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
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.
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)
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.