It's the LSP plugin that finally drove me to leave ST4 for Zed. Language integration is table stakes for an editor now. The fact that ST support is behind a volunteer plugin instead of integrated directly in the editor just means it's never going to be as good as a editor that does have first class support. The ST devs need to actually improve the editor, but I haven't seen any material updates in years.

I think it's less that they sat on their laurels and more that a team of 2 had trouble keeping up with the dozens of well-paid folks working on VSCode. Which suggests that perhaps a shareware model did not work out so well for them.

Agreed, LSP has replaced Linter extensions and the TabNine LLM which is nice (and snappy). Even if some of the lsp servers are clunky to use.

even before VSCode Atom had started to eat their lunch

I dislike "$x is dead" as much if not more as you do, and I'm sure it works fine as something doesn't need to be the most popular choice to be working.

With that being said, just a quick look at, for example Stack Overflow 2025 survey tells me it doesn't have the same mindshare it once had.

Eh.. I gave ST4 a go earlier this year and moved away from it due to plugins I wanted not being updated for years, and no longer working. That really feels on the cusp of being dead to me

There needs to be a critical mass of people using it for things that aren't core to stay updated

The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?

I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.) Eclipse had a robust architecture, but writing plugins for it was a dispiriting slog, even when I got paid for it (again, my experience, many years ago.)

NB: Not all parts of VSCode are open source, especially not many popular extensions.

For me, it was that the maintainer of a language plugin I used was, um, challenging to work with. I wanted to contribute to add some much-requested functionality and he talked to me like I was a toddler and warned me not to waste his time.

Well, OK then. Back to Emacs I went.

I think it stopped taking off when they stopped developing on it for something like four years

People refer to it as VSCode, but do people really use VSCode or VSCodium? I personally use VSCodium. I think that is the most de-telemetry'd version of it, I think?

That makes sense. The rest of us left ST a long while ago, and the rest remain because they're happy with it and have been for a long time.

I don't have any insights into how the company is doing, I'm just going by the sample set of people around me or things I read.

I'm a fan of indie software and native apps but I know zero people in the past 10 years that switched to ST. I know plenty of people of people who switched to Vscode and all the other free or paid competitors. It's probably enough to sustain a small company, and not everyone has to strive for a monopoly. But I wouldn't call that thriving.

I don't know anyone that still uses Sublime. I haven't seen a company recommend its engineers use it either. I used to be an avid user until VSCode came out.

It has users but the number of users is dwarfed by the big dogs like VS Code, Visual Studio and IntelliJ Idea - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular... (using 2024 because 2025 onwards is AI slop).

People are 7x more likely to be using VS Code, which means that a niche tool is far more likely to have a VA Code plugin than an ST plugin.

Other than that, if the 11% of people using it are happy then there’s no issue.

That’s true. It’s all relative.

ST developer here. We aren't happy that happened either, it was a big oversight in the ST4 release that made people like yourself lose trust in us. I'm sorry and will do my best to not have something like that happen again.

> Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted.

I'm curious what you don't like about this model? The most common complaint with regards to updates was the long waiting period between major versions, which we've now eliminated, and without changing the perpetual nature of our licenses.

> You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.

Or until some change in the underlying OS makes it no longer able to run. Not saying that happens frequently, but it does happen.

> I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.

New font pickers, settings dialogues and other "polish" is hardly what i'd call new features. I listed those as "improvements".

I'm not trying to start a fight, and i respect the work that has been done, but VS Code releases more features in a month that ST has released in the entire ST4 lifecycle, as does Zed. I understand the team is (a lot) smaller. My frustration is that when a new release comes out, it's mostly polish, and not fixing the real problems, such as lack of integration and plugins.

You may choose to brush it off as just an old fart rambling on the internet, but i'm not alone with this opinion, and i have ST licenses dating back to the original version, and i have chosen not to renew my ST4 license. When you start losing the "religious" users, maybe it's time to reevaluate ?

That no major AI players even bother to announce a ST plugin/package is proof enough, its now just a tool to manage random text copy/paste snippets.

vscode seems to have totally taken over dev mindshare these days.

VSCode is open source, too, but it's been pretty easy for them to keep forks from taking off by having proprietary extensions, a "markeplace", and other lock-in.

All they have to do is only permit official builds to talk to official builds (for security, of course ;-), and forking Zed becomes a lot harder.

I really dislike the dismissive "fork it" response. You do know how much time and work it takes to maintain your own fork of something, right? It's great that it's possible, but to expect most people to do something like that is absurd.

A year or two ago I moved away from one of the neovim distros when they randomly changed all the keybinds on an upgrade (such things really anger me) and set up my own config. Funnily enough, I preferred vimscript. I still do use lua of course for various things, but those just go in lua EOF blocks in the vimscript. Vimscript is really terse and convenient for many things, I love it.

What makes NeoVIM emacs-like?

classical AI and modern generative AI are VERY different beasts. also, there isn't any AI in emacs itself. It was a tool built to make a job easier.

That’s fine as long as they don’t force AI prompts to me.

To clarify, I use AI agents, but I absolutely hate them submitting code in my editor. Chatting is fair enough and useful, but I need to turn off the auto-generating code part.

This will sound a bit odd, but I don't necessarily want to pay in a way that makes it look like I'm paying for the AI rather than the editor.

I'm enjoying using Zed, and I do pay for tools I use regularly. It's now approaching a month of daily use for me and I don't see that changing. But to echo the other replies, I'm uninterested in the LLM tools. I don't use those normally and paying for that as a way to support Zed would send the wrong signal. You have to be careful when you restrict what people can pay for, because that will become what you optimize for which may not be what your users actually care about.

Zed is fast, easy to configure (so far, maybe some hard parts I haven't run into yet), works well with the languages I care about via LSPs, and the collaboration features are compelling. I want to pay to support that, I don't want to pay for an LLM feature I don't care about that ends up distracting from the progress on the things I want to see maintained or improved.

I already pay for Zed Pro, but my fear (and likely GP's as well) is that this doesn't provide enough revenue for the team.

Since switching from Emacs last year, I have absolutely loved how this editor has evolved, and I am looking for any way to directly support the effort. I have been a Zed Pro subscriber for quite a while now, and I have started trying to contribute to the codebase, but I really wish there were monetization options beyond making a spread on Anthropic API pricing.

I would also pay for Zed (the editor) and not the AI. But I also don't want to pay just make Zed more attractive for VC acquisition.

You don't have to give me any more features than what's in the free editor. I would gladly pay up to $300 just to have a "license".

Big fan of Zed. I want to echo a sibling comment that I don't see that as paying for Zed, I see it as paying for LLM usage. And since I already have my own LLM keys, I just use those instead.

I can't pay for Zed Pro using my work funds because it's an unapproved AI service. Can you provide another way to pay? E.g. cross device settings sync or professional support.

I'm a big fan of Zed and having met much of the team I think it's some great people building a great product. But I do echo concerns that while the intentions are all honorable the incentives of the pricing structure, business environment, and now a funding round are concerning in the long term. I don't think anyone at Zed has a single ill intent or a secret master plan but these days anything I'm not paying for I just assume is going to be enshittified eventually. Especially for an app where the only paid features are AI-centric and there's a VC expecting to make multiples on a $60m investment.

So here's my ask: let me pay for it without paying for AI! None of my use cases will stress your servers; I have `"disable_ai": true` in my settings.json. Give me a $5/mo "support the devs tier" or a $10/mo tier with some random app quality-of-life features and I'm there. I specifically want to pay for good software without paying for AI to signify the value proposition that still exists there cause I don't think a VC would believe me otherwise.

With Shaun Maguire's recent behavior associating with Sequoia is gross

> Stating that everyone else is building on Electron belies your lack of exposure to any editors other than vscode \ atom spin offs.

Enlighten me.

I have never seen so much virtue signaling and moral superiority in a GitHub issue. What a joke.

Wow, some people really don't know what to give a shit about, do they? It must be endlessly exhausting to go around looking for any reason to boycott everything, instead of using these fantastic tools to make things that make the world a better place.