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Launch Sublime Text from the Mac OS X Terminal

Launch Sublime Text from the Mac OS X Terminal

Sublime Text 2 ships with a CLI called subl (why not "sublime", go figure). This utility is hidden in the following folder (assuming you installed Sublime in /Applications like normal folk. If this following line opens Sublime Text for you, then bingo, you're ready.

open /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl

You can find more (official) details about subl here: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html

Installation

The official documentation I linked to above recommends creating a ~/bin folder (in your home directory). That's weird, I don't recall ever being asked to do that on OS X since most people install binaries within /usr/local/bin which – if you're a developer – is likely to already have tons of other binaries.

So contrary to the Sublime team recommendation, we're not going to create a bin folder in your home directory:

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

This will simply create a symlink called subl (remember, we like names that don't suck to type 500 times a day) between the subl binary stashed in the Sublime application package, and a folder where your system usually looks for binaries to execute (launch). Think of it as a wormhole of awesome.

Now let's do a check to see if everything will run smoothly. Enter this:

nano ~/.bash_profile nano ~/.zshrc

(In some cases the profile file is named ~/.profile)

You should see at the top of the file a line that starts with: export PATH=

This contains all the directories that will be looked into for executable binaries when you type a command in Terminal. Since we create a symlink to subl called sublime in the /usr/local/bin directory let's check if this directory is listed on that same line.

If you don't already have a PATH set in your bash_profile you can type:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

If you had to add /usr/local/bin to your PATH, run the following command before continuing:

source ~/.bash_profile source ~/.zshrc

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

Testing

Open a Terminal window and run:

subl filename (replace "filename" by an actual file name)

or

subl foldername (replace "foldername" by an actual folder name)

or even

subl . (to open the entire current directory)

Conclusion

Now you don't need to get out of Terminal to simply open a file or a folder, you didn't have to add an "alias" or yet another bin directory to your .bash_profile which you would have needed with the official instructions given by the Sublime team.

Have fun, Sublime is a great editor showing a lot of promise.

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