Basic Concepts

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Here we’ll explain concepts that the reader needs to be familiar with in order to fully understand the contents of this guide.

Conventions in This Guide

This guide is written from the perspective of a Windows user, but most instructions should require only trivial changes to work on other platforms.

Relative paths (e.g. Packages/User) start at the Data Directory unless otherwise noted.

We assume default key bindings when indicating keyboard shortcuts. Due to the way Sublime Text maps keys to commands, some key bindings won’t match your locale’s keyboard layout.

With Great Power Come Many Questions

Sublime Text is a very extensible and customizable editor. It does many things out of the box, but if you spend some time tailoring it to your exact needs, it will give you superpowers. This guide will teach you all you need to know to configure Sublime Text.

In the following paragraphs, we’ll outline some aspects that won’t click in your mind until you’ve spent some time using Sublime Text. Keep exploring the editor and looking around in this guide, and everything will fall into place at some point.

Sublime Text is certainly a versatile tool for programmers, but you don’t need to be one to use it, or even to configure it to make it the perfect tool for your writing. If you’re a hacker, however, you are about to spend the remainder of your day playing around with this editor.

The Data Directory

Sublime Text 2 stores nearly all of the interesting files for users under the data directory. This is a platform-dependent location:

  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Sublime Text 2
  • OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2
  • Linux: ~/.config/sublime-text-2

For portable installations, look inside Sublime Text 2/Data. Here, the Sublime Text 2 part refers to the directory to which you’ve extracted the contents of the compressed file containing Sublime Text 2.

Note that only in portable installations does a directory named Data exist. For the other types of installation, the data directory is the location indicated above.

The Packages Directory

This is a key directory: all resources for supported programming and markup languages are stored here. A package is a directory containing related files having a special meaning to Sublime Text.

You can access the packages directory from the Sublime Text menu (Preferences | Browse Packages...), or by means of an api call: sublime.packages_path(). In this guide, we refer to this location as Packages, packages path, packages folder or packages directory.

The User Package

Packages/User is a catch-all directory for custom plugins, snippets, macros, etc. Consider it your personal area in the packages folder. Sublime Text will never overwrite the contents of Packages/User during upgrades.

The Python Console and the Python API

This information is especially interesting for programmers. For the rest of Sublime Text users, you just need to know that it enables users with programming skills to add their own features to the editor. (So go learn how to program; it’s great fun!)

Sublime Text comes with an embedded Python interpreter. It’s an useful tool to inspect Sublime Text settings and to quickly test API calls while you’re writing plugins.

To open the Python console, press Ctrl+` or select View | Show Console in the menu.

Confused? Let’s try again more slowly:

Python is a programming language known to be easy for beginners and very powerful at the same time. API is short for ‘Application Programming Interface’, which is a fancy way of saying that Sublime Text is prepared to be programmed by the user. Put differently, Sublime Text gives the user access to its internals through Python. Lastly, a console is a little window inside Sublime Text which lets you type in short snippets of Python code and run them. The console also shows text output by Sublime Text or its plugins.

Your System’s Python vs the Sublime Text Embedded Python

On Windows and Linux, Sublime Text comes with its own Python interpreter and it’s separate from your system’s Python installation.

On OS X, the system Python is used instead. Modifying your system version of Python, such as replacing it with the MacPorts version, can cause problems for Sublime Text.

The embedded interpreter is intended only to interact with the plugin API, not for general development. A few plugins may run into issues because the embedded or used interpreters are not the same on every OS.

Packages, Plugins, Resources and Other Things That May Not Make Sense to You Now

For now, just keep in mind that almost everything in Sublime Text can be adapted to your needs. This vast flexibility is the reason why you will learn about so many settings files: there simply must be a place to specify all your preferences.

Configuration files in Sublime Text let you change the editor’s behavior, add macros, snippets or create new features –where feature means ‘anything you can think of’. OK, maybe not anything, but Sublime Text definitely hands you over a good deal of control.

These settings files simply are text files following a special structure or format: JSON predominates, but you’ll find XML files too.

In this guide, we refer collectively to all these disparate configuration files as resources. Sublime Text will look for resources inside the packages directory. To keep things tidy, the editor has a notion of a package, which is a directory containing resources that belong together (maybe they all help write emails faster or code in a certain programming language).

Textmate Compatibility

This information is mainly useful for Textmate expats who are now using Sublime Text. Textmate is an editor for the Mac.

Sublime Text is fairly compatible with Textmate bundles with the notable exception of commands. Additionally, Sublime Text requires all syntax definitions to have the .tmLanguage extension, and all preferences files to have the .tmPreferences extension. This means that .plist files will be ignored, even if they are located under a Syntaxes or Preferences subdirectory.

Vi Emulation

This information is mainly useful for dinosaurs and people who like to drop the term RSI in conversations. Vi is an ancient modal editor that lets the user perform all operations from the keyboard. Vim, a modern version of vi, is still in widespread use.

Sublime Text provides vi emulation through the Vintage package. The Vintage package is ignored by default. Read more about Vintage in the official documentation.

Emacs

This information is hardly useful for anyone. Emacs is... Well, nobody really knows what emacs is, but some people edit text with it.

If you are an emacs user, you’re probably not reading this.

Be Sublime, My Friend

Borrowing from Bruce Lee’s wisdom, Sublime Text can become almost anything you need it to be. In skilled hands, it can defeat an army of ninjas without your breaking a sweat.

Empty your mind; be sublime, my friend.