The story behind Sublime Text

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Summary

Sublime Text emerged from Jon Skinner's vision to create a superior text editor, leading to its initial release in January 2008. Its design principles focused on an unobtrusive, minimal interface, avoiding dialogs that obscure text, and maximizing screen real estate for focused editing. The editor strategically leveraged TextMate's community by supporting its syntax files and subsequently attracted developers with features like a robust project system, "goto anything," and extensive Python-based plugin customization. Its cross-platform availability across Windows, OS X, and Linux significantly contributed to its widespread adoption, establishing it as a highly functional and beloved editor.

Sublime Text is a cross-platform text and source code editor, with a Python application programming interface (API). The graphical user interface design was inspired by Vim.Its functionality is also extendable with plugins; Post its release, it gained much attention and wide popularity. Do you know what's the story behind Sublime Text?

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Jon Skinner left his job as a software engineer at Google in order to pursue a dream: to build a better text editor. The end result is the popular Sublime Text today. The initial version of Sublime Text was released to the public on January 18, 2008. Its GUI is similar to the version we are using today. 

The guiding principle of developing Sublime Text are :

  • Unobtrusive, minimal chrome. The focus should be on the text, not fourteen different toolbars.
  • Don’t obscure the text with dialogs.
  • Use the pixels you’ve got. Full screen, multi monitor and editing files side by side should all be possible

By early 2008 there was support for TextMate syntax files which gave Sublime Text a nice platform from which to grow by piggybacking on the already developed TextMate community. TextMate and Sublime Text are similar in that they both have a very minimal aesthetic so the switch was easy, especially as Sublime Text grew while TextMate seemed to stagnate even after becoming open source. Over the next four years it would slowly absorb a good portion of the developers who used TextMate by implementing appealing features which were highly requested. The project system, goto anything, robust customization, python plugins and package management of Sublime Text, along with the fact that it was cross platform (Windows, OS X and Linux), really propelled it through the public alpha in early 2011.

What we currently have is a beautiful editor with rich functionality that people love to use, all thanks to the brave ambition and ideas of Jon Skinner.

Source : http://www.quora.com/Sublime-Text/What-is-the-story-behind-Sublime-Text

HISTORY STORY SUBLIME TEXT

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Anonymous
Oct 26, 2016 at 1:52 am
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Is it real story. I have doubt.

Anonymous
Oct 26, 2016 at 1:53 am
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I also have doubt about this.

Ryan
May 10, 2017 at 3:49 pm
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This is absolutely true. Jon Skinner is very active in the Stack Exchange community (in fact he has the most rep there and will be the first there to hit 1,000,000 rep). He did work for Google and he did quit to focus on this. You can go to SO and contact him if you want. He has answered a few of my questions on there. The man is brilliant.