This morning brought some good, and fairly unexpected, news regarding the Sublime Text editor. A new major release has now entered beta and is available for registered users to try out. Yes, that’s right Sublime Text 3 is ready for you to try out.

Version 2 gained significant popularity amongst all sorts of different folks that utilize text editors, and even some more used to an IDE environment. I’ve dabbled with several other worthy competitors and always find my way back to this powerful, fast, and just plain awesome editor. I think I speak for most of the Sublime users when I say that there wasn’t a long list of issues I was itching to have resolved, or new features I felt I needed to be added.

Changes and Additions

With that said, the Sublime Text developers were still able to make some significant improvements. Speed has been improved. It was never slow, but you may have noticed the load time being a little sluggish. That has been resolved and other tweaks have made to make the editor even snappier.

UI

The user interface of Sublime Text is pretty minimal and it’s something that a lot of people love. So you’ll be happy to know that it’s still the running theme. But some nice UI adjustments have been made in this latest release. Pane management is now a bit easier. Dealing with multiple panes has been streamlined a bit. The file preview functionality has been improved upon as well. And even a little niftier animation to the file navigation pane has been added.

Functionality

Some changes have been made to the inner workings of the application as well. The plugins API has seen some substantial upgrades. Plugins now uses Python 3.3 which is an upgrade from Sublime Text 2′s Python 2.6. There is evidently porting that needs to be done on existing apps, but it’s said that the process is pretty simple and ultimately shouldn’t be much of an issue.

The API now also runs plugins out of process. What this means is that if a plugin has trouble and crashes, the entire application won’t crash. This is a really nice addition and I’m excited to see it. I’ve had issues with a plugin or two myself and there’s nothing more frustrating than the unexpected crash when you’re right in the middle of something. This allows for the plugin to crash while maintaining the full application status. Bonus.

Believe it or not, there is still a pretty large list of improvements and changes that have been made since version 2. I’ve picked out a few of the most noticeable ones, but there’s definitely a lot of nice additions elsewhere in the app.

Pricing

One thing to note is that with version 3 the price will be raised $11 to a total of $70. If you already own a license you’ll need to upgrade and pay the $11 once version 3 is out of beta. New users, however, will be charged the $70. People will complain about this I’m sure, but it feels pretty justified to me. If you do any amount of code work, your code editor is really the heart of your livelihood. And when you know that your product is worth it, charge. $70 for an application that helps me make a living? Totally worth it.

If you’re a registered user, I’d recommend checking out the Sublime Text 3 beta. It feels pretty stable from what I can tell so far. Just be aware that your plugins probably aren’t going to be available for a bit.