You can essentially use Sublime for free indefinitely. It shows you a prompt to buy a license for every few saves you make but that’s about it. Not invasive in my book. I also think people underestimate the amount of work that goes into building a good text editor and keeping it up to date over the years.

I cannot use Sublime without license in my work setting without violating License terms. That's a huge deal breaker

That’s a good point. I think if you really like the editor it might be something your employer could pay for. At least ST only offers a one-time fee for each major version. Of course that depends on where you work and their policies. So I see how it’s not so easy and my comment definitely missed that part.

You can, but then the license explicitly forbids you from using it for commercial purposes.

Which is basically anything that is done on company hardware. Also there is a compliance factor, at least at my company.

I have actually tried Lapce because I like Lua and I thought it would be a nice alternative to building plugins in Lua rather than Python. But I can't get over how clunky the UI is in Lapce. I also find it will randomly crash on me and I can't really tell why. There's also no easy way to add additional LSPs. You have to look at these extensions, and there is a very limited number of them. I wish they would just allow you to configure the LSP through a JSON object like Sublime does.

Agreed, it has rough edges. But the UI got improved with the last update to 0.4.2. Havent had crashes on Linux, had some on Windows through. But still, its Beta quality Software and better than most other editors already. And its cross platform and really fast