Mastering Sublime Text

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/

From the official Sublime docs:

The location of the Data directory is platform-dependent:

We should see at least three directories inside the Data directory:

{
   "font_size": 14,
   "ignored_packages":
   [
      "Vintage"
   ]
}

Almost every corner and pixel of Sublime Text can be tweaked, extended, or customized. All this customization is based on JSON, XML, Python, and Sublime files. A package is basically a folder that contains all resources that belong together, and it gives Sublime a new functionality or customization. This is all we need to know for now.

Let's go back to our file using Goto Anything (shown in the following screenshot), one of Sublime's best features, by pressing Ctrl + P:

As you can see, the Go To window opens after indexing all files that are on the side bar. We can navigate by typing the file name, acronyms, extension, or prefix.

This search feature is called Fuzzy Text Search or Approximate string matching.

Press Esc to close the Go To window. We are going to use this a lot while developing a large project, so we should feel comfortable with it before moving on.

Try closing the current tab by pressing Ctrl + W. Now if no tab is left open, you can open a new one by pressing Ctrl + N, or even open a new window by pressing Ctrl + Shift + N.

To jump between open tabs in Windows or Linux, simply press Alt + # (where # is the sequential number of the tab from left to right), or press Command + # for OS X. In Windows or Linux, we can also go to the Next or Previous tab by pressing Ctrl + PageUp and Ctrl + PageDown respectively. The same can be done by pressing Option + Command + → or Option + Command + ← in OS X. Another nice navigation feature is the tab stack. To go forward in the stack, press Ctrl + Tab, and press Ctrl + Shift + Tab to go backwards. On OS X also, it's Control and not Command this time.

There are more nice Go To features such as Go To line by pressing Ctrl + G, and Go To matching bracket with Ctrl + M.

One of the most important features is the command palette where all the custom features or plugins can be accessed. Open the command palette by pressing Ctrl + Shift + P, or Command + Shift + P on OS X. We should see the following screenshot:

This window is using the same search algorithm that the Go To Anything window uses. We can see that I typed CA and I get the Close All command. Pressing Enter will close all open tabs. Don't worry, it will notify if a file we are trying to close has not been saved. We can see any keyboard shortcuts to the right of each command.

Sublime comes with an embedded Python interpreter. It's a useful tool to inspect the editor's settings, quickly test API calls while developing plugins, or just do simple math. To open the Python console, press Ctrl+` or go to View | Show Console from the main menu. The following screenshot shows a Python console:

It's important to know that Sublime comes with its own Python interpreter on Windows and Linux, and it's separate from your system's Python installation. Modifying your system's version of python, such as replacing it with the MacPorts version, can cause problems with Sublime Text.