I was getting to know a new team member recently, so we were asking each other the usual important questions: what drives you as a person, is there such a thing as free will, what text editor do you use, that sort of thing.
I was a little surprised when the answer to the last question was “Sublime Text.” My myopic experience for the past few years has made it very easy to forget that people out there use anything other than an IDE if they prefer the kitchen sink experience, or VSCode if they prefer a heavily customisable editor, are budget conscious, or are simply happy to go with the community default.
Earlier in my career, when I could still tolerate computers enough to spend my weekends trying to figure out why the sound had stopped working again, I was a pretty heavy Ubuntu/Linux Mint user. I did most of my programming in gedit, with occasional dips into notepad++ if I was using a Windows system. Both are wonderful pieces of software, but in FOSS tradition, using them sometimes felt utilitarian bordering on clunky.
I bought my Sublime Text license on January 31st 2013.
It was the first time in my programming career that I really felt like I had superpowers. It was the first time I’d experienced the feeling that serious vim users describe: ideas going straight from your brain to your editor, with input being frictionless to the point of telepathy.
It’s also one of the first pieces of software I remember using that really felt lovingly crafted. As I said, I was using a lot of free software at the time, and a lot of it had been created by kind, thoughtful and deeply intelligent people who were very much not experts in UX or visual design.
I probably pissed off too many of my friends by harping on about it.
It influenced me as a user and developer well beyond its direct impact on my ability to turn keystrokes into more than mere keystrokes. It was a study in beauty, economy and craft.
