Question out of curiosity: why does Sublime need an alternative? As far as I know it still is maintained?

Sorry did not mean to hate on Sublime, it was pointed out in another comment that the comparison didn’t really match and I sort of agree. The mental model that brought that initially was the one-off use case of opening large files, for which I have traditionally done through Sublime in the past.

Sublime is great but falling behind. LSP support being a janky plugin instead of first party is a great example.

I don't think they mean "replacement" but rather "the sublime of ai editors"

I love Sublime. I have been using it for years and it's just fantastic software. I have no problems paying for it. But since it is such an important part of my toolbox, not having the source code is a liability. What if they decide to drop support for my platform? What if they decide to shift gears into AI and enshittify the experience?

Every other piece of software in my toolbox is open-source. The scenarios I've described happened to some of those tools, and I maintain my own forks. Currently, Sublime is the single point of failure on my toolbox.

I would buy a source code license if I could.