After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text.
I am finally at peace! Do you know how relaxing it is without the daily “update available” and “view release notes” ritual? There is nothing I dread more than release notes. Between VS Code and Zed, I must have glanced at a million lines of sloppy commit summaries. Can I remember seeing anything of value? Nothing comes to mind…
Modern software sucks. It’s built by self-proclaimed “engineers” who make their chat box addiction your problem and still use Twitter.
When I mentioned Sublime Text on the socials people went all nostalgic on me.
Obi-wan Kenobi: 'Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.' - Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
Sublime Text is still around. The last stable build was released May 2025. There are dev builds as recent as July this year. I don’t know who develops it and I don’t care. All I know is that I can place my text cursor and read the surrounding code without a bombardment of popovers, pop-unders, pop-left-and-rights, pop-inlines, pop-in-and-out-too-fast-to-sees.
It’s been a few weeks since I returned to Sublime Text. It does everything I need. There is not a single “feature” I’ve missed from VS Code or Zed. Many I’m glad to see the back of.
The perfect dev stack is a collection of software that each does one job and doesn’t suffer main character syndrome. I want to code, I’m not looking to make lifestyle choices. I don’t want a bloated everything app. Don’t get me started on the “unified toolchain” plague! Show me the latest VC-backed build tool and I’ll show you ten lines of PHP that does a better job.
If you’re fed up of the absolute state of things, Sublime Text still works.