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Sublime Text ships with a CLI called subl, but this CLI isn't added to our environment by default. We want to be able to use it straight from our terminal, so we need to add a symbolic link called subl to the subl executable.

ln –s /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/subl

To see if it worked, type subl filename in the terminal where filename is the file you want to edit. Did it work? If not, then we need to add our folder that contains the new symlink to the environment. Run the following command:

open ~/.bash_profile

The first line of the file should start with export PATH=. It contains all the directories that will be looked into for executable binaries when we type a command in the terminal. Since we created a symlink to subl inside the /usr/local/bin directory, we will add it to the path by adding it to the directories:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin[…]

Now, run the following code before continuing:

source ~/.bash_profile

This will reload your .bash_profile with the newly added directory.

Sublime CLI should work now; try one of the following commands:

subl filename ("filename" is the filename to edit)
subl foldername ("foldername" is the folder to open)
subl . (to open the current directory)

That's it! We have Sublime Text with CLI running on our OS X!

We want to add Sublime to our environment so we can use it straight from the command line. Open Run by pressing WinKey + R and enter sysdm.cpl, as shown in the following screenshot:

Click on OK, the System Properties window should open. Now, go to the Advanced tab and click on the Environment Variables… button at the bottom-right corner. Environment variables should open, look for the Path variable in System variables, double-click it to open the Edit System Variable window, and add your Sublime installation path to the end of the Variable value field prefixed with a semicolon, as shown in the following screenshot:

As we can see, my installation path is D:\Program Files\Sublime Text 3. Click on OK. Now we can run Sublime from the command line by typing sublime_text filename where filename is the file to edit. But the sublime_text command is too long to type every time we want to open a file with Sublime. Go to your installation directory and create a new file named subl.bat. Paste the following code into the file:

@echo off
start sublime_text.exe %*

The first line turns off the echo of the .bat file. This means that we won't see any output when we run the file. The second line will start the sublime_text executable with the given parameters.

Save the .bat file and open a new command line. We can now use the following commands in our command line:

subl filename ("filename" is the filename to edit)
subl foldername ("foldername" is the folder to open)
subl . (to open the current directory)

That's it; we have Sublime on our Windows PC!

This section will explain how to install Sublime Text on Ubuntu 32/64 bit.

There are a few different options for installing Sublime Text on your Ubuntu; we will use the Personal Package Archive (PPA) one. For this, we need to add the PPA that contains the Sublime Package. PPA is a software repository that contains packages that can be installed by Ubuntu's Launchpad.

To add the repository, run the following from the terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer

To install Sublime Text 3 on our Ubuntu, we can now use the following commands:

subl filename ("filename" is the filename to edit)
subl foldername ("foldername" is the folder to open)
subl . (to open the current directory)

We can also see the Sublime icon on Ubuntu's action bar, which is typically on the left-hand side, as shown in the following screenshot:

sudo subl /usr/share/applications/defaults.list

Installing Sublime on a Linux other than Ubuntu takes a little longer, but we will do it as fast as possible! We start by going to http://www.sublimetext.com/3 and downloading the desired tarball for 32-bit or 64-bit.

After downloading, let's open our terminal and navigate to the Downloads folder:

cd ~/Downloads

The downloaded file is compressed using TAR. We will have to NTAR it first by running the following command:

tar xf sublime_text_3_build_3047_x64.tar.bz2

Move the extracted folder to /op:

sudo mv sublime_text_3 /opt/

We want to make a symbolic link so that we can run Sublime straight from the terminal:

sudo ln -s /opt/sublime_text_3/sublime_text /usr/bin/subl

Now, we have Sublime installed and can use the following commands to open the directory:

subl filename ("filename" is the filename to edit)
subl foldername ("foldername" is the folder to open)
subl . (to open the current directory)

sudo cp /opt/sublime_text/sublime_text.desktop /usr/share/applications/