Jon Skinner

Jon Skinner is a software developer best known as the creator of Sublime Text, the fast, minimalist code editor that defined modern editor conventions such as the command palette, multiple cursors and the minimap. He founded Sublime HQ Pty Ltd, a small, self-funded company based in Woollahra, Sydney, which also makes the Git client Sublime Merge.

Skinner had been writing Sublime Text on weeknights for almost two years when, in November 2007, he left his job as a software engineer at Google to work on it full time. In a blog post that month he explained that he had a strong vision for how the humble text editor could be made better and had quit to build a company around that conviction. Sublime Text 1.0 shipped for Windows on January 18, 2008.

Sublime Text 2, released on June 26, 2012, brought the editor to Mac and Linux and turned it into one of the most popular tools among web developers of the early 2010s. Its Python plugin API spawned a large ecosystem built around the community Package Control manager, and its keyboard-driven features were widely copied by later editors. Sublime Text 3 entered beta in 2013 and was officially released on September 13, 2017, adding symbol indexing and Goto Definition.

In September 2018 Sublime HQ launched Sublime Merge, a Git client built on the same fast custom UI engine. Sublime Text 4 arrived on May 20, 2021 with GPU rendering, native Apple Silicon support, better auto-completion and a Python 3.8 plugin host. The business has always run on a simple model: a free, unlimited evaluation and paid perpetual licenses.

Skinner keeps an unusually low public profile and rarely gives interviews, preferring to let the product speak. Sublime Text matters in indie history as proof that a single developer who leaves a big-company job can build a paid tool that millions of programmers choose over free alternatives.