It doesn't have to be a full IDE. Sublime Text and Textmate before it have both been very successful while charging a respectable fee.

Maybe the slightly-snarky lesson here is "developers will pay decent money for a text editor... on OSX".

I've paid for Sublime and I run mostly Arch Linux systems.

Developers will pay decent money for any editor that helps them create better code (and thus more money). :-P

Any particular reason you chose sublime over Vim?

I can't speak for the other poster, but in my case gentler learning curve (I've been using vim for about 10 years and I still don't know 10% of what it can do), smooth scrolling, a real GUI (vim's text menus can be pretty confusing at times), and the features vim didn't have at the time like multiple cursors, command palette and go to anything.

Why do I keep using it? Because generally new functionality requires about 2 minutes of readme.md and then it is working, rather than half an hour of hacking with vim config files.

Overtime I just found myself being more productive and 'happier' while using Sublime. A lot of that comes from the extra functionality it offers (built-in and from numerous plugins). Eg, Markdown preview, image preview, color picker, various project search and management features from SidebarEnhancements.

I still love Vim and use it for editing single files or whenever I remote in to another machine but this new generation of text editor / IDE hybrids just fit my project workflow a bit better.

TM is now open source and a lot of ST users are stuck at V2. I dont think there is a lot of room for another product.

I'd say there's always room for a product that works well. Textmate, back in the day, had to come in and compete with well-regarded software after all -- even if we ignore vim/emacs as being insufficiently-Mac, there was BBEdit.

I don't know that I'd say Sublime users are "stuck". The long beta on v3 seems to be splitting the community, somewhat, but it wouldn't be surprising if the final release resulted in it consolidating again.

Perhaps, but either way as a ST2 user I'm looking for a replacement and once ST2 does not meet my needs I'll either go back to emacs full time or look towards something else for light weight stuff.

I've already movers most of my we stuff to IntelliJ/WebStorm. I really liked ST2 but was a little miffed that right after I bought my licence ST3 was pushed to the forefront of the site without a reasonable upgrade plan.

I do certainly agree that the new-version / upgrade thing has been poorly handled. If nothing else, announcing it and causing the split should have been followed by rapid development instead of over a year of slow beta releases.

I thought that was one of the big plus points for ST.

It looks and works the same on all platforms, OSX, Windows, Linux.

So maybe there is something in that the OSX crowd will pay for tools.

That said, I find it far easier to get up and running with a myriad of free software on OSX than I ever did on Windows (much love to homebrew)

Code is text last I checked. I see what you're getting at, but "text editor" encompasses that already. For everyone I talk to anyway.