Sublime Text 4 – What’s New and What it means to your older version

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In the land of Electron apps dominating your daily computer life. Whether you are using VSCode, Slack, Discord or Microsoft Team, the platform behind the scene and its powers are the basics of a browser. More than anything, the speed of those apps is all depending on how fast a naked browser loads. Another way to put it, they aren’t as fast as they can be if it was created without chromium as the foundation.

sublime text 4 600x325 - Sublime Text 4 - What's New and What it means to your older version

Sublime Text, on the other hand, does not build with Electron. They are created with C++/Python that compiles down to native binary that runs on all 3 major OS. I’ve been a fan of the app for over a decade and still use it daily. Today we will go over three new changes in Sublime Text 4 (or just Sublime Text).

License Change

Gone are the days you purchase one license for each major version to get more features and more releases. The developer decided to change the license model, and each new purchase of the sublime text will give you 3 years of support and future upgrades. Please help contribute and support those developers behind the scene that made those tools so awesome.

Sublime Text Multi-Select Tabs

Sublime Text always supports multiple tabs, and you can customize the layout any way you want. But the catch is you have to know ahead of time what type of layout you want to use, and new files you open will then fit into the previously defined layouts. This is the case for almost all editors and IDEs. But Sublime Text made a step further. You get auto split views when you select more than one file from the tree. It’s definitely unique to Sublime that I haven’t seen in any other code editor, VScode included.

sublime text 4 multi select - Sublime Text 4 - What's New and What it means to your older version

GPU Rendering Support

This is huge for those of you interested in performance. The new app support comes with GPU rendering support. It’s turned off by default on Windows, but you can turn it on and try it out. OpenGL powers the GPU support as it’s the lowest common denominator that all three OS supports.

// Enables hardware accelerated rendering. This moves rendering to your GPU,
// allowing for faster rendering at higher resolutions. Changing this
// setting requires an application restart to take effect.
// - "none": Performs CPU rendering.
// - "opengl": Uses OpenGL for rendering. Minimum required version is 4.1
//
// On Mac, this value is overridden in the platform specific settings.
"hardware_acceleration": "opengl",

It’s especially the case if you have a high res monitor, 4K or 8K monitors will experience more smooth and faster render for large files.

You can turn it on by going to the settings, finding the option above, and changing the value for hardware acceleration to OpenGL. If the app stops rendering, it might be a sign of issues with Sublime Text not compatible with your driver. You can always turn it off and let it render by the software (i.e. CPU) instead.

If you are a fan of Sublime and want to learn more about what it can do, be sure to check out some of the top features it has to offer.

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