They donât make âem like Sublime Text anymore

After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software Iâm back to coding in Sublime Text.

I am finally at peace! Do you know how relaxing it is without the daily âupdate availableâ and âview release notesâ 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 mindâ¦

Modern software sucks. Itâs built by self-proclaimed âengineersâ 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.

Sublime Text is still around. The last stable build was released May 2025. There are dev builds as recent as July this year. I donât know who develops it and I donât 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.

Itâs been a few weeks since I returned to Sublime Text. It does everything I need. There is not a single âfeatureâ Iâve missed from VS Code or Zed. Many Iâm glad to see the back of.

The perfect dev stack is a collection of software that each does one job and doesnât suffer main character syndrome. I want to code, Iâm not looking to make lifestyle choices. I donât want a bloated everything app. Donât get me started on the âunified toolchainâ plague! Show me the latest VC-backed build tool and Iâll show you ten lines of PHP that does a better job.

If youâre fed up of the absolute state of things, Sublime Text still works.