Rust Enhanced reaches 50k downloads

January 13, 2018

In case you didn’t know there is an official Rust Package for Sublime Text 3. Its called Rust Enhanced, and we’ve had a great year in 2017. During September – October Rust Enhanced made it into the top 15 trending Sublime Packages on package control, and received over 50k downloads, so this calls for some celebration!.

The above shows our built-in test runner, and the phantoms on the syntax checking on the right, using sublime’s new phantom feature.

It’s not all been plain sailing, it’s been a long journey to get here….

In May 2016 when my interest in Rust began to grow I was looking for a Sublime Package, I noticed one on GitHub, although it was quite inactive. To make matters more complicated the Sublime team decided to fork the package and add it natively to the editor so that users could get Rust support out the box. Although this was convenient it meant that upstream features from the Rust team would not make it in, or could take a long time (2 years ago Sublime’s update cycle was slow). So I decided to sort this out.

The first step was a conversation with the Sublime team, actually just wbond at that time. We came to the conclusion that we should keep this package alive and put all new features in there, wbond also made some fantastic additions, so we brought them in. The basic Rust package (which comes with Sublime now as of 3.0) has syntax highlighting but any new features such as syntax checking, building etc we would bring into our project.

Fast forward a year and we had some contributors come on board, syntax highlighting was improved, syntax checking was added, and we moved to a release based cycle. We changed our name from ‘Rust’ to ‘Rust Enhanced’ (as ‘Rust’ was now taken up by Sublime itself). You can check the releases tab on our Github page to see what’s been added, but we’ve generally been keeping up with features the Rust compiler offers.

2018

After getting feedback from users across rust-lang forums, the most asked about feature by far was RLS. Experimental RLS support has now been added (with use via the LSP package), so feel free to try this out, instructions are on the readme. The 2 packages should work well together although this is still very much work in progress. We hope to improve the experience with RLS this year by working closely with the RLS team and LSP. We also hope to continue improving syntax highlighting (its not perfect yet), and to provide better documentation.

Help is needed, feel free to join us, or even raise any issues you have with it, hopefully we will have another awesome year