The “Sublime Text of X”

Superhuman

Superhuman is an invite-only $30/month email client. People like it for its sleek design, responsive speed, and suite of keyboard shortcuts to improve a user’s email efficiency. Superhuman is worth the price for people who spend hours on email every day. Part of its feature offering includes read statuses, which is useful for executives and sales people who like to keep a pulse on their conversations.

Users love Superhuman. Take a quick peak on Twitter at the effusive praise the company gets. Andreessen Horowitz led the latest investment round in the company with a valuation of roughly $260 million.

Following in the tailwind of this prosumer email client that has taken Silicon Valley and Twitter by storm are a suite of companies claiming to be “Superhuman for x”.

As identified by Todd Goldberg, the “Superhuman of X” has the following traits:

• Designed for speed.
• Built as an opinionated product experience for a specific use case and/or target audience.
• Driven primarily by keyboard shortcuts.
• Beautiful and thoughtfully designed.
• Optional: Built as a modern alternative to a product that has legacy distribution effects
• Optional: Positioned as a premium product vs. free alternatives.

Superhuman Command bar: short-cut triggered command search bar

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Sublime Text

I present Sublime Text: a piece of software more than a decade older than Superhuman, that shares the above attributes. Sublime can be driven primarily by keyboard shortcuts. It’s as thoughtfully designed as I have been shamefully unwilling to purchase the non-trial version for 80 USD. The similarities lie much deeper than that. Sublime has two close-to-instant-speed search-bars: one for opening a file in your project [goto] and one for executing commands.

Sublime Text Command Palette: short-cut triggered command search bar

Sublime Text is also simultaneously opinionated but also configurable. It is simple enough for a programmer to install, open, and “hit the ground running” on a big project with a combination of GOTO (⌘+P) and project search (⌘+Shift+F).

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The “Sublime Text of X”

Without futhur ado, I present a case study sampling of “Sublime Texts for X”.

The (Eponymous) Sublime Text of Text Editors: https://www.sublimetext.com/

The Sublime Text of Finder/File Explorer: https://fman.io/

The Sublime Text of Task/Bug Tracking: https://linear.app/

The Sublime Text of Calendars: https://cron.app/

The Sublime Text of Git GUI Clients: https://www.sublimemerge.com/

The “Sublime Text of X” is software having the following traits:

• Designed for speed.
• Built as an opinionated product experience for a specific use case and/or target audience.
• Driven primarily by keyboard shortcuts.
• Beautiful and thoughtfully designed.
• Not Optional:  Dark mode 

I look forward to a bright dark future where everything can be done fast and efficiently through keyboard shortcuts.

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from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2JHm4As