How to set up Sublime Text command line on OSX ? – Quick Tip

Last week, I had to reinstall all the tools I use on a new computer, since the previous one passed away ☠

And since I use Sublime Text as a default text editor, (please, no debate over which text editor is the best in the comment 😝, I had to reinstall it and make it easily accessible through the terminal.

The command subl

For those who don’t know, Sublime Text has a shortcut, a command line tool named subl, which allow you to use summon sublime text though your terminal.

Once setup up, you can use command line like subl my_file_or_folder to open a file or a folder in Sublime Text. You can also add the option -n to open it in a new windows, or the option -h to display the help and have all the description of all the possibilities available to you. 😉

Setting up subl on OSX

The first step to have the command subl accessible is to install Sublime Text, obviously.If this is not already the case for you, then, follow this link, download and install it on your computer.

At this point, you should be able to open Sublime Text without the terminal 😉

So now, let’s focus on the main goal, being able to call the command subl from your terminal.To do so, you must open the file .bash_profile which is normally in you HOME folder. To to so, you can type the command open ~/.bash_profile, for example.If the file doesn’t exist, it is okay, we can create an empty one where we will add our instruction. 🙂

Once this file open, add the following line wherever you want (if you have a complex .bash_profile, you may prefer put this line at the end of the file):

export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin

If you haven’t installed Sublime Text in you Applications folder, change the path accordingly to the location where you put it, and tell me why you did so in the comments, I am curious 😃

Now close your opened terminal and reopen them, or simply run the command source ~./bash_profile, and you will be able to run the command subl. To make sure of it, you can run the command subl -v to display your version of the command line installed 😉

Conclusion

If you are used to install software through script, this manipulation is probably trivial for you.Personally, I needed to write this post so that future me will be able to go back to it whenever he will need to do so 😆

And maybe some of you, awesome people, will need it in the future too 😉

Thank you all for reading this article !And until my next article, have an splendid day 😉

Other resources

• Sublime Text 3 Osx Documentation