledge and work surrounding their editor becomes useless. They're forced to start over with something else.<p>All that said, I <i>would</i> recommend Sublime Text to others if the developer made an anti-abandonware pledge. The pledge would be to release the source code if no new version had been released in more than a year. I realize he has to make a living. Heck, I don't mind if he gets filthy rich from selling Sublime Text. I'm simply worried that despite his good intentions, he'll end up hurting his users in the long run. With an anti-abandonware pledge, users would be able to avoid the fate of TextMate users.<p>1. <a href="https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-sublime" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-sublime</a><p>2. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor</a>